The Apostle Paul was a wanderer. God had gifted him to plant churches, and that meant moving around a lot: start the church, build it up to where it could keep itself going, raise up leaders within the fellowship, and move on to the next city. Or at least, that was the general approach. Some places, he stayed longer—most notably Ephesus, where he spent three years; but there were more places like Thessalonica, where the authorities ran him out of town after just three weeks. None of them added up to long pastorates for Paul, only short ones and shorter ones. That was hard on him, because he cared deeply about the churches and people he had left behind; getting back to visit churches he had planted drove his travels just as much as planting new ones. When he couldn’t visit for whatever reason—perhaps because his travels went awry, perhaps because he was in prison—he wrote letters, like this one.
In reading Paul’s letters, we should always remember there’s no small talk here and no fluff. Right from the first word, he’s always on about his purpose, always doing something intentional. Philippians is one in which his opening comments serve as an overture to the letter, bringing up themes he intends to address at greater length, starting with the very first line. Normally, Paul opens his letters with “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus . . .” and goes on from there. His calling as an apostle is the source of his authority, and so that’s generally where he needs to start; but here, writing to a body of believers who honor and respect his authority, he leaves that out. Instead, he describes himself (and Timothy) as a servant of Christ Jesus. Or at least, that’s how the NIV renders it; to give the word its full force, he calls each of them a slave of Christ.
To be sure, this didn’t mean quite what it does to our ears. Roman society knew full well that slaves were human, and they weren’t doomed to perpetual slavery; if things broke their way, slaves could earn their freedom and even become Roman citizens. In fact, I’ve seen speculation that Paul’s parents might have been slaves who had earned citizenship. All the same, slaves had no legal rights, no freedoms, and no personal autonomy whatsoever. They were completely subject to their masters’ every whim and desire, whatever those might be.
In addition to the cultural context, there is an important biblical context for Paul’s description of himself as a slave of Christ, because nearly a third of the Old Testament uses of the word ebed, the principal Hebrew word for “slave,” are used to describe an individual or the nation as the slave of God. Among individuals, the word is used most frequently of David and Moses, 38 and 37 times respectively. Paul is putting himself and Timothy in the same biblical frame as those two, Elijah, Isaiah, and the prophets more generally.
For Paul to call himself a slave of Christ means he is bound over to Christ, totally at his service, with no independent rights of his own; Jesus is his Lord in every respect, in every aspect of his life. It therefore means he is Christ’s instrument: he does not speak and act on his own, but God speaks and acts through him. It also means he does not find his life in getting his way, but rather in submitting to Christ, for that submission defines his life; his identity is defined by serving others, for he serves his Lord by serving his people. And here’s the key: Paul isn’t claiming this title to assert his authority (he would do that by invoking his apostleship) or his superiority to the Philippians—and how ironic would that be, anyway? Rather, I believe, Paul is presenting himself and his status as a model for the Philippians. We might say the goal of discipleship in Jesus is to reach the point where we can honestly say we, too, are slaves of Christ.
