I Appeal to You
On this page
So, 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—I, Paul, an old man and even now a prisoner for the sake of Christ Jesus—I am appealing to you concerning my child, whose spiritual father I have become during my imprisonment, that is, Onesimus, who was formerly useless to you, but is now useful to you and me. I have sent him (who is my very heart) back to you. I wanted to keep him with me so that he could serve me in your place during my imprisonment for the sake of the gospel. However, without your consent I did not want to do anything, so that your good deed would not be out of compulsion, but from your own willingness.
Philemon 8–14 (NET)
Read Philemon 8–14 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
Bold Enough to Command
The seven verses of the appeal proper are the rhetorical heart of the letter. They are the verses in which Paul, having greeted Philemon and given thanks for him, now turns to what he has been writing to ask. The appeal will land in verse seventeen, when Paul finally names what he wants Philemon to do: accept him as you would me. But the way Paul reaches that landing is more careful than it looks. He spends seven verses preparing for one sentence. We will spend a session on the seven verses, and a session on what follows.
The first move is verse eight: So, although I have quite a lot of confidence in Christ and could command you to do what is proper. The opening word So (διό, “therefore,” “accordingly”) ties what follows to what has come before. The thanksgiving has done its work. The ground has been prepared. Now, accordingly, Paul turns to the appeal.
What he says next is striking. He could command. He has the boldness (παρρησία, the apostolic frankness that speaks without fear) to command Philemon to do what the situation requires. In classical Greek παρρησία named the right of a free citizen to speak openly in the assembly; in the New Testament it becomes the privilege of the Christian, given by the gospel, to come before God and before fellow believers with directness and without shame. Paul has it. He is an apostle of Christ, called by God, set over the church as a minister of the gospel. He is in a position to require.
And he names this position before he sets it aside. This is essential to the rhetoric. If Paul had simply asked, we might have imagined that he was asking because he could do nothing else, because, in chains, he had no authority left. He does not let us imagine this. He says, plainly, that the authority is real. He could command. He has, as he says, quite a lot of confidence in Christ. The right is his. The voluntary laying-aside of the right is what comes next.
Confessional Lutherans will recognize in this a pattern that runs through Paul’s letters: authority exercised not for the minister’s own sake but for the sake of the church. We must be careful here, though. Paul’s apostolic authority is foundational and unrepeatable. He was called immediately by the risen Christ, and his word is the apostolic word on which the church is built. Contemporary pastors do not possess apostolic authority in that sense. They exercise the ministerial authority belonging to Christ’s office of preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments, an authority that belongs to the office and its divine commission, not to the personal dignity of the man who holds it. The Lutheran Confessions are careful on this point, in Article XXVIII of the Augsburg Confession and in the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope: the power of the keys is the command to preach the gospel, to forgive and retain sins, and to administer the sacraments, and it is exercised by the Word, not by force (AC XXVIII.5–21). Paul, as an apostle, has authority in the fullest sense. He is free to command.
But he will not. Not here. Not in this letter. Not for this matter. Although I have quite a lot of confidence in Christ and could command you. The sentence pivots on the word although. The authority is real, and yet Paul will not use it. The reason is coming in the next phrase.
For Love’s Sake I Prefer to Appeal
The reason is given in a short phrase: on the basis of love. Διὰ τὴν ἀγάπην, on account of the love. The Greek says it more abstractly than English can: on account of the love, with the definite article, the love that is the love of the gospel and the love of the saints and the love that has come to be the climate of the Christian life. Paul will not command here, because what he wants from Philemon is something only love can give.
This is one of the small places in the New Testament where the gospel’s logic shows through most clearly. Paul chooses appeal rather than apostolic command in this particular case so that Philemon’s response may be a free fruit of faith rather than mere external compliance. This does not mean that the New Testament abolishes command. Christ and His apostles continue to teach, admonish, and command, and Paul himself will soon use an imperative (Refresh my heart in Christ, verse 20) and speak of Philemon’s obedience (verse 21). The Formula of Concord is plain that the law remains for the regenerate as well as the unregenerate, because the old Adam clings to us until death (FC SD VI). The gospel does not justify by command; rather, having justified freely in Christ, the gospel creates the willing obedience that the law describes and the Holy Spirit works. The Spirit writes God’s will upon hearts of flesh (Jeremiah 31:33; 2 Corinthians 3:3), producing the love that the law describes but cannot itself create. Paul, ministering under the new covenant, would rather appeal (μᾶλλον παρακαλῶ), asking the saints to do, in love, what the law could only have required.
Luther saw this with great clarity. The Christian in the inner man, justified by faith and indwelt by the Holy Spirit, does not need the lash of the law to drive him to good works. He does the works freely, because faith has produced love, and love does what it does without compulsion. The law remains useful (it is needed as a curb on the flesh and as a mirror that shows us our sin and as a guide for sanctified life), but the law is not the engine of Christian love. The engine of Christian love is the love of Christ poured out into the heart by the Holy Spirit. Paul, who knows this as well as anyone in the New Testament, does not lead with the law’s demand in this letter. He appeals. He sets love before Philemon and trusts the Spirit to do His work.
