Philemon Philemon. Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. We're working on the book of Philemon, and I found something really cool that I'm super excited to share with you and unpack today about Philemon that we've been working on around here. I found a set of homilies on Philemon by John Chrysostom, one of the great church fathers of the Eastern Church. He's a fourth century guy. He played a big role in a whole lot of important things in the history of Christianity, right? It's a very big name. It's okay if you haven't heard of him before. Again, his name is John Chrysostom. C-H-R-Y-S-O-S-T-O-M. Orthodox people really, really like him. Now I didn't learn about him at all in church. I heard about him for the first time in seminary and church history stuff. So again, if you don't know the name, don't feel bad. But he's a big deal. He's important. And he wrote stuff about Philemon. Well, it makes sense that he would write stuff about Philemon for a couple of reasons. One, because the question of slavery and what to do with Christian households and things like that was still a very poignant, important question a few hundred years after the time that Philemon was written, when Chrysostom was written. Also, it would make sense that Chrysostom would write about Philemon because it's right in his neck of the woods. He's from that part of the world. A lot of the same six or seven or ten flags that flew over Colossae flew over Chrysostom's home as well. And as I was reading through this business, it struck me that it's really quite simple. For somebody so brilliant who gets quoted to, you know, win fights on the internet about religious things. He really had a talent for writing stuff in a way that normal people would get to make sense of the text. I like that. I respect that. I aspire to that. I was particularly appreciative of this little bit right here. And I thought Chrysostom's skill for making the complex simple was really on display here when he's talking about verses eight and nine and Paul's appeal to Philemon, because Chrysostom breaks it down into the components of the appeal. I think this is great. Let me read it to you. Paul appeals to Philemon on a number of grounds. The quality of his person, his age, and because he was also a quote prisoner of Jesus Christ. So I sat and thought about that for a little bit. And you know, quick disclaimer, real quick, by the way. The last thing that I want to do around here is give you the impression that you've got to go get three or four degrees in church history and ancient forgotten languages and New Testament in order to do this stuff. You do not. A huge point of this whole thing that we do together is to remind you: you're smart, you're competent, you're already really good at interpreting things, and you can study the Bible and read it and understand it very, very well. This book wants to be understood. Christianity is an incarnational faith put forward by an incarnational God who took on flesh to be here. He wants to be known, is the point. So sometimes I know I feel when people start dropping names I haven't heard and they're referencing things in languages I can't read. And it seems like they know all this stuff and they're neck deep in it. And I feel like kind of the outsider who doesn't know all these references, it can make me feel like this is it's just not for me. I never want to do that to you. This is for you. It takes you what one minute if you didn't know who John Chrysostom is to know who he is. And you totally understood what I just read to you from him. You don't have to be some kind of scholar to be good at this. At any rate, Chrysostom nails this because what he's really doing here is he's just saying, okay, well, let's break down the appeal here into its component parts. And he's got four. And I think I would like to add three more points of appeal here that Paul is using that are maybe not as overt, a little more abstract. So here we go. Appeal number one, the quality of his person. Now I'm counting this one as two, and I don't know if Chrysostom was counting it as two, but I am, because this could be read two ways. The quality of Paul's person, that is his standing, his position, all the things that add up to his credibility. You know, just picture the stuff we talked about over the last few days. That all the things that add up to his apostolic authority and credibility as a person of integrity. But I think probably what Chrysostom meant when he wrote this is the quality of Philemon's character is the first aspect of the appeal. So I'm counting the quality of Paul as a person and the quality of Philemon as a person as the double appeal here. And of course, the stuff that we talked about, whatever, a week ago, verses four through seven, I always think my God, as I remember you in my prayers, because I hear about your faith and the Lord Jesus and your love for the saints and all of that business. I think that's the stuff where he's appealing to Philemon's good character, the quality of his person. Okay, so I'm counting that one as two. Okay, next up, Chris System writes Paul appeals to Philemon on a number of grounds. The quality of his person, next, his age, because he was old. Now maybe in the last 50 years or so, age has become a little bit less respected, but I think that's coming back around too. I think people are starting to figure out that having been alive for a while is worth something. And I think with the race to the bottom in terms of making all advertising and all messaging target the extremely, extremely young, I just think the scales are falling off of the eyes of society, and people are realizing that no, there's something to respect and dignity that is afforded people with age and to a hearing of their wisdom. Society often lacks for wisdom that is readily available amongst our aged and our more experienced. But Paul just he straight up calls himself an old man, and it's an interesting little move. He does it here in what is that, verse nine. Yet I appeal to you on the basis of love. I then, as Paul, an old man, and now also a prisoner of Jesus. I appeal to you for my son Onesimus. That old man routine. My dad does that. He started doing it after he retired a few years ago. And I find it endearing because you know every now and then dad'll just drop some kind of well, you know, I'm just an old man, but you know, what if we, or uh, the old man would like, and my dad is whip smart. He's brilliant. There's no slippage at all. He's written five, six books now since he retired just a few years ago. You should probably buy all of those, but by the way, I'll try to remember to have