(Deuteronomy 23:15-16; Galatians 3:26-29, Philemon)
As we talked about last week, Onesimus had a problem, and that gave Paul an opportunity. Or rather, Onesimus had two problems. The first was that he was a slave. Legally, though everyone agreed he was human, he didn’t exactly qualify as a person—he was instead a living, breathing, walking, talking, two-legged piece of property who belonged to a person named Philemon. Onesimus’ second problem was that he had dealt with the first problem by escaping from his master in the city of Colossae and running away to Rome. This obviously got him away from the day-to-day consequences of being enslaved, but it also left him in a dangerous position, because the Roman policy on fugitive slaves was simple and inflexible: if caught, they were returned to their master, who could do whatever he wanted to them. And I do mean whatever.
The good thing for Onesimus was that by the sovereign grace of God, he fell in with the apostle Paul and ended up part of Paul’s household as the apostle was under house arrest in Rome. This was good for him spiritually, as Paul led him to Christ during that time; it was also good for him physically, as Paul was the man who had led his master to Christ, and thus could be an advocate for him with Philemon. As we saw, this gave Paul the opportunity, when the time came to send a letter to the Colossian church, to send Onesimus back with it, with his own letter to Philemon to give him protection; it gave Paul the opportunity to rearrange Philemon’s thinking, and through him the thinking of his whole congregation, about Onesimus specifically, and about slaves in general. It gave him the chance to confront Philemon with the fact that this slave of his, this man whose body and blood he owned, was now also his brother in Christ, and as free in Jesus as Philemon himself; and in so doing, it allowed him to force Philemon to consider very carefully the consequences of that fact.
To what purpose? Well, to understand that, having looked last week at verses 15-16, let’s go back and start with the beginning of the letter. Paul opens it in typical fashion, with a greeting, a thanksgiving, and a prayer, but it’s worth noting a couple things here. First, it’s a personal letter, but not only a personal letter. It’s addressed to Philemon—clearly someone whom Paul holds in high regard—to a woman named Apphia and another man, named Archippos—beyond the fact that both are Christians, we don’t know who they were—and to “the church that meets in your home.” That’s very interesting, because it means that while this letter is to Philemon, with requests and persuasion for Philemon, the whole congregation is going to be reading it over his shoulder, if you will, as he reads it. Partly, that might be to encourage Philemon to do what Paul wants him to do, since if he doesn’t, he’ll look bad in front of everyone; but more than that, I think this tells us that Paul isn’t only concerned about Onesimus and Philemon here. He has some things he wants to teach the whole church in Colossae through this episode.
Sometimes in Paul’s letters, the thanksgiving and the prayer are pretty clearly separated; here, they’re interwoven. He starts off, “I always thank God as I pray for you,” and then he finishes that sentence one half at a time. First, in verse 5, he says why he thanks God for Philemon: because of his faith and his love. The way this is structured in the Greek makes it clear that his love is not just for the people of the church, but also for the Lord Jesus, and that his faith isn’t just for himself, but that in fact his faith is a source of strength for the church.
And then look at verse 6—what do you see? “So that.” The NIV isn’t very helpful here; they have it in the middle when it should be at the beginning. You see, the verb “to pray” isn’t in this verse; that verb is back in verse 4. The interesting thing about verse 6 is that it doesn’t actually give the content of Paul’s prayer, strictly speaking—it begins with “so that” and gives the purpose of Paul’s prayer. It’s a small difference, but it’s an important one for us in understanding this letter. You see, Paul isn’t just saying, “I’m praying this for you, I’m thankful for you, Amen, now let’s get down to business.” Instead, he’s saying, “This is why I’m praying for you, this is what I want to see happen in your life and through your life, and it’s for that reason that I’m going to say what I’m about to say to you.”
What we need to understand here is that when we see “so that” in the Scriptures, we need to pay attention, because this is going to answer the “why” question. I may have said this here before, but the preacher’s question is “so what?” As a preacher, whenever I tell you something, I have to consider that you have the right to say—not in a nasty or disrespectful way, but as an honest question—“so what?” So what’s the reason you’re telling me this? So what’s the reason I should care? So what difference does this make to me in my life? And when you ask “so what,” the answer should come back, “so that”—and so it does here. This is Paul’s purpose for Philemon, it’s what he wants to see happen in Philemon’s life, and so this is the other pole of this letter. I said last week that verses 15-16 are the keynote of this letter, the keystone of its argument, and so they are; but verse 6, the purpose of his prayers for Philemon, is also the purpose of this letter toward which that argument is focused.
That, I’m guessing, is why Paul layered this sentence six feet deep with theologically loaded, meaning-full words, as he’s clearly trying to express something powerful here. Unfortunately, one of the things he succeeded in doing is in making this verse all but impossible to render into English. I feel sorry for Bible translators here, because they can’t explain it, or turn it into a whole paragraph—they have to put just a line or two that makes at least minimal sense in English and captures, as best they can, what Paul is trying to say. That’s why the NIV takes the “so that” from the beginning of the verse and moves it to the middle—I think it’s a mistake, but they’re just trying to get all the pieces to fit into the box in a way that lets people see more or less the right picture. For preaching from, though, it’s not so great, so if you’ll look up at the screen, you’ll see my translation of verse 6. It’s not great English, but like I said, this is a tough verse.
