Philemon. Philemon. Okay, yesterday we were playing the historical biblical what-if game with the question of what if Paul and Onesimus had not agreed to send Onesimus back to Philemon. Let's extrapolate that out further. How would things work out for Philemon if it went as it did go, which is Paul sends Onesimus back to Philemon? Or how might things have gone if Paul didn't send Onesimus back to Philemon? Consider a work environment where you are someone's boss and they come to you and say, I broke a rule here at work. What do we do now? Think about how you feel when that has maybe happened. Versus if you run through the security footage because you know something is missing and you spend hours scrubbing through it and you catch them after they've already lied to you about some stuff. Well, one engenders soft-heartedness and a desire to make it work. You're like, well, all other things aside, I think we could figure it out together. The other creates a feeling of bitterness in your heart. The relationship is ruined. How could I trust them again with these kinds of things? How's it gonna hit for Philemon if Onesimus comes back in chains, having been caught as a runaway slave with a bill attached to him for the return costs? Versus if Onesimus walks right back up to Philemon with no fetters on his arms and hands him a letter that is not a bill, but rather is a promissory note to pay whatever Philemon is owed from the Apostle Paul himself. Well, I would argue that this is a significant fork in the road in terms of outcomes. The one is going to cause embitteredness, the other is gonna cause a softening of the heart, most likely. In the same way that your kid comes in and is like, I screwed up, help me, versus if you catch your kid doing something they shouldn't do, you're gonna feel totally different about it one way or the other. And Philemon is a human, so he's gonna feel completely different about it, depending on how it plays out. I would submit to you that if Paul doesn't send Onesimus back voluntarily and Onesimus gets caught, the relationship between Onesimus and Philemon is never gonna be good, right? I mean, Philemon's got to do something to demonstrate that he takes his position as head of the household seriously. Onesimus has flaunted that. Saving face is very important in cultures today, but saving face was very, very, very, very important in ancient cultures. And the idea of just bringing this guy who got caught back on and restoring him to his previous level of service and reputation, I don't like, I think the world kind of ran on reputation a lot more back then. I don't think Philemon could have afforded that. Everybody would have thought he'd gone soft. Philemon would have been over a barrel, even if he wanted to show gentleness toward Onesimus, I don't think, socially in those conditions, he could have done that. However, because Onesimus came back the way he did, it put Philemon in a great position to do the stuff that Paul requested. And Paul, as we've discussed before, is a social genius. He knows the ins and outs of all of the cultural expectations all over the world. The Colossians were not the same as the Romans, and neither of them were the same as the people of Jerusalem. Paul had a feel for the culture in that part of the world. Even if he'd never set foot properly in Colossae, he knew people from Colossae. Paul was a student of culture, Paul was a student of people. I think that woven into this little petition, this little letter of Philemon, is tremendous nuance and knowledge of the very unique thing that is the Colossian mind on the part of Paul. He might not have been able to reel off all six, seven, or ten flags or however you count it that had flown over Colossae, but he could intuit the way history had uniquely shaped these people, their points of pride, their points of softness, and how they would respond to such a request. And so, as we play the game of what if here, I think because Paul did send this letter, I have to guess that there are layers of nuance and subtlety to this letter of Philemon that I'm not remotely qualified to unpack and that no modern scholar can properly see because it was so intimate and it's so subtle. But think about it, think about speechcraft in your life when you use it. I mean, sometimes you'll talk to 10 people and you'll be like, yeah, this gesture of kindness that I do is just a social habit. This goes over great with everybody I talk to, but then I talked to this other person that way, and it did not go over great. What the heck? We all know what it's like to have a social touch that works with most people, but somebody else just thinks about the world different and your normal go-to stuff. It doesn't work. It's off-putting, and it made them feel bad when you were trying to make them feel not bad. In the same way that you have a hundred levels of depth and complexity, some you're aware of, some you're not aware of, that you draw on when you evaluate people, you look at their face, you see what they're wearing, you think about the context in which you're meeting them, and you know what kind of stuff it makes sense to give them conversationally, and maybe even in body language, to make them feel good and to get a good outcome out of the interaction. You just know this stuff. Well, so did brilliant people in the ancient world. And Paul would have been at a complete disadvantage and an impossible situation to try to salvage this if he knowingly had Philemon's slave and didn't return him. I mean, that would be like, and this is gross, by the way, because people aren't property. But I'm trying to draw an analogy, even though it's a corrupt analogy. This would be like if when someone stole my truck, and that did happen once, my truck got straight up stolen, used for bad things, and then abandoned out on the reservation. That happened, those are just the facts of the case. And I was so preoccupied with that missing truck while it was gone, it drove me crazy thinking about that. I looked at everybody's with suspicion. If anybody had a truck that looked like mine, I was kind of eyeballing it. I even followed a couple people for a few blocks just to verify that it wasn't my truck. I can't afford a new truck. That I mean, it was an old one, but it meant a lot to me. And being without it, it was hard. That really hurt us as a family. And if I found out that the whole time the people who stole the truck drove over to my friend's house a few hours down the road and parked it there and broke bread with my friend and hung out, and he knew full well they had stolen my truck, and my friend did not call me and did not send them back with my truck and did not do anything about it. Yeah, that's the end of my friendship with that friend. Again, I understand how the analogy I just threw out is compromised. One is an inanimate object, it's just a truck, it can be replaced. The other is a priceless human being made in the image of God. But I draw the