Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And every single one of you and me, everybody involved in this conversation, we have all had a reunion or reconciliation scene unfold in our lives. Probably lots of them, right? Because it's we're not even talking about like flaming hot, falling out kind of situations necessarily. Sometimes it's just distance or circumstances, or nobody did anything wrong, and we just drift from each other. We live in different parts of the world or our paths go different directions or whatever. And we're estranged from people for maybe harsh reasons, maybe perfectly natural and understandable reasons. But either way, when you come back together, you know what it feels like, right? There's kind of this feeling out thing. Like, can we pick up where we left off? Isn't that one of the great compliments that we give our friendships that seem to transcend all of this? We're like, yeah, I heard from him. It was awesome. It's like we just picked up right where we left off. It was great. But more often than not, we don't pick up right where we left off because reunion scenes and reconciliations, which sometimes are one and the same, they're complicated. There's circumstances, there's baggage to all of that. And we've got a whale of a reunion/slash maybe hopefully reconciliation scene that we're trying to visualize here with this little book of Philemon that we're working on. And it's very hard to picture it because we don't get a lot of details about this book. Check it out. I brought a Bible for this activity. This is how long Philemon is in my Bible.
unknownIt's one page.
SPEAKER_01It's 25 verses. We don't really get any other details about this incident anywhere else in the Bible, or for certain anywhere in church history. So we kind of got to triangulate it out. And I thought to get a better sense of what this reunion might have been like, as Onesimus himself, the runaway slave, is delivering the letter to his former master. I thought we could just picture some other famous reconciliations that we know from storytelling and from the Bible, and consider what type of reconciliation or reunion this might be between the two. So here's my first reunion template that I'm picturing. This is the kind where nobody did anything wrong. Now come on, you got stories like this, right? Where life just took you in different directions. Or maybe you did get forced to make a choice one way or the other. And maybe it did force you to feel a little adversarial, or you landed on the other side of an argument or a team or something with somebody you used to care about, kind of a fox and the hound sort of star-crossed friendship sort of situation. But the one that I picture that I think is beautiful and tragic from somewhat recent storytelling is the one that unfolds in the Tom Hanks film, Castaway. Right? Do you remember at the beginning of that movie? He's got somebody he loves, Helen Hunt. And he gets on his plane, and they're gonna get like they'll be back. That's like the whole thing that keeps him going while he's on the island. And you can't wait to see him get off that island and make his way back to his old love, but four years have passed. And I don't want to ruin it if you've never seen the movie, but that reconciliation scene is one that really, as a viewer, it makes you feel the sting of sometimes time just passes and nobody did anything wrong. And maybe you don't get all the sweet payoffs that you hope to get. It's a 20-some-year-old movie. I don't know why I'm dancing around, spoilers. If you haven't seen it, I'd go see that one. That's a great film. In the Bible, we have one like that. I mean, we have uh several like that. One that comes to mind for me is found in 1 Samuel 23. We hear about this great friendship between two young men, best pals, David and Jonathan. Jonathan's dad is the king, Saul. And Saul isn't such a great guy, and increasingly Saul doesn't like David very much, and that puts Jonathan in a very difficult situation. And ultimately, Jonathan can only lightly defy his father to help his father's rival, his best friend, David. And Jonathan finds David out in the wilderness in this scene in 1 Samuel 23, and he strengthens him and encourages him, and you know, they're crying and stuff because they're on opposite sides of a thing, and they both have a role that they need to play. That's very sad. They're, I mean, they never get to hang out again as friends. Okay, so back to Onesimus running away from Philemon, stealing some stuff from him, probably, finding Paul in a prison cell somewhere, becoming a Christian under the tutelage of Paul, and then getting a letter from Paul that he carries back to Philemon. I wonder if Onesimus even knew what the letter said, or if he was finding out when Philemon opened it too. Hmm. I've never thought about that. Funny, I bet all of you have thought about that. When I send a letter of recommendation for somebody, I uh sometimes I let them read it, sometimes I don't. Huh. Well, we'll explore that more as we go along. But we got this scenario right here. So my question is is that final scene of castaway? Nobody did anything wrong, but life has just moved on, kind of reunion that David and Jonathan, uh, this is just we're just on different sides of this kind of reunion. Is that what we're getting here in Philemon? Maybe a little bit, but it doesn't feel like it it's that kind of thing. Because it really does feel like the most charitable reading of this would be everybody did a little something wrong here. Onesimus was wrong from stealing from his master, Philemon was wrong for enslaving him. But again, we haven't even fully felt out what kind of slavery we're talking about here, what their relationship might have been like. So, no, I don't think the template of reconciliation story that is just the man, we're just on different sides of the thing. What could be done? Is I don't think that applies here. I think there was a wrong, and I think the feeling of this reconciliation scene between Philemon and Onesimus is going to be the kind that is tempered by something having gone wrong. Well, okay, that makes me think of another template. And this is the template where wrongs happened, but they're not the kind of wrong that you couldn't overcome. It was a big deal, and the divide is real, but no blood has been shed here. We can still work this thing out. I think of the rivalry between two characters in a show that I enjoyed, especially the first season, a show called Ted Lasso. It's put out by Apple TV. Probably a lot of you know this one, maybe some of you don't. Jason Sadakis plays this upbeat soccer coach, or rather American football coach, who for whatever reason ends up coaching a soccer team in the UK, and his superpower is relentless optimism. Well, on this team, there's a lot of colorful characters, and you got a grumpy old veteran who gets kind of paired up and becomes a