He starts off with the phrase “the communion of your faith.” In the Greek, this is koinonia tou pisteos. Koinonia is the word we most often translate “fellowship”; it’s from the word koine, meaning “common,” and it means doing, sharing, owning, living in common, being involved in something together and being involved in one another’s lives. It’s hard to translate in the simplest of cases because it’s a much richer word than just “fellowship,” with a much deeper meaning than we usually give that word; but here, when it’s combined with “faith”—and specifically, Philemon’s faith—what does that mean? There are, I think, two parts to that. The first is that Philemon’s faith isn’t just his own, but is a faith held in common with the whole Christian church, and indeed that it came to him through the Christian church; he is one who has received this blessing from the church, and thus is indebted to it. The second is that in living out his faith, and especially in serving as a leader in the church, he has expanded that communion, that circle of relationships—his faith has formed a community, and there is a koinonia which has resulted from his faith, including perhaps people whom he personally has led to Christ. The communion of his faith is the communion, the part of the body of Christ, which has shaped him and which he himself has shaped in his turn.
Paul’s hope is that that communion might become effective—this is the word from which we get our word “energy”; in fact, one commentator translates this, “might be a source of energy.” The idea is that the communion of Philemon’s faith, that this community of which he is a part and which he is responsible to lead, would be energized to produce results, to accomplish things. But to accomplish what? The aim here, Paul says, is “full knowledge of all the good that is ours into Christ.” Now, that sounds strange, in the first place because we’re used to thinking of knowledge as a head thing. You go to school, you read books, you listen to the teachers and the professors, and you learn things, and then you take tests and put those things down on paper to show that you know them. In the biblical mindset, though, knowledge isn’t a head thing, or at least not purely so. Sure, it has intellectual content, but it’s more than that. First, it’s active—you don’t actually know something until it’s reflected in how you live your life each day. Second, it’s relational—to know someone is not simply to be aware of facts about them, but to experience them and be in relationship with them.
Thus, when Paul talks about “full knowledge of all the good that is ours,” he’s not talking about possessing a set of facts about what’s good and what isn’t, he’s talking about experiencing in our own lives the good which Christ has given us—experiencing God’s work in our lives, and living accordingly, and so embodying that good in a way that the whole world can see. This is what Paul wants Philemon’s faith to produce, in his own life and also in the broader church, through his leadership of the communion of faith of which he is a part. This sort of witness is what he wants to see in Philemon’s life, and what he wants to see Philemon lead others to through his teaching and example. The desire to see this is the reason why Paul writes this letter.
Now, that doesn’t quite finish verse 6, of course, but don’t worry, I’m not leaving Jesus out of this sermon; I’ll come back to this verse in a minute. Before I do, however, I want to point you to perhaps the most interesting feature of this letter. Look at verse 8: “Therefore”—because this is what I want to see happen in your life—“although in Christ I have every right to tell you what to do here, I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to ask you to do this out of love.” Out of love for whom? Well, partly for Paul, clearly; but this is also more general—out of love for Christ, out of Philemon’s love for the church, out of the love that is chief among “all the good” that he’s just been talking about in verse 6. He goes on to ask two things: first, that Philemon welcome Onesimus as he would welcome Paul himself; and second, that he would send Onesimus back to Paul—and perhaps even first set him free from slavery; I think that’s what Paul’s hinting at in verse 21—so that he could once again help Paul in his ministry in Rome. But where Paul could have simply ordered Philemon to do all these things and been certain of being obeyed, he doesn’t; instead, he just asks him. Why?
Paul doesn’t spell this out, of course, but I think we can see the answer to that in the letter. It’s all about love, and about the communion of Philemon’s faith becoming effective in the full knowledge of all that is theirs into Christ. For Paul, this isn’t just about Onesimus being protected, or getting Onesimus back; there’s something larger at stake here as well: the growth of the Colossian church, which now includes Onesimus. Paul doesn’t just want Philemon to do the right thing, he wants him to do the right thing for the right reason—because if you know the love of Christ in your life, this is what you do; this is what it means to live out that love, first toward Onesimus, and then toward Paul—and he wants him to do it in full view of the church (that’s the main reason this letter is supposed to be read to them as well) so that in doing it, he will set an example for them as they go out and live their own lives.
This, I think, points us back to the end of verse 6, where Paul talks about “all the good that is ours into Christ.” Now, that’s a literal translation, and it’s bad English, but I think it’s important for us to catch the meaning of that little preposition. You can just take it to mean “in,” as the NIV does, and just talk about the good that is ours in Christ; or you can translate it as “toward,” as other commentators do, and focus on the fact that the good that God does in us is supposed to focus our attention on Christ, and move us toward him. It seems to me that we need to hang on to both those aspects and remember that we’re still in process: we’re already in Christ, and in Christ we have all this good that’s beginning to be realized, but it’s only beginning; we still need to be closer to him, and we’re still being drawn closer to him. We need to remember, as Hannah sang earlier, that it truly is in Christ alone that our hope is found, not in anything else. We need to remember that we find our true life in Christ alone, for Christ alone, and that the hope and the goal toward which we live is Christ alone. Let’s pray.