comparison for the sake of trying to emotionally put ourselves in the shoes of someone from a time who would have thought of Onesimus as both part of his household, his responsibility, and his property. I don't like how it sounds either. And someone he cares about and loves, a person who is valuable, probably who he missed on a very personal level. You know, there's a few other things here to consider from the exclusively Philemon side. Some of the things that I jotted down some notes here. Some of the things on the what if side for Philemon are kind of petty, but I mean they would have been real considerations for him. It would seem that if Paul had withheld Onesimus, that I mean, that hurts Philemon's household, obviously. We don't like the institution, so we probably don't feel much sympathy for that. But also it kind of looks like either way, maybe Philemon will not have custody of Onesimus anymore. I mean, that's certainly one way it could play out. Oh, oh wow, no, this last one that I jotted down. This isn't trivial at all. This is kind of a big deal. Here it is. The letter of Colossians that makes it into the Bible, it's pretty important. Remember, we broke that down. The first part is this gigantic declaration of the supremacy of Christ over all the other assumptions and all the other gods that have sort of stacked up in layers over the centuries with all the different flags that have flown over Colossae. No, no, no, Paul says. In the first half of Colossians, Paul drills home the point that Christ is supreme, not one more of your many gods, the God. And then in the second half of the very short book of Colossians, Paul deals with the implications of that. Jesus is God in the flesh, the maker and sustainer of all things. What does that mean for you? What does that mean in your household, even? Colossians is a very important book of the Bible for Christians for all time, for you and me to this day. And I got to thinking, if Paul doesn't send Onesimus back, and if Onesimus ultimately, who is the one with the power here, he's the decider, if he doesn't self-sacrificially go back to Philemon, what happens to the book of Colossians? Philemon is obviously a key player in the church in Colossae, and he's got a bunch of friends. They know him, they care about him, and he's been wronged. Maybe you wouldn't see it as a wrong to have a slave run away, but that was the conventional wisdom back then. And people felt like something got stolen from Philemon. So all his buddies are going to be very sad about that with him. They're going to be very concerned about the state of it. Same way you would ask about a crisis in someone else's life. That's how they're thinking. With that in mind, if Onesimus doesn't come back or he does get marched back because he got caught, I think Philemon is going to be embittered to the next letter or any letter that the Apostle Paul writes to Colossae after Philemon finds out that Paul had custody of Onesimus and he didn't do anything about it. He didn't even tell me. And because Philemon has so many friends, I'm guessing that a whole lot of the heads of household in Colossae are going to feel the same way. They're going to be like, What is this? Did we get sold a bill of goods? The guy who's kind of the top of this Christian family tree that we're now a part of. Like he's just a liar and a fraud. He says, Oh no, I make my own way, you know, I make tents and everything. I pay my own bills. I don't want to be a burden to anyone, but then he steals our slaves and doesn't tell us and lies about it. Oh, so he sent a letter to the church. Cool. Well, read it yourselves, because I'm not going to be there for the reading of that. Maybe I'll see you next week. I think that kind of response would have been very possible, even likely, from Philemon and many others, if it doesn't work out the way it worked out. That is, Paul sends Onesimus back with two letters in hand, those being Colossians and Philemon. I think that's a really big deal. In a way, Onesimus is kind of taking one for the team here. And his gesture of sacrifice and humility, even though I think you and I both agree he had a legitimate gripe and running away morally makes sense to us. The amount of humility that that man demonstrated in marching himself back to Philemon's door, man, I think it paid huge dividends. I think it served the church. I think it served other Christians. I think it served the unity of very flawed people within the church, I have to think, rooted somehow in kingdom calculus. And look, I don't think that the Bible teaches that universally in all situations, if you run away as a slave, you better go back and be like Onesimus. But in this very weird circumstance, with this very ambiguous relationship that seems to have existed between the beloved Onesimus and his master, but also maybe dear friend or father figure, Philemon, all surrounding this fledgling church and Paul's very well-known situation in Rome, like all the hopes of Christians are writing on Paul's appeal, maybe going well before Nero. That's how they would have thought of it, with so much writing on this. For someone so low on the social totem pole to have so much responsibility and so much weight behind this decision that would affect him so greatly. I mean, that's that's a tough deal. But after having gamed out all the other ways Paul and Onesimus could have played this, in the end, it seems like it was of the most benefit to Philemon. Obviously, he gets his household back intact. Paul and the church clearly benefit from the course of action Paul chose. It seems to me that Onesimus benefited the most from this course of action. Yeah, ideally, the Roman economy would have leapt forward 2,000 years. There could have been a disambiguation between what is slavery and what is a job, and there could have been rules to protect workers, and the whole thing could have just been abolished, and everybody could have lived in the utopia we live in now, where there's no tension between classes whatsoever. Obviously, that would be ideal. But considering what the time was and what we were dealing with and what this particular situation was, having considered it from the perspective of Philemon, from Paul, from Onesimus, from the church, in light of all of that, I think we need to bump up how we think of Onesimus. I think we need to hold him in much higher regard. No longer as a name that maybe one in 20 people who've read the Bible even remember, but as a very important figure in the early church because this was a time bomb. It wasn't really Paul who did the solving here. Because Paul can say, go back all you want, but there's a long journey between Rome and Colossae. It was up to Onesimus. So much of the health and the well-being and the fate of the early church was in this runaway slave's hands. What a fragile thing, what a strange thing. And he came through in a self-sacrificial way. Wow. Yeah, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.