A Letter from Prison

From Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother, to Philemon, our dear friend and colaborer, to Apphia our sister, to Archippus our fellow soldier, and to the church that meets in your house. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!

Philemon 1–3 (NET)

Read Philemon 1–3 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Paul, a Prisoner

Every letter Paul wrote begins with his name. That is the convention of the ancient world: the sender names himself first, before the recipient, before the body, before the greeting. Paul follows the convention without deviation. What he varies, from letter to letter, is what he chooses to put beside his name.

In Romans, he is a slave of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God. In First Corinthians, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus. In Galatians, an apostle (not from men, nor by human agency, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father). In Ephesians and Colossians, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God. The pattern is steady. Paul names himself an apostle.

He does not, in Philemon, name himself an apostle. He names himself a prisoner of Christ Jesus. The Greek is δέσμιος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ, literally, a bound one, a man in chains, belonging to Christ Jesus. Δέσμιος is the noun that names what Paul is at the moment he writes. He is in custody. We follow the traditional and most likely view that he writes from Rome, under the guard Acts 28 describes, awaiting the disposition of his appeal to Caesar, though some interpreters place the letter during an imprisonment at Ephesus. He is also, in another sense the noun will not let go of, owned. Christ has made him His prisoner. The chains the Romans have put on him are not the only chains he wears.

The choice of self-designation is the rhetorical heart of the letter. Paul is about to ask Philemon for something. He could ask as an apostle, with all the weight of apostolic office behind the asking. He chooses not to. He asks as a prisoner. He sets aside the lever he could have pulled and reaches for a different one. The letter that follows will turn on this opening word: on the willing renunciation of command. Paul will tell Philemon, a few lines later, although I have quite a lot of confidence in Christ and could command you to do what is proper, I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love. The opening word has already prepared the ground. A prisoner appeals. He does not order.

Confessional Lutherans will hear in this opening an echo of Luther’s understanding of Christian liberty. The Christian, Luther wrote in 1520, is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none, and at the same time a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. The freedom of the inner man and the servanthood of the outer man stand together without contradiction. Paul, who could command, chooses instead to ask. The freedom of his apostolic office expresses itself in the voluntary laying-aside of that office’s prerogative. We will see the same logic at work, on a smaller scale and in a different key, when Paul asks Philemon to receive Onesimus voluntarily and not by compulsion. Christian liberty is not the absence of constraint. It is the freedom that chooses, in love, what coercion could have demanded.

Timothy Our Brother

Paul does not write alone. Timothy our brother stands beside his name in the salutation, as Timothy stood beside his name in five other letters: Second Corinthians, Philippians, Colossians, First Thessalonians, Second Thessalonians. The pairing of Paul and Timothy is a fixture of the early apostolic mission. Timothy was Paul’s protégé, his fellow worker, his trusted emissary, eventually the recipient of two letters in his own name. Here, in Philemon’s greeting, Timothy is named as a brother, ἀδελφός, the kinship word the gospel takes up and refashions.

The naming is not incidental. Timothy is named here because the situation Paul is about to address is not a private quarrel between two men. It is an apostolic matter, conducted under the witness of the church. By placing Timothy’s name alongside his own, Paul signals that what he writes is not merely the personal opinion of one Christian to another. How much Timothy contributed to the letter itself we cannot say; the name alone does not tell us that the two men deliberated over it together. But Timothy stands beside Paul as co-witness to the appeal.

Timothy’s name does not return in the letter, though the closing greetings in Session 6 will show us the wider circle of Paul’s companions. For now, his presence in the salutation is enough. The letter has more than one author behind it, even if Paul holds the pen.

There is also a quieter point here for those with ears for it. Timothy our brother, says Paul, naming Timothy with the word that will do the heaviest lifting in this letter. The word brother (ἀδελφός) appears four times in the letter, in verses 1, 7, 16, and 20, and sister (ἀδελφή) once, in verse 2. The kinship language frames the entire appeal. Paul opens with it. Timothy is brother; Apphia is sister; Philemon will be addressed as brother in verse seven and again in verse twenty; Onesimus will be named beloved brother in verse sixteen. The word does not appear by accident. Paul is laying down the keyword on which the whole letter will turn before he has crossed the second line.

