Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Labour Podcast, and I am so sorry that I could not get through my whole train of thought yesterday, but am I that sorry? Because if I was that sorry, I could have gone back and just re-recorded it. So I guess I'm only sort of sorry. Bottom line is this we're in the middle of whatever it is here, a three-day arc where we are talking about different kinds of reunion moments, different kinds of reconciliation. And we have considered reconciliations that happen after an estrangement where nobody did anything wrong. It was just life happened to the relationship. There's a parting of ways, and then you come back together. And I think usually even if you can't pick up right where you left off because the world has changed, there's still a great opportunity for soft hearts and a good reunion in those sets of circumstances. As is the case with Chuck and Kelly from Castaway or David and Jonathan from 1 Samuel. Then we talked about the kind of reunions that happen after something really did go very wrong, like the rivalry between Roy and Jamie in Ted Lasso, or the rivalry between Jacob and Esau in Genesis 33, where really bad things did happen, but with the passage of time, maybe it could get better now that the pressure is off. But then, starting yesterday, we've been considering what reconciliation looks like after something truly horrible has happened. The kind of thing that feels like it is a relational Rubicon, a moral Rubicon, something that can't be undone, toothpaste that can't be put back in the tube, like what Anakin Skywalker did to all those younglings in the Jedi Temple, or like what Joseph's brothers did to him when they shoved him into a pit and sold him into slavery in Egypt out of jealousy. I'm not yet quite sure what type of reunion/slash reconciliation situation we're looking at with the letter of Philemon and the deal between Onesimus and Philemon, but I think we've got a thread that runs through the whole Bible that we can pull on that's gonna get us a little closer to coming at Philemon with the right mindset as we imagine this reunion moment between the runaway slave and his master. Having never been a slave myself, not being descended from any slaves myself, having no record at any point as far back as I can track my family going back 600 plus years. Do we have any contact with slavery in any way? It feels like a pretty foreign institution to me. I can conceptualize it, you know, abstractly in my brain. I'm speaking as someone who does not feel the internalized weight of what this institution is, but I am speaking as somebody who really likes freedom and options and opportunity. And I am speaking as someone who really chafes at anybody trying to or any system that tries to lock me down for arbitrary dumb reasons and make me do stuff. I like being a team player when we're doing things that make sense and when I'm volunteering, but I think I am not wired well to be compliant with anything that looks like someone arbitrarily enforcing their authority over me, especially at the level that we see happening to Onesimus, to other slaves in the ancient world, and especially to the level we see happening to poor Joseph, who, despite his horrible circumstances, back to the story, somehow thrives in Egypt, thrives in his master's household. And this is a recurring motif throughout the Bible. And this is not a throwaway line, this is very important for what we're talking about in Philemon. There's a recurring motif throughout the Bible of people like me who are wired to chafe at coercion, finding themselves coerced, finding themselves against their will, ending up in slavery or a state of subjection. And then somehow God takes them from this very lowly state and engenders in them some sense of kingdom values, some sense of, I mean, I guess what in New Testament says we would call Christ-likeness that causes them to be a blessing even to their oppressors. I mean, talk about upside-down kingdom values there, and somehow then rise through the ranks and be used by God in the grand redemptive plan. That is absolutely the case for Joseph. That is absolutely the case for the Hebrew slaves a couple pages over in the book of Exodus and Moses. That is absolutely the case. I mean, the whole book of Jeremiah points to this same motif that unfolds after 586 BC when Nebuchadnezzar conquers the southern kingdom of Judah, ironically, so named for one of the brothers who pushed Joseph into a pit and sold him into slavery. But Jeremiah tells the Jews who are about to be taken away into captivity to go and work for the good of the city, and that God has plans to prosper you and not to harm you, that he hasn't forgotten you. And then God follows through on all of that in Babylon and in Persia. So my point is that there is this motif, this through line in the whole Bible where God uses subjection. He even positions people, people he loves, in states of subjection for his purposes. So back to this reconciliation reunion scene after this horrible wrong that the brothers did to Joseph. Eventually, there's a famine in the land and they can't make things work. And so they go to Egypt because they heard Egypt has stuff saved up. Why does it have stuff saved up? Because Joseph did so well with so little and was so trustworthy with little that he eventually was entrusted with much. He became the right-hand man of Pharaoh, and he came up with a very elaborate, very taxi plan to save up a bunch of grain, and so he had it to help out people, refugees who might come knocking. And who comes knocking? His brothers. So then in Genesis 45, after Joseph puts his brothers through the paces a little bit, he reveals himself. They didn't even know who they were dealing with as they were negotiating their survival and negotiating for these provisions with this Egyptian official. Hearts are soft. It is a beautiful reconciliation scene, despite what I would say is a horrible, grievous, awful wrong that goes far beyond sibling rivalry or ribbing or anything like that. And I suppose in the grand scheme of things, that gives me hope for what we might be imagining here or seeing here in the book of Philemon. A reunion by, perhaps, someone who God, even though this is hard for us to comprehend, ordained like so many others he ordained throughout the Bible. Perhaps this is a reunion between someone God ordained to be in this difficult, even evil, subservient role in the household of Philemon, who is now doing the very difficult thing of going back to Philemon for some redemptive purpose that goes beyond just the interpersonal relationship and justification or catharsis or vindication that might be owed to Onesimus by Philemon, or who knows exactly what happened, maybe somewhat to Philemon by Onesimus. I have reason, because of what I see in these other reconciliation templates throughout the Bible, to believe that behind these 25 verses in Philemon, there is a beautiful story of reconciliation happening here that might follow a similar pattern, even in the face of horrible circumstances that made the estrangement happen in the first place and made the reconciliation necessary. Look, there are a lot of different reunion scenarios that you might encounter in your own life. Some of them are reunions that just have to happen because nobody did anything wrong, but we just parted ways. Life took us apart and now we're back together. Those might be awkward and they might take a little bit of feeling out, but there's not a lot of pressure there and hearts get soft. There are other times where there's a pretty serious rivalry that develops. People do bad things and it gets sideways for a while. But in the grand scheme of things, with time passing, as is the case between Roy and Jamie and Ted Lasso, and as is the case between Jacob and Esau in that beautiful scene in Genesis 33, with enough time and the pressure being ramped down, hearts can soften and those reunions can go well. Sometimes really bad things happen, though, and the estrangement is born out of something awful. And even with the passage of time, it feels like a pretty rare thing that that might get patched up. There are examples in the Bible of such reunions not going very well, but I like hope and I like that motif I was mentioning earlier, so I chose to fixate on one that did have a positive outcome, even though it involved, like Philemon, slavery. We'll obviously have a lot of time to talk about how this reunion went and how it all worked out as we continue to chip away at the actual book of Philemon, but I got a sneaking suspicion that the early church would not have viewed this letter as scripture if it hadn't worked out well. I don't think this would be in the Bible if the whole thing had gone to crap and this had been a big dust-up and problem in colossae. And like I said, we'll be able to explore that more as we go along. All right. Thanks for gaming out these reunion reconciliation templates. Maybe for you, maybe for me, just thinking through the anatomy of how these things work has prompted in you some thought about potential reunions or reconciliation that might be worth pursuing in your life? Maybe not. Just something to think about. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.