The Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Do
Philemon
What do you do when the person closest to you has betrayed and hurt you? I had a friend in college with whom I reconnected after I moved back from seminary. Let’s call her Jane. She had a whirlwind romance and after just six months, got married. All of her friends, including myself asked her to slow down. Despite our advice, they married. A year later, he fell sick and was unable to work. While incapacitated, Jane’s husband, who had terrible credit, received the mail each day and began filling out Jane’s credit card offers and also got a card in his name. One day, Jane received a call from a collection company and was told she owed $40,000 of credit card debt. She discovered her husband had been filling out card offers, receiving one for himself, never telling her about it. When he maxed out one, he would get another. On top of that, New Orleans booted her car because he had $1500 of parking tickets which he just stuffed in the glove box. Plus, he hadn’t paid rent on his office in the World Trade Center and the locks had been changed making her grandmother’s dining room unretrievable. Can you imagine her hurt and sense of betrayal. The problem is those closest to us have the greatest opportunity to wound us the deepest. And when they do, what do you do?
The Book of Philemon was written by the Apostle Paul in approximately 60 A. D. to a man named Philemon who lived in Colossea and was a leader in the church. He appears to have been a fairly wealthy Colossian. Philemon evidently came to faith in Christ as a result of Paul's influence (v. 19), perhaps when Paul was residing at Ephesus. http://lavistachurchofchrist.org/images/Asia%20Minor.jpg The city of Colossea was located in the province Phyrgia or modern day Turkey on the busy Lycus River where it merged with the Meander river. Thus, Colossea was a hub of commercial boat traffic on these two rivers. The city was also located on the Roman Road which ran directly east from Ephesus passed through Laodicea, and eleven miles farther, Colossae. It ran all the way to the Tigris Euphrates river in modern day Iraq. Paul writes this letter from Rome where he was under house arrest for more than two years. He does not know his fate but this does not keep Paul from continuing his ministry. He continues to receive visitors to teach and mentor them in the faith and one of those was Onesimus, who was a runaway slave who made his way to Rome. Scholars believe that Onesimus carried not only the letter to Philemon but also Paul’s letter to the Colossians and the Ephesians. From those three letters, we learn of Paul’s obedience, dedication and faithfulness to the mission of Jesus Christ in spite of the circumstances he is facing.
This is the first mention of slavery in the New Testament though it was prominent throughout the Roman Empire. Scholars believe there may well have been 60 million slaves in the Roman Empire in the first century and comprised 40-50% of the inhabitants of most large urban centers. Slaves were critical to the social and economic structure of the Empire. It was everywhere and all-embracing. Paul and the early church must have been constantly in contact with it from the beginning. One of the difficulties we Americans have when reading about slavery in the New Testament is that we see it through our own history of antebellum slavery in the South. But slavery in the urban cities of Rome was very different from slavery in the South. Most people in Paul’s day owned slaves. Urban Roman slaves were more like household servants in Victorian England than slaves in the antebellum South. They came from the peoples and land the Roman Empire conquered and were culled from the middle class. They were teachers, engineers, doctors, accountants, cooks and skilled craftsmen. Slaves lived with their masters and thus, became one of the family. They were encouraged to be entrepreneurs and start their own businesses and could save up the profits to purchase their freedom. A freed slave gained Roman citizenship though they could not hold public office, a process called manumission. But many decided not to purchase their freedom because they were so well treated and wanted to stay in their master’s care and protection.
Onesimus is a runaway slave and non-believer at that time. This is unusual because many slaves came to faith with their Christian master. This happened because the first century Christian church were house churches and Roman villas were perfectly set up to accommodate this. http://michellemoran.com/CD/Roman-Villa.jpg The front of a Roman villa faced the street and had commercial space in it. Behind that was the atrium which was a public room for business and meetings and a perfect settings for the early church to meet. The largest atriums were 30-35 square feet and could hold 50-80 people. As a result, masters brought their slaves with them and thus they heard the Gospel and came to faith. We also know this because most of the meetings of the first century church were at night and night meetings were outlawed by Rome because that’s when plans of sedition were made. Night time meetings accommodated the many slaves who had to work during the day. What’s interesting is that Onesimus did not come to faith under his Master. Why did he run away? There is no evidence that Philemon treated Onesimus harshly. Some scholars have surmised that because of his faith, Philemon may have given too much grace and freedom to Onesimus and thus when the opportunity presented, he took advantage of it and slipped away.
But in a manner of divine providence, he ran away to Rome and encountered Paul under house arrest. Paul led him to faith and he became a follower of Jesus. Following his conversion, Onesimus became a valuable helper of Paul (v. 11) so much so, that Paul desired to keep Onesimus with him to help in his ministery. But instead he felt a greater responsibility to return the slave to his Christian master (vv. 13-14). Onesimus, now a follower of Christ, needed to make amends with Philemon, whom he had wronged. This was a great risk because slave owners had absolute authority over their slaves and could punish their slaves in the manner they saw fit. Regardless, Paul implores Philemon to forgive Onesimus and be reconciled with him.