To Philemon, Beloved Fellow Worker

The letter is addressed to Philemon, our dear friend and colaborer, as the NET renders it; more literally, our beloved fellow worker. Two words modify the name. He is beloved, ἀγαπητός, the word the Father speaks over the Son at the baptism and the transfiguration, the word the New Testament reaches for when it wants to name a relation that goes beyond duty into affection. And he is fellow worker, συνεργός, a partner in the work of the gospel.

We know almost nothing about Philemon beyond what these twenty-five verses tell us. He lived, in all likelihood, in Colossae or in its near vicinity, since Onesimus is identified in Colossians as a man of that city. He was wealthy enough to own at least one slave and to host a congregation in his house. He had come to faith through Paul’s ministry, as verse nineteen will hint when Paul tells him you owe me your very self. He was, by Paul’s own account, a man who had refreshed the hearts of the saints. That is the sketch. The rest is silence.

But silence is not nothing. Philemon stands in the New Testament as the kind of Christian most early believers actually were: not an apostle, not a prophet, not a name that recurs in the book of Acts, but a householder who opened his home to the church and worked for the gospel within his station. He is the kind of Christian most readers of this study are. We are, most of us, not Pauls. We are Philemons.

The word fellow worker is worth lingering on. Συνεργός means one who labors together with another in a common task. Paul uses the term sparingly and with care. It is not a courtesy title. It names a real relation. Philemon is, in Paul’s reckoning, a partner in the gospel work. Whatever ministry Philemon exercises (opening his home, sustaining the congregation, providing for traveling apostles, caring for the saints), Paul counts it as labor in the same field as his own apostolic labor.

The Lutheran tradition has a name for the place where Philemon labors. It is the place we call vocation. Every Christian, Luther taught, has a calling in this world: not only the priest at the altar but the householder at his table, the master in his household, the servant at her work, the wife with her children. Each calling is a mask behind which God serves the neighbor through His people, and God’s justifying love in Christ, received by faith, bears fruit in love that serves the neighbor. Philemon’s vocation is the householder’s vocation: to receive guests, to host the church, to manage his household in the fear of the Lord, to deal justly and lovingly with everyone under his roof. Paul honors that vocation when he names Philemon fellow worker. The gospel-work that Paul does on the road and Philemon does at home is, in Paul’s reckoning, the same work.

This matters for what is coming. When Paul asks Philemon to receive Onesimus no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, as a dear brother, he is not asking Philemon to step outside his vocation. He is asking Philemon to fulfill it. The Christian master, in his calling, must receive the Christian slave as a brother. Vocation is not the opposite of brotherhood. Brotherhood is what vocation looks like when the gospel has done its work in it.

One caution belongs here. Vocation does not sanctify every feature of a fallen social order. Philemon’s place within the Roman household structure gives him concrete duties of love and justice toward Onesimus, but those duties neither baptize the institution of slavery nor forbid him from pursuing Onesimus’s freedom where he can. God calls the householder; He does not thereby bless every arrangement the householder has inherited.

Apphia Our Sister

The second recipient is Apphia our sister. The conventional reading, and it is almost certainly the right one, is that Apphia was Philemon’s wife. The juxtaposition of names suggests it. The reach of the letter into the domestic life of the household makes most sense if Apphia is the woman of the house. And the address our sister, ἀδελφή, places her, like Philemon, within the family of believers that the letter addresses.

That she is named at all is significant. Paul did not have to name her. He could have addressed the letter to Philemon alone, in the manner of much ancient correspondence between men. He could have addressed it to Philemon and his household without singling out any of the household members. He chose instead to name Apphia by name and to name her as a sister in Christ. The fugitive slave question that the letter will take up is not, in Paul’s reckoning, a question Philemon will decide alone. Apphia has a stake in it. The household’s response to Onesimus will be the household’s response, and the woman of the house is named in the address because her voice is in the matter.

It is worth pausing here for a brief word about women in the New Testament house churches, since this is the kind of detail that contemporary readers can miss. The early Christian congregations met, almost universally, in private homes. The hostess of the home was the hostess of the church. Lydia in Philippi, Nympha in Laodicea, Prisca alongside her husband Aquila in Rome and elsewhere, Phoebe in Cenchreae as a διάκονος of the church there; women appear in the apostolic record as householders, hosts, and patrons of the early Christian congregations with striking regularity. Apphia stands in that line. To address Apphia by name in this letter is to acknowledge her role in the church that meets in their house.

