Prepare a Guest Room

The close of the letter opens with a word that sits oddly against everything before it.

Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I ask.

Obedience. After telling Philemon he would rather appeal than command, after going to the trouble of leaving him a genuine no, Paul picks the weight back up. He is not taking the freedom away. He is telling Philemon, in a letter a church will hear, what he expects, which is a different kind of pressure and a real one.

Then: even more than I ask. He never says what the more would be. He never says what the more would be, so the sentence opens a door, leaves it open, and walks past without going through.

In the meantime, prepare a guest room for me, because I hope that through your prayers I will be restored to you.

One line about a guest room, and the temperature of everything before it changes. Paul asks for a guest room to be prepared, because he hopes to be restored to them through their prayers. Whatever Philemon decides about Onesimus, the man who did the asking hopes to arrive at that house. The request is affectionate. It is not only affectionate.

The greetings come next, from Epaphras, who is in prison alongside him, and then from Mark, Aristarchus, Demas and Luke. Those names sit at the end of a letter about one household and one man.

Then grace, and the letter stops. Twenty-five verses about one slave, one owner, and one apostle who would not give an order.

We do not know what Philemon did. The letter was kept and no answer survives. What survives is the ask in full, with the arguments, the signature, the guest room, and no surviving record of the decision it was asking for. The letter is addressed to a church as well as to Philemon, and then a man had to say something in front of his neighbors. We are not told what he said.