Why didn’t Paul take the opportunity to condemn slavery? First, conditions were not right for such social upheaval. The Romans would never have voluntarily freed their slaves because they were the foundation of their economy. So any revolt would have been severely crushed. Second, the Christian faith was in its infancy and not in a position to evoke such social change. In Paul’s time, there were less than a few hundred Christians in Rome and there may have been no more than 1000 by the end of the first century. It took 150 years for 1% of Rome’s 450,000 residents to become Christian. For Paul, there was a greater issue at hand, the fact that Onesimus had become a follower of Jesus and thus a Christian brother to Philemon. Paul appeals to Philemon to forgive Onesimus and thus we have the central theme of this “Notecard from God.” What do you as a follower of Jesus Christ when someone close to you has hurt you?
One Sunday morning in my last congregation, I had a woman who started attending and was married to her partner. She had come to a funeral at the church and thought she might try it as a result. She came guarded because she was a lesbian and had never been accepted in any church before and in fact had been deeply wounded. But it wasn’t just limited to the church. That had happened thoughout her life. She had been severely bullied in high school, in particular by one girl. It got so bad that she considered suicide. So you can well imagine how she felt one Sunday when she saw this bully, now many years after high school, walked down the isle and gave her life to Christ. After her profession of faith and baptism, she then turned and went to this woman she had bullied and lied about and asked for her forgiveness. Tears started streaming down her face as they embraced and the love and forgiveness of Christ was found between them and seen by all gathered for worship.
What do you do when it’s a fellow member of the body of Christ? For it’s not just about being reconciled to one another in the church, it is also meant to extend to all of our relationships. We forgive because we have first been forgiven. And forgiveness is not just living out our faith, it’s our witness to the world. For Jesus said, “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.” John 13:34-35 There were two principles governed which guided Philemon: his faith and his love and Paul appeals to these for Philemon to forgive Onesimusand be reconciled with him. How do you do that, especially when someone has hurt you deeply?
Lewis B. Smedes was a professor of Theology and Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary and the author of “The Art of Forgiving.” In it, he says that forgiveness requires three basic actions. First, surrender your right to get even. Romans 12:19 says, “Never avenge yourselves. Leave that to God, for he has said that he will repay those who deserve it.” TLB In other words, place the outcome of the matter in God's hands. Second, rediscover the humanity of our wrongdoer. Instead of seeing them as victimizers and we as victims, see them as people in need of grace. Realize that they are a complex, weak, confused, fragile person, not all that different from us. This is what God does. Third, desire good things to happen to them. In other words, bless them. Unnatural? Too much to ask of us? Perhaps. And yet, this is how God deals with us; he not only surrenders his right to see us punished, he sees us in our humanity and all of our sinfulness and he graces us with whatever blessing is right for us. And Fourth, I would add ask Jesus Christ to come into the situation and fill us with his love. We cannot love enough to forgive others, especially when we have been deeply hurt and betrayed. It can only happen through the love of Jesus which we have received. And when we do, we will experience God like never before.
Corrie ten Boom was imprisoned and tortured for hiding Jews during the Nazi occupation of Holland. She watched her sister Betsie starve to death. In 1947, she was invited to speak at a church in Munich, Germany and tell the defeated German people that God forgives. After she spoke, she saw him, a balding heavy-set man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands, working his way forward against the others. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue Nazi uniform. It came back with a rush: the huge room with its harsh overhead lights, the pile of discarded dresses and shoes in the center of the floor, the shame of walking naked past this man. Images of her dying sister filled her mind. This man had been a guard at Ravensbruck concentration camp where she were sent. He came up and said, "You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk. I was a guard there." He did not remember her. "But since that time, I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. “Fraulein" he said with his hand extended, "will you forgive me?"
And I stood there—I whose sins had every day to be forgiven—and could not. Betsie had died in that place. Could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking? It could not have been many seconds that he stood there, hand held out, but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do. For I had to do it—I knew that. The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us. "If you do not forgive men their trespasses," Jesus says, "neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses." … And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion—I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. "Jesus, help me!" she prayed silently. "I can lift my hand, I can do that much. You supply the feeling."
And so woodenly, mechanically, she thrust her hand into the one stretched out to her. And as she did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in her shoulder, raced down her arm, sprang into their joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood her whole being, bringing tears to her eyes. "I forgive you, brother with all my heart!" For a long moment we grasped each other's hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. And she writes, “I had never known God's love so intensely as I did then.” Amen.
