Main news for 9 October 2014

King James Version (en)

Philemon, Chapter 1, verse 7

⁴ He rejoiceth to hear of the faith and love of Philemon

⁷For we have great joy and consolation in thy love, because the bowels of the saints are refreshed by thee, brother.

NOTES

The form Paul chose for speaking with Philemon is very interesting. Let us look: Paul is an elder, as he himself...

Paul places a very high value on brotherly love, even when the matter concerns each individual member of the Church. Today such a view would seem a little...

Paul places a very high value on brotherly love, even when the matter concerns each individual member of the Church. Today such a view would seem a little strange to us. We are more used to thinking that we need the love of the Church, not that the Church needs ours. For Paul, as we can see, this is a mutual process. And that is not surprising. Indeed, if the Church were an organization, even a religious organization, then as a whole it would always and in every way surpass any of its members, even the most outstanding one. But the Church is not a religious organization; it is a community of people living in the Kingdom. Here there are deep and personal relationships among people, but not the kind of wholeness or aggregate that would automatically prove more important than any individual person. The Kingdom does not know a mass, a collective, or an aggregate. It knows only the individual person. And the Church, the real Church with a capital C, also does not know the crowd or the collective; it knows only the individual person and the community as a fellowship of such people in all the depth and uniqueness of their relationships with one another. And here every person truly matters. The love of each person can truly support the whole Church; following the custom of the first Christian Church, the apostle calls the members of the Church "saints." It turns out that not only does each person depend on the Church, but the Church also depends on each person. Of course, it does not depend in the way we depend on one another in the untransformed world, unable to do without one another and at the same time unable to live with one another. It depends as people depend on one another in the Kingdom, being bound by relationships that certainly cannot be considered obligatory in the sense in which the untransformed world understands obligations, but which nevertheless prove absolutely necessary for us, just as necessary as the people with whom these relationships bind us and without whom we would have no one with whom to share the fullness of the life of the Kingdom that we receive by becoming part of it. And this readiness to share is what distinguishes the Kingdom from the untransformed world. Here people relate in order to give; there, in order to receive. And every giver, everyone ready to share what he has, becomes a noticeable figure in the Kingdom. So noticeable that the whole Church knows about him.

In his letter to Philemon, Paul writes about a certain man named Onesimus, who apparently was Philemon's slave and...

In his letter to Philemon, Paul writes about a certain man named Onesimus, who apparently was Philemon's slave and whom Paul is now returning to his master no longer as a slave, but as a brother in Christ (vv. 15–16). Apparently, before his conversion Onesimus was not a particularly conscientious man, but after turning to Christ through the apostle's preaching, he changed completely; Paul himself calls him his “son,” in the spiritual sense, of course (vv. 10–12). Such an attitude toward slaves was, of course, shaped above all by the requirements of the Torah, which prohibits lifelong slavery and requires a slave to be treated as an equal. This differed from the norms of the Greco-Roman world, where a slave was often not regarded as a human being at all, but merely, in Aristotle's phrase, as a “speaking tool,” something like talking livestock. Of course, the Torah's rules concerning slaves originally applied only to Hebrew slaves, but even before Christ came into the world, some Jewish households began treating all the slaves in their homes accordingly, regardless of their origin.

For Paul, it was obvious that every slave was not only as human as anyone else, but also a potential Christian to whom one could and should bear witness as a first priority: after all, it is the master who is answerable to God for his slaves' way of life. If a slave has converted and become a Christian, one's relationship with him must be built not on the laws of our as yet untransfigured world, but on those of the Kingdom; this is what Paul writes to Philemon. When he speaks of receiving Onesimus “not as a slave, but more than a slave, as a beloved brother” (v. 16), Paul means a spiritual rather than a social reality. Under the laws of the society in which Philemon and Onesimus both live, the latter remains the former's slave; under the laws of the Kingdom, where relations of domination and subordination have no place, they are brothers, equal before God. It depends on them alone which laws these two will follow in their relationship from now on: those of the untransfigured world or those of the Kingdom.

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