rival with a young hotshot, and they're awful to each other, and they do mean things and they make each other's lives miserable. But then you get an emotional payoff because these two characters, Roy and Jamie, eventually they become humans to each other. And it turns out Jamie's dad is a pretty horrible man, and Roy has enough emotional ability to understand why Jamie acts the way he does, which is frankly insufferable. And Roy, who seems like a person who would never soften to anyone, we get a moment after this where he softens towards Jamie and the unthinkable happens. They embrace after Roy observes this awful glimpse into what Jamie's life and childhood must have been like. Now, don't get me wrong, that reconciliation moment happens after a whole lot of ugly, bad, legitimately awful things have gone down between these two soccer players, but something more powerful happens and they're better for it and they transcend it. And it's really, it's just a beautiful reconciliation moment, one of my favorite in recent storytelling. Well, I think we get a story like that in the Bible back in Genesis 33, in the really early days of the descendants of Abraham. I mean, we're talking like generation three, not like generation three. This is literally generation three of God's chosen people. God chooses Abraham, he promises Abraham, you're gonna have a son. Eventually, Abraham has a son named Isaac. Isaac is the inheritor of this great promise that God makes Abraham to say, you're gonna be a great nation, you're gonna have a ton of descendants, I'm gonna give you a land, and you are going to be a blessing to all the nations. That's a really big deal in the Bible, that promise, because it's the promise that's gonna include Jesus and the whole redemptive thing that is kind of the whole point of why we look at the Bible or why we even care about any of this. So that starts with this guy, Abraham. That's very exciting. Abraham has a kid named Isaac, and Isaac has twins named Jacob and Esau. Esau is the first one out barely. And the description of his birth is I always get a kick out of it. I'm gonna find him and read it to you. Where's it at? That's not in 33. It's earlier. Here we go. Genesis 25. Listen how they describe the birth of these twins. When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb. The first to come out was red, and his whole body was like a hairy garment. So they named him Esau, which apparently people smarter than me tell me just means like red hairy baby, apparently. After this, his brother came out with his hand grasping Esau's heel, so he was named Jacob. Isaac was 60 years old when Rebecca gave birth to them. And they have, you know, a predictable twin rivalry. Jacob's superpower is trickery. It gets him in a lot of trouble. It also gets him a lot of opportunities. And Jacob eventually really wrongs Esau. He tricks old man Isaac out of that generational blessing. Jacob tricks him out of it and gets that blessing handed down to him and his descendants instead of to Esau, who was technically, even if barely, the firstborn, to him and his descendants. And he knows he's screwed up. So Jacob and Esau are parted. They go in different directions. Jacob lives out most of the days of his young life in, I guess, what we would now call modern day Iraq, Mesopotamia. And he goes there and he runs into a trickster who's just about as good as he is at it. And they trick each other back and forth, this distant relative. Jacob gets a couple of wives out of the deal. The Bible does not promote that. It just tells the story in these very ancient, very ancient times of what happened with households. And eventually the relationship with the eastern branch of the family runs its course. And Jacob, under pretty serious pressure, realizes he's got to go back to where Esau is. The preparation for this is incredible. Jacob figures out that I'm in Esau's territory, and that's his camp or land right over there. And he sends servants and is like, hey, we're from Jacob. Hi. And then the servants come back and they're like, Yeah, Esau is gonna come see you with 400 men. And Jacob's like, I do not like the sound of that at all. Let's send him a bunch more presents, and he sends him a bunch more presents. Another night passes, and Jacob is understandably freaking out because he expects that this reunion is not going to go well because of how deeply he wronged Esau. And that 400 men thing really sticks in Jacob's craw. He's made these plans to like divide the two branches of his family. And if Esau attacks, at least this half of the family will get away. And Jacob isn't really tricking anybody anymore. He's going right through the front door. And as Esau finally, the next day starts to approach, Jacob is coming out, and he's bowing down on the ground like facing the dust seven times. And then in one of the most powerful moments in the whole Old Testament, the whole Bible, this is what goes down in Genesis 33:4. High tension, what's going to happen in the reunion? But Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him. He threw his arms around his neck and kissed him and they wept. Then Esau looked up and saw the women and children. Who are these with you? He asked. And Jacob answered, These are the children God has generously given your servant. That should not have gone that way. That is so beautiful. I read a passage like that. I'm like, all right, well, if you guys could work out something like that, I could probably work out something with the people who maybe I have bad history with, or maybe I meant to do right or I got it wrong, or maybe I meant to do wrong and I got it wrong. But this is a situation like the Ted Lasso Roy versus Jamie thing where there is real bad blood. People really did wrong things to each other. I think what Jacob did to Esau is worse than probably anything Roy did to Jamie or vice versa. I mean, this is pretty ideal. This is the kind of reunion you hope for. Jacob's got all these elaborate plans for how to show how sorry he is. And Esau's, yeah, he doesn't say anything. He just runs out to him and hugs him. Then he's like, Introduce me to your family, brother. It gets me. It has gotten me in this conversation. I love that kind of story. It points to the reality of God, even in the distant Old Testament and in these people's lives. People shouldn't act like that. You should hold grudges and you should get what's yours. And yet, these guys, somehow, even in the midst of this primeval age where it seems like morality and ethics were all different, still, the proximity of the God of Abraham to these brothers is what I'm gonna give credit to for their ability to soften their hearts and humble each other and see the bigger story and move forward. Okay, I only got to two of the three templates for setups for a reunion today. That's plenty for now. And Matt, this is the 10 minute 51 hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.