Jeff link those down below. He's written a whole bunch of really good poetry books, like old school good poetry, including one about the loss of my brother, which is crippling for me to read. They're good. You might like them. You go check them out. You can shoot my dad an email if you read one of his books. He will write back. He will be happy to hear from you. At any rate, I know what dad is doing. He's not being like, well, I don't know anything anymore because I'm old. No, he's finding a way to just humbly acknowledge his station in life, but also, you know, kind of acknowledge that like there's something to be said for the fact that he is old. He will use it in, as he likes to call it, a self-defecating way, but really it's also a very humble reminder of, hey, you know, this is a dude who knows some stuff. I think dad wields this very, very well, despite how sloppily I might have tried to communicate how he employs this. Come on, you know people who employ that, and they do so very well socially and with humility as well. Clearly, that's what Paul's doing here. He's not the little kid anymore who got all worked up in a college sophomore fervor about having the right opinions, and I'm going to be the most right golden boy of my class of all the golden boys. If my competitors in my little class here of Christian persecution school will persecute 10 Christians, I'll persecute a hundred teacher. I persecuted a hundred. Am I the best student now? I'll go up to Damascus and I'll persecute them there too. Would I get extra credit if I did that? I mean, Paul was, by his own description, very zealous in these ways. But he was a kid and he thought he knew everything. And then he met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, and then he got struck blind, and the scales fell off of his eyes. And then he got hit by rocks a lot until people thought he was dead, and then he got put in jail, and he got flogged a whole bunch. People had riots because of him. Crazy stuff happened with Paul. He got arrested like 15 times, as we discussed, or however many times it was. This guy has had the rough edges kind of worn down a little bit. Life has beat some of the pomposity of youth out of him. And so precisely because of that, when he drops this little line about, I'm an old man, you know, there's a lot of layers of meaning to that. And I think it's a real gentle, nice touch here. Okay, Chrysostom, who is really good at making the Bible make sense, goes on. Paul appeals to Philemon on a number of grounds. One, the quality of his person. I think he means Philemon, but I'm also lumping in the quality of Paul's person. Two, or I guess we're calling it three, his age because he was old, and four, and from what was more just than all, because he was also a prisoner of Jesus Christ. And of course, as I've mentioned like 10 times over the course of this podcast, Paul mentions that he's a prisoner in one out of every five verses in this letter to Philemon. What a great breakdown from this ancient Christian on a text you and I have been staring at for a long time. He just gave us some categories to think about it here. These are the things that Paul is appealing to on the front end, the interpersonal stuff. But then as we get further into it, and Chrysostom expounds on this as well, the appeal moves into three new areas, which are it's good for the two of you. This is good for Onesimus, this is good for Philemon. Next, and this is very implicit, but I think it's there, it's good for the church. This is the right way to model Christian relationships in the household. And I think Paul would assume that Philemon, if he wanted more clarity on what Paul means by that, would just go and get the letter that came along with Philemon, that being the letter of Colossians, and be like, there, that is what Christian households look like. Emulate that, Philemon. And then the final appeal is just to Christ. This is for the advancement of the gospel. This is for the glory of Christ. Hey Philemon, I'm making sacrifices too. But we really sense that Paul is very delicately tiptoeing up here. And you know what? It might, it might have been Chrysus. No, I think it was Jerome who wrote in another thing I was reading about Philemon, the ancient church father and translator of the Bible, Jerome. I think he said at one point that Paul had to be delicate because in this time, to go and tell somebody like this is what you ought to do with your slave would be, and I know this isn't a direct analogy, there are moral problems here, but it would be like you or me today making endless commentary about how someone else ought to parent, or demanding that a friend open up their household finances to you so you could see what's going on with all of that. Obviously, that is dehumanizing. Obviously, we think about these things differently, and I might argue betterly at this point. But that was, I believe, Jerome's observation that Paul needed to appeal to a whole bunch of things because he really was transgressing a cultural social boundary here to interject himself in what society viewed, for better or worse, right or wrong, what society viewed as an internal affair of this household and therefore largely no one else's business. But in general, this would be like the kind of thing that would just happen behind closed doors, and Paul is interjecting himself into it. And because of that, Chrysostom's very astute, very ancient observation of this text is helpful. Paul is trying a bunch of different stuff in this appeal to attempt to ensure a good outcome here, appealing to things that are kind of self-effacing and that even humble Paul before Philemon, things that are in praise of Philemon, things that are just practical realities. And I think implicitly Paul's appealing to much bigger, loftier things than just interpersonal disputes or even well-earned flattery. Nice job, John Chrysostom. It's like you're really good at Christianity in the Bible. Thanks, buddy. Also, nice job, all of church history. It's almost as though there were a whole bunch of people who came before you and me who were smart and thought about this stuff too, and realized that it all applied to their actual lives, and that the best way to understand how it applied was to go and try to understand what was going on in the first place and then extrapolate it out from there. It's almost like there's a God who's superintended this entire process, all the way from the time of the stuff we're looking at in the Bible all the way up till right now. Who do? All right, Morphine Lehman appeal. Next time around, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.