A Lutheran reader will want to add something here that the Reformation recovered and that subsequent centuries have not always remembered. The priesthood of all believers, taught in 1 Peter 2:9 and argued by Luther in works such as his Address to the Christian Nobility, names a reality that the New Testament already presupposes. The Confessions reflect it in the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, which applies the royal priesthood of 1 Peter 2 to the true church and grounds in it the church’s right to call ministers (Tr 67–69). Every baptized Christian (man, woman, slave, free, Jew, Greek) stands before God as a priest. The vocations differ. The standing does not. At the same time, the Augsburg Confession preserves the public office: no one should publicly teach or preach or administer the sacraments in the church without a regular call (AC XIV), for the ministry of Word and Sacrament is Christ’s own gift to His church (AC V). All the baptized stand equally before God as priests; public preaching and sacramental administration belong to those rightly called. Apphia, addressed in this letter as a sister in Christ on the same footing as her husband, lives the reality that the Reformation would later have to recover against the medieval church’s narrowing of the priesthood to the clergy alone.

Archippus Our Fellow Soldier

The third named recipient is Archippus our fellow soldier. The phrase συστρατιώτης ἡμῶν, fellow soldier, is a martial metaphor Paul uses sparingly. Epaphroditus is called a fellow soldier in Philippians 2:25. Archippus is called one here. The word names a comrade in arms, a man on the line beside Paul in the gospel’s contested fields.

Who Archippus was is a question on which we have one slender piece of further evidence. In Colossians 4:17, the apostle issues a charge by name: And tell Archippus, “See to it that you complete the ministry you received in the Lord.” The ministry, διακονία, is unspecified. It is enough that Paul names it, charges Archippus to fulfill it, and asks the Colossian congregation to deliver the charge. Archippus, in other words, had received some ministry or task in the Lord; the word can mean ministry, service, or simply task. Many readers have taken it to be a pastoral office, perhaps in the congregation at Colossae or at nearby Laodicea. That is possible, but the text does not establish it.

Many interpreters have placed Archippus in Philemon’s household, perhaps as a son or another relative. The address sequence of the letter (Philemon, Apphia, Archippus, the church in your house) can be read as the address sequence of a household: the master, the mistress, a younger member of the family, the assembled congregation. But this too is inference. Whether Archippus was related to Philemon, or lived under his roof, cannot be established from the text. What is clear is that the church met in the house of the one addressed as your (singular), most naturally Philemon.

What this means for our purposes is that the letter is addressed to a man with a recognized ministry in the Lord as well as to a householder. Archippus is a recipient. Whatever his task, he receives the letter alongside the master and the mistress of the household. He is bound by what it asks. The handling of Onesimus is not a matter Philemon can decide in private and have the church’s servants bless after the fact. Archippus is in the room when the letter is read aloud. He has a stake in the response.

This is one of the small details that confessional Lutherans, attentive to the proper distinction of offices, will appreciate. Philemon’s vocation is the householder’s. Archippus has his own ministry in the Lord, whatever its exact shape. They are distinct callings, exercised under one roof, both addressed by one apostolic letter. Paul does not collapse the two into each other. He honors them both by addressing them both.

The Church in Your House

The fourth address, and to the church that meets in your house, completes the salutation. The Greek is τῇ κατ’ οἶκόν σου ἐκκλησίᾳ, “the church according to your house,” meaning the congregation that gathers in Philemon’s home. The pronoun your is singular. It is Philemon’s house. But the church that meets there is not Philemon’s church. It is the Church (ἐκκλησία, the assembly called out by the gospel) meeting under Philemon’s roof by his hospitality.

In the apostolic age, this is what congregations looked like. They ordinarily met in homes; adapted or dedicated church buildings became increasingly common only later. A congregation was, more or less, the people who fit into someone’s home. The hospitality of the householder was a structural requirement of the church’s life. Without believers who opened their homes, the church had nowhere to gather.

