Philemon

Philemon is twenty-five verses long, a single chapter, and it is the most personal thing Paul left behind. It is not a treatise. It is a letter about one man, asking one favor, and the whole weight of it sits in how carefully it is worded.

Onesimus was a slave belonging to Philemon, a Christian in whose house a church met. Something happened, and Onesimus left. Paul does not spell out what, though he offers to cover any debt, which suggests money was involved. However it came about, Onesimus ended up with Paul in prison, became a Christian there, and made himself useful. Paul is now sending him back, carrying this letter, to a man who under Roman law could have had him branded, flogged or killed.

What Paul does with that situation is the point. He begins by saying he has every right to order Philemon to do what is proper and that he is not going to. He appeals instead, on the basis of love. He calls Onesimus his own child and his own heart. He asks Philemon to take him back not as a slave but as a brother. And then he says he is confident Philemon will do even more than he is asking, without ever specifying what more would be, which is either the gentlest pressure in the New Testament or the most effective.

The letter never denounces slavery outright. Modern readers notice that immediately, and they are right to. What it does instead is put a slave and his owner in the same family, at the same table, answerable to the same Lord, and leave them there. It took the church far too long to finish the sentence Paul started.

For a family this is a single evening's read, and it raises real questions rather than tidy ones. Forgiveness costs the person doing it something. Philemon is asked to pay, in public, in front of a church meeting in his own front room.