St
Luke’s, Havelock North – Ordinary Sunday 23, 2007 – Sermon
“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father
and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself,
cannot be my disciples.”
Over the past seven years I’ve preached on this
reading four times and said the same thing every time: following Jesus – being
a Christian and being part of the Church – is hard and costly and it’s meant to
be hard and costly and any attempts to make it easier will inevitably lead us
in the wrong direction. So I’ve said it all before, whether anyone was
listening or not, and today I want to say it again, but with a twist, because
today we’re invited to consider what is without question a difficult and
challenging Gospel reading alongside and in the light of the other readings
gathered around it, and in particular this morning I want to focus on the
epistle.
Philemon. We could spend the next fifteen
minutes debating just which is the correct pronunciation for this shortest of
Paul’s letters, but I’d rather not. I want to focus on this reading because it
isn’t one we generally pay much attention to. It’s not one that leaps out and grabs
you like the Gospel today or displays some wonderful imagery like the potter
and the clay in Jeremiah. Of the 25 verses that make up the entire letter we’ve
heard 21 of them and I’d be surprised if you remembered most.
The scene in Philemon is both simple and
complex. Onesimus was a slave who had run away and somehow
come in contact with Paul, apparently while Paul was in prison, and has worked
for and alongside him for some time. In the meantime Onesimus’
old master, Philemon, has also become a Christian and now Paul is writing to
him to urge him to take Onesimus back. That’s pretty
much it. It’s a very specific letter written for a very specific purpose in
very specific circumstances and it’s more than fair to ask why it is that we
find it in the Bible? What was it about this short, personal letter that convinced
those people hundreds of years after it was written to put it into the canon
and make it Holy Scripture? It’s a fair question and at least part of the
answer is because this letter tells us something about the man who more than
any other influenced the life and direction of the
Paul was many things and among them he was a man
of his time and a man of Christ, and for Paul those two didn’t always sit
comfortably. He struggles at times with what he’s been brought up to believe
uphold – things that he holds dearly and strongly – and what he’s come to
believe and understand about the nature of Christ, and often those struggles
take place in public. We see them, for example, when we find in one instance
Paul extolling the virtues of a woman in leadership in the Christian community
and proclaiming the radical inclusiveness of Jesus, while in another he bluntly
tells women to keep their heads covered and their mouths shut in church.
Another example, and the one which fits most clearly with today, is Paul’s
attitude towards slavery.
Firstly let’s be clear, slavery was a common
practice in the Graeco-Roman world and there’s nothing
specifically in the Bible condemning it and plenty which actually condones it. It
also though wasn’t much like the slave trade centuries later in
It’s clear in the New Testament that many slaves
were in positions of considerable power and responsibility. It wasn’t uncommon
for slaves to receive a good education and even become teachers themselves and
some slaves could even become rich through their own business dealings and
gifts from their masters. But therein lays the point. No matter what the
condition of the slave, he or she was still a slave, a chattel, the personal
property of another human being and by definition of less worth than the one
doing the owning.
A slave was still a slave, and Paul never really
questions that. There’s a lot of debate over whether Paul wants Philemon to
free Onesimus or not. Slaves could be emancipated and
become free men and women, and some believe that’s what Paul intends here, but
there’s no clear evidence of it. Paul seldom, in fact, directly challenges the
legal and social systems of his day, although he frequently tries to
reinterpret them. ‘Slaves obey your masters,’ he writes in Colossians,
incidentally in a letter that also introduces Onesimus,
but in the very next verses he counters that command with an instruction for
masters to be just and fair with their slaves, knowing that they too have a
master in heaven. On that basis then it’s unlikely that Paul was deliberately
challenging the master-slave relationship in his letter to Philemon. But it is
clear from what he writes that he wasn’t altogether comfortable with the
traditional nature of that relationship.
“I am appealing to you for my child, Onesimus.” There’s a sense of intimacy about Paul’s choice
of words in this letter that leaves no doubt that he saw Onesimus
as something other than just another piece of someone else’s property. The
Biblical scholar Bill Long describes Paul’s encounters with Onesimus
as a ‘watershed event’ in his ministry. As Paul gets to know this runaway slave
and work with him he begins to respect him and care for him and clearly even
love him almost like a father would and that becomes a challenge for Paul’s
worldview. In an earlier letter he had written about the
Christian community as a place where there should be neither Jew nor
Greek nor slave nor free, and now, in through his experiences with this slave,
Paul’s personal experience and ethics catch up with his theology and he comes
to understand the true implications of his earlier words.
So he writes to Philemon, urging him to take Onesimus back, but ‘no longer as a slave but more than a
slave – note that he stops short of saying as a free man – but as a beloved
brother.’ Imagine how radical, how unthinkable, that must have sounded. Here is
Paul writing to a man whose slave had run away, abandoned his post committing a
crime punishable by beatings and even death, telling him to take this slave
back, and not just as a slave, but as a beloved brother – ‘both in the flesh –
in real life – and in the Lord.’ If you ever wondered what that earlier letter
meant about neither slave nor free, here’s the practical example. And an
example too of what Jesus means in our Gospel reading this morning, but with a
major dose of irony thrown in.
“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father
and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself,
cannot be my disciples.” There isn’t time now to go into a major exploration of
what Jesus is doing here. It certainly involves some significant 1st
century issues to do with families and responsibilities and there’s also an
element of the rhetoric of provocation here, where Jesus deliberately goes over
the top and overstates the case in order to force a response and debate on the
issues. We could spend an hour though and still not completely explain away
that difficult and harsh word ‘hate’. The main point of the reading, though,
isn’t to hate your family, it’s to count the cost
before following Christ.
Paul in his letter, albeit using much more
careful and considerate language, equally challenges Philemon to pay the cost
of choosing to follow Christ by accepting a new relationship with his former
slave.
There are many, many costs to following Christ
and I honestly believe that we who can call ourselves Christians so casually
need to remember that and be reminded of it often. Here though we find just one
of them. Choosing to follow Christ is not the same as choosing to focus on our
own spirituality. Unfailingly throughout the Gospels and the epistles we get
the message that Christianity is not primarily about an individual journey to
self fulfilment and nor, in the words of Tom Wright, is the Church simply a
self-help aid to private spiritual improvement. Our personal relationships with
God are important, no question, but so are our relationships with others.
What Paul’s letter to Philemon so graphically
illustrates is that being a follower of Christ demands that we work towards
having right relationships, just relationships, equal relationships, but most
of all, that we work towards having relationships based on our mutual
connection in Christ.
This is hard work. To be able to truly welcome
someone as a brother or sister isn’t always an easy thing to do. Apart from
anything else it means not always asking the question we ask so often, what’s
in it for me? Paul never says what’s in it for Philemon, just as Jesus never
really says what’s in it for those who count the cost and still choose to
follow him. He just says do it. How we answer, what we
choose, is up to us.