This is the setting in which the letter to Philemon will be read aloud. We sometimes imagine ancient correspondence as private: read silently by the recipient in his study, considered over a day or two, answered at leisure. Philemon will not be read that way. The letter is addressed to the church in Philemon’s house as well as to Philemon. It will be read aloud, in the assembly, with Philemon present and Apphia present and Archippus present and the rest of the congregation listening. Whatever Philemon decides about Onesimus, he will decide in the hearing of his fellow believers.

This is not a small detail. It changes what kind of letter Philemon is. Paul is not writing a private appeal he hopes Philemon will quietly consider. He is writing an apostolic letter to a congregation that addresses a particular household head within it on a particular matter. The pressure of the church’s listening is part of the letter’s design. Philemon will respond not only to Paul but in the presence of the church that knows what Paul has asked.

There is something deeply Lutheran about this arrangement, though we have to look at it carefully to see what is and is not Lutheran about it. The confessional Lutheran tradition does not endorse a free-for-all in which the congregation collectively decides every matter; it preserves the proper office of the ministry, and it locates authority in the called and ordained servants of the Word as the Augsburg Confession affirms. But the Lutheran tradition does honor the assembly of believers as the place where the Word is heard and the response of faith is made in common. The church is the communio sanctorum, the communion of saints, gathered around Word and Sacrament. Decisions about how the body of Christ lives together are not made over the heads of the saints. They are made within their hearing.

Philemon, then, is a letter for hearers: for a congregation gathered in a living room in Colossae, listening as someone reads aloud what the apostle in Rome has written. We will do well, as we read it ourselves, to imagine the hearing.

Grace to You and Peace

The greeting closes with the formula Paul uses in every letter he writes: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. The pairing is so familiar that the modern reader can pass over it without noticing what is being said. Paul is not making conversation. He is preaching the gospel in two words.

Grace, χάρις, is the Greek greeting reworked. The ordinary Hellenistic greeting was χαίρειν, “greetings.” Paul takes the verb and bends it toward the noun χάρις, the noun that names the unmerited favor of God toward sinners in Christ. Peace, εἰρήνη, is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew shalom, the wholeness and well-being that the Old Testament names as the gift of God to His covenant people. Paul, the Jew writing in Greek to congregations of Jews and Gentiles, has woven the Greek and the Hebrew greetings together. Grace and peace is a confession before it is a salutation.

The order matters. Grace comes first. Peace follows. The peace that the gospel gives is the peace that follows from grace: not the absence of conflict, not the cessation of difficulty, but the wholeness that is given to sinners when God justifies the ungodly. Without grace, no peace. Without the unmerited favor of God in Christ, no settled well-being. The order of the words mirrors the order of the gospel: God gives first, and what He gives reorders everything else.

And the source matters. Grace and peace come from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Two persons of the Holy Trinity are named together, given together, in one breath as the single source of one gift. The Father is named the Father. Jesus is named the Lord and Christ, Kyrios, the word by which the Septuagint rendered the holy name of God; Christos, the Greek for the anointed One. Paul has set, in his casual greeting, two distinct persons in such close conjunction that no reader can miss the implication. The Lord Jesus Christ stands beside the Father as the source of divine gift. Paul never sets out the doctrine of the Trinity in the technical vocabulary the church would later use at Nicaea. But it is a reality his greetings already presuppose.

Confessional Lutherans recite the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed as the church’s response to greetings like this. The doctrine is the unfolding of what Paul says in passing. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: the Father and the Son, named together as one source of one grace. The Spirit will come in by name in other Pauline greetings, but the substance is already here. Where the gospel goes, the Trinity is.

The greeting is also the gospel’s opening word in this letter. The whole appeal that follows (for Onesimus, for his reception, for his welcome as a brother) rests on the grace and peace named in verse three. Apart from the grace of God toward sinners in Christ, the appeal is sentimental. With it, the appeal is the only thing that makes sense. Philemon, who has received grace from God for his own sins, is being asked to receive Onesimus on the basis of the same grace. The grace that justifies the master is the grace that justifies the slave. There is no other foundation on which the letter could rest.

