The Price

Lections: The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 23), AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Epistle to Philemon comes ‘round but once every three years in the lectionary of our church. And I feel compelled to preach on it pretty much every time, because there’s nothing else quite like it in our Scriptures. Paul is imprisoned—whether in Rome or Caesarea he does not say—when a runaway slave shows up at his door. And it’s someone whom he knows. This is Onesimus, of the household of Philemon, who lives way up in Colossae, in Anatolia, modern Türkiye, a significant journey by sea. His appearance must’ve come as a surprise.

Paul knows Philemon very well indeed. He is a wealthy paterfamilias, a Gentile convert to Christianity; as to culture, an educated Greek; as to law, a Roman citizen. Philemon hosts a church in his home, with a guest room reserved for St Paul. This would likely make him a presbyter, an elder who presides at Holy Communion, what we today would call a pastor or a priest. And he owns slaves, including one Onesimus.

Somewhere along the line, Onesimus has been accused of stealing from his master, an offense for which penalties under Roman law ranged from flogging to crucifixion. In his desperation, Onesimus hopped a ship and made a beeline for the one authority whom his master was sure to respect: the Apostle Paul. It had to have been a highly risky journey.

Slavery is deeply sinful, no two ways about it. It’s also one of the oldest ideas that we have ever had. Slavery predates writing, predates cities, predates civilization. As soon as we knew how to build things, we wanted to make other people do it for us.

The ancient and classical worlds simply assumed that some must be slaves. Often they would couch it as mercy: rather than wiping out your enemies entirely, you could reduce them to subservience. In Latin, the words for keeping safe and servant have the same root. The Hebrew Bible attempts to mitigate slavery, insisting that a slave must be clothed and fed as one of the family; and, crucially, that slaves must be liberated every seventh year, sent off with money in their pockets! Yet this law maybe stood as much in mock as mark.

By the time of our New Testament, the Roman Empire had been built upon the backs of slaves. Expansionist wars had flooded Rome with captives, enriching the elite and driving the poor to dependency. As much as a fifth of the Empire’s population lived enslaved. Yet slavery existed on a spectrum. Romans always lived within a hierarchy, with people above them and people below. We might think that slaves occupied only the bottom rung.

But many Roman slaves earned money. They hadn’t human rights but they had cash, and thus one day might buy their freedom. In such a case, their master then remained their patron; no-one could be entirely free. But they were better off than they had been before. Some sold themselves in slavery to escape debts, or even for advancement. That might sound bizarre, but slaves of the Emperor could accumulate vast wealth. We have records of slaves, owning slaves, owning slaves, down to the seventh degree.

Greek slaves were especially prized. Romans had a love/hate relationship with Greece. They emulated Greek architecture, theater, philosophy, religion, even adopted the language. But they also found the Greeks to be rather foppish and effeminate, a little too fond of softness and sophistry. Romans would often purchase Greek slaves as tutors to teach their children. And they gave them cutesy names such as Onesimus, which means “useful.”

There were of course rebellions. No-one really wants to be a slave. The Romans called these the Servile Wars, the latest of which occurred about a century before Christ. This was the famous war of Spartacus, a Thracian slave forced to fight as a gladiator. His initial force of 70 eventually gathered 120,000, who gave the Roman war machine a good run for their money. It took three years and eight Legions to finally put Spartacus down.

And once the Romans did, they then crucified 6,000 slaves along the 120 miles of the Appian Way, which works out to a cross every hundred feet or so, all the way to Rome. Keep this in mind, when we read, in other letters of Paul, the Apostle’s advice that slaves should be good to their masters, and masters good to their slaves. We look on that today and think, “Why didn’t he argue for abolition?” Because everybody then remembered Spartacus, and all of those crosses lined up over the horizon.

Back to our epistle. Paul is imprisoned; a slave shows up, looking for his help; a slave who happens to be owned by a Christian priest and personal friend of Paul. While he stays with Paul, under house arrest, Onesimus converts and receives Holy Baptism. He is no less a Christian now than his master in Colossae. Alas, the Senate and People of Rome prove a bit more hardnosed than our Lord Jesus Christ, and so he remains a fugitive.

Thus Paul writes a letter, from his captivity, back to Anatolia. And he lays things out pretty thick. He thanks Philemon for all of his love, his ministry, his friendship. And then he says, I’m writing you this letter in order to give you the chance to do the right thing voluntarily. I could order you, he adds. Paul, after all, is the bishop outranking the priest. But I don’t have to do that, do I? Let’s not go that route, if we can find a better way.

I am sending Onesimus back to you, Paul writes. And we might find this shocking. Is Paul seriously returning a runaway slave to his owner? But read on. Paul states, quite clearly, that Philemon is to welcome Onesimus no longer as a slave but as a brother. No longer as a slave! That bit is very clear. And if Onesimus owes you anything, Paul continues, if you find any red upon his ledger, charge it to my account. I take on his debt. But I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, Philemon, that you owe to me your very self. Refresh my heart in Christ, he concludes. I know that you will do even more than I ask.

What an epistle! Here sits Paul in prison, one Roman citizen writing to another, telling him, “Free your slave. Accept him as your brother. Do it voluntarily, or I will order you to do so by the authority of Christ. Think on what your own soul owes.” Paul didn’t send Onesimus back to Philemon in order to be a slave. He sent him back (a) to protect him from the sword of Roman law, and (b) to give Philemon the opportunity to repent. And to his credit, we know that he did. Onesimus went on to serve as a bishop. And Philemon, as a priest, became a martyr under the Neronian persecution.

Now admittedly, a strongly worded letter might not be as dramatic as Spartacus swinging his sword. But this insistence upon universal brotherhood changed the world.

God, after all, is the God of slaves. We’ve known that since the Exodus. In Philippians, Paul writes that Christ Himself became a slave for our sake. This shocked the wider Roman world. People commented on how odd it was that Syriac Christians never owned slaves. One wealthy Roman, inquiring about Baptism, recoiled when told he would have to stop raping his slaves. “Can I not do what I want with my own?” he retorted. But they aren’t your own; they’re the children of God. And He proves Himself a powerfully protective parent.

We don’t have slaves today, now do we? We fought our bloodiest war over that. Americans no longer work each other to death; now we pay other countries to do it for us. You know, like civilized human beings. We abolished slavery on paper—a racial slavery somehow even worse than that of Rome—yet still we treat people as other, as lesser, as subhuman, based on nothing apart from prejudice and privilege. Still we yearn for hierarchies that place us on the peak, atop the backs and bones of any of those who dared get in our way. Roma adhuc sumus.

Bearing My Cross is going to cost you, Jesus said. It will cost you comfort and complacency. It will cost you the things that you think that you deserve. But only in this way are we set free: free to release the onerous burden of our egos; free from the deadweight of our oppressive sins; free to embrace the good of others as our own; free at last to love, with all the pain that love entails.

This then is the promise and the price of the Cross: that in setting others free, we free ourselves.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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