The Message Remix (360 page)

INTRODUCTION
PHILEMON

 

Every movement we make in response to God has a ripple effect, touching family, neighbors, friends, community.
Belief in God alters our language. Love of God affects daily relationships. Hope in God enters into our work. Also their opposites—unbelief, indifference, and despair. None of these movements and responses, beliefs and prayers, gestures and searches, can be confined to the soul.
They spill out and make history. If they don’t, they are under suspicion of being fantasies at best, hypocrisies at worst.

Christians have always insisted on the historicity of Jesus—an actual birth, a datable death, a witnessed resurrection, locatable towns. There is a parallel historicity in the followers of Jesus. As they take in everything Jesus said and did—all of it a personal revelation of God in time and place—it all gets worked into local history, eventually into world history.

Philemon and Onesimus, the slave owner and slave who figure prominently in this letter from Paul, had no idea that believing in Jesus would involve them in radical social change. But as the two of them were brought together by this letter, it did. And it still does.

 

 

From:
Paul usually dictated his letters, as he did with his letter to the church at Colosse, which he probably sent at the same time as this one. But this letter, to one member of the Colossian church, he wrote with his own hand. This was a private message, man to man, not the business even of the friend who took down his dictation. In it, Paul spent the capital of his personal relationship with Philemon on behalf of another human being (not property, in Paul’s eyes), Onesimus.

 

To:
Philemon, like most prosperous men, owned slaves. He lived in Colosse, a small, crowded, ethnically mixed city in what is now Turkey. When he became a follower of Jesus, many in his large household (which included extended family, employees, and slaves) likely did so too, for household members typically followed the religion of their patriarch. Philemon’s slave Onesimus had apparently converted (perhaps only in name), then had run away and traveled hundreds of miles to where Paul was imprisoned. There he became serious about his faith.

 

Re:
About A.D. 61. In many cities, up to a third of the population were slaves. They did much of the work that kept the empire running but were legally property, not people. Owners had the right to treat them however they wanted. Most owners saw that slaves worked better when allowed to marry and to own a few things. There were even some laws against cruelty—more like our animal rights than our human rights.

Many slaves worked hard to buy their freedom eventually with money their owners let them accumulate. The freed person had higher social status than a slave but still had social obligations to his former owner, now patron/patriarch.