Gathering the Threads

Three verses. We have spent a chapter on three verses, and we will need to do something like this again before the letter is through. Philemon will not yield its riches to a hurried reader. The opening greeting alone has given us six things worth carrying forward.

First, Paul names himself a prisoner before he names himself an apostle. The chains are the rhetorical lever of the whole letter. Paul will ask, not command. He will appeal, not order. The opening word has already prepared the ground.

Second, Timothy stands beside Paul as co-sender. The matter Paul takes up is not a private quarrel but an apostolic matter under the witness of the church.

Third, Philemon is named beloved fellow worker. He is honored in his vocation as a householder who hosts the church and labors for the gospel within his station. The Lutheran doctrine of vocation finds in Philemon a New Testament expression: the gospel-work of the apostle on the road and the gospel-work of the householder at home are the same work.

Fourth, Apphia is named our sister. Her standing in the household and in the church is recognized in the salutation. The priesthood of all believers (the reality the Reformation would later have to recover) already lives in the apostolic address.

Fifth, Archippus is named fellow soldier. A man with a recognized ministry in the Lord is in the room when the letter is read. Callings are properly distinguished, the householder’s is not Archippus’s, but both are addressed by the same apostolic word.

Sixth, the church in Philemon’s house is addressed alongside the household. The letter is for a hearing congregation, not a private reader. Philemon will respond in the presence of the saints among whom he lives.

And the greeting, grace and peace to you, sets the gospel down as the foundation of everything that follows. The Father and the Son are named as the single source of the gift. The Trinity is the unfolding of what Paul has said in passing. The whole appeal of the letter rests on the grace named in verse three.

We have not yet read about Onesimus. We have not yet been told there is a problem to solve. Paul has only addressed the letter. But the address has done a great deal of work. We know who is in the room. We know on what footing the letter will speak. We know that the apostle has set aside his command and chosen to appeal. We are ready to hear what the appeal is.

For Discussion

Six questions for individual reflection or for use in a group study. Take your time. The questions are not pretexts for an answer the author has in mind; they are doors into the text.

1. Paul names himself a prisoner of Christ Jesus in verse one, before naming himself anything else. Why does he set aside the title of apostle? What does the choice signal about the letter that will follow?

2. The word brother appears in the first three verses (Timothy our brother) and will appear again throughout the letter. What does it mean for Paul to use kinship language for Christians who are not biologically related? Where does the New Testament locate the basis of this kinship?

3. Philemon is named our dear friend and colaborer (literally, our beloved fellow worker). How would you describe the vocation of a Christian householder who hosts a church in his home? In what sense is that calling a form of labor for the gospel? How does it relate to other vocations within the church?

4. Apphia is addressed by name as our sister. Why does her inclusion in the salutation matter for how the rest of the letter will be heard? What does it tell us about the role of women in the early house churches?

5. The church meets in Philemon’s house, and the letter is addressed to the church as well as to Philemon. How does it change the character of the letter to know it will be read aloud in the hearing of the congregation? What pressure does that hearing place on Philemon’s response?

6. The greeting closes with grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. What is the relation between grace and peace? Why does Paul name them in that order? On what does the rest of the letter rest if not on these two gifts?

Looking Ahead

In the next session we will turn to verses four through seven, in which Paul offers thanksgiving for Philemon’s faith and love. The thanksgiving sections of Paul’s letters are never empty courtesy. They name the gospel-fruit Paul has heard about and shape the appeal that follows. In Philemon’s case, the thanksgiving will reveal a man whose generosity has refreshed the hearts of the saints: a man whose Christian character is the basis on which Paul will dare to ask what he is about to ask.

Read Philemon 4–7 before our next session. Notice what Paul gives thanks for, what he prays for, and what he has heard about Philemon. The thanksgiving is short. Let it sit with you.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, who for our sake were bound and bore the whole cost of our redemption: teach us to read this small letter with the patience it deserves. Set before us the example of Paul, who set aside his rights to ask instead of command. Set before us the household of Philemon, in which the gospel found its home. Make us beloved fellow workers in the labor of the gospel, sisters and brothers in the family of the saints, hearers of Your Word in the assembly of Your people. Pour out upon us the grace and peace that come from the Father and from You, that we, having been so freely given, may give what we have been given. Amen.