And Paul, the apostle, here names himself in a way that further softens his approach. I, Paul, an old man and even now a prisoner for the sake of Christ Jesus. The Greek word translated old man is πρεσβύτης. Many careful interpreters have argued that the word should instead be read as ambassador, a closely related form, πρεσβευτής, that Paul uses in Ephesians 6:20 when he calls himself an ambassador in chains; the two spellings were sometimes interchanged. The manuscripts read πρεσβύτης, and interpreters remain divided. The two readings are theologically compatible. We will follow the NET and take it as old man. Paul, perhaps in his sixties when he writes (old by the reckoning of the ancient world, where life expectancy was short), names his age as part of his appeal. He is not bringing the weight of apostolic command. He is bringing the weight of long service and present suffering.
And even now a prisoner for the sake of Christ Jesus. The chains are named again. Paul mentioned them in verse one when he introduced himself; he mentions them again in verse nine when he characterizes his appeal. The chains are not a circumstance Paul wants Philemon to forget. They are part of what Paul brings to the conversation. The man who appeals is old; he is in chains; he asks not from a position of strength but from a position of weakness, voluntarily chosen, for love’s sake. Philemon is not being commanded by an apostle in full force. He is being asked by an aging prisoner who has set aside his right to require.
There is, of course, a sense in which this is itself a rhetorical strategy of great power. Paul knows that an appeal made on these terms is harder to refuse than a command would have been. A command might have been resisted; an appeal from a beloved father in the faith, an old man in chains, is not easily refused. But the strategy is real because the love is real. Paul is not pretending to be old or pretending to be in chains. He is genuinely old. He is genuinely in chains. The rhetoric works because the situation it describes is true.
My Child, Onesimus
Verse ten contains the moment the whole letter has been moving toward. I am appealing to you concerning my child, whose spiritual father I have become during my imprisonment, that is, Onesimus. Paul names the man for the first time.
Notice how he names him. The order of the words in the verse is rhetorically careful. Paul says I am appealing to you concerning my child (περὶ τοῦ ἐμοῦ τέκνου) before he says the name. My child. He has established the relation before he has identified the person. Whoever this person is, Philemon now knows that Paul claims him as his own.
Then the name: Onesimus. The name lands after the relation has been established. We can almost feel the rhetorical sequence in the Greek word order: I appeal to you concerning my child, whom I begot in my chains, Onesimus. The name comes at the end of the verse, after the affectionate frame. Philemon, hearing the letter read aloud in the church gathered in his house, has been waiting for this name. He may have been waiting for it with apprehension, perhaps with anger. When it comes, it comes inside a frame that calls Onesimus Paul’s child.
The phrase whose spiritual father I have become during my imprisonment (ὃν ἐγέννησα ἐν τοῖς δεσμοῖς) is theologically dense. The verb ἐγέννησα means “I begot” or “I fathered.” Paul has used it elsewhere to describe his role in the conversion of others. In First Corinthians 4:15 he tells the Corinthians, For though you may have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, because I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. The same metaphor. The same verb. To preach the gospel to someone, and to have that preaching produce faith, is to become that person’s spiritual father.
Onesimus, the slave from Colossae, has somehow found his way to Paul in his custody and heard the gospel from Paul’s lips. We do not know how the meeting happened. The traditional reading, which this study follows, is that Onesimus had run away. Some interpreters suggest instead that, after a falling-out with his master, he deliberately sought Paul out as a friend of the household who could plead his case, a kind of appeal Roman custom allowed. We do not know what was said between them. We know only the outcome: Onesimus is now a Christian. The gospel has reached the place no one expected it to reach, the heart of a man who had left his master, perhaps having wronged him, and ended up in the company of an aging apostle in chains. The Christ who saves the chief of sinners has saved this one too. Paul, by the preaching of the gospel, has become Onesimus’s father.
The phrase in my imprisonment (ἐν τοῖς δεσμοῖς) locates the conversion in time and circumstance. Paul did not father Onesimus in the great days of his missionary travels. He fathered him in chains. The gospel went out into the world from a prisoner’s quarters under Roman guard. A man’s life was transformed in a place where, by all visible measure, the apostle was powerless. The theology of the cross, the doctrine that God works His greatest works through what looks like weakness and failure to the world, has rarely had a clearer illustration. The gospel preached by a prisoner converted a runaway slave. Out of two captivities, God made one freedom.
There is a Lutheran tenderness toward this image. The minister of the gospel is, in his vocation, a midwife of new birth. He does not produce the birth himself; the Holy Spirit produces it through Word and Sacrament. But he is the instrument by which God works. Paul, in his chains, was the instrument by which God brought Onesimus into the kingdom. Pastors and Christian teachers in every generation since have been instruments of the same work in their own places. The chain of spiritual paternity stretches from Paul to Onesimus and from every preacher of the gospel to every soul brought to faith through his words. The means are humble. The work is God’s.
Useless, Now Useful
Verse eleven contains the only joke in the letter. Onesimus, Paul says, was formerly useless to you, but is now useful to you and me. The joke is a pun on the name Onesimus.
The Greek name Ὀνήσιμος means useful or profitable. It was a common name for slaves in the ancient world, given precisely because masters wanted to name their slaves with words that described what slaves were supposed to be. A slave named Useful was a slave who, in his very name, carried the expectation of his vocation. Onesimus had not lived up to his name. He had run away. He may have stolen from his master before he ran. He had been, by his actions, the opposite of useful. He had been ἄχρηστος: useless.
Paul plays the pun openly. Formerly useless: ἄχρηστος. Now useful: εὔχρηστος. The two adjectives sit beside each other in the Greek as deliberate opposites. Achrēstos, useless. Euchrēstos, well-used, properly useful. The man whose name meant useful has, by his conversion, become what his name has always said he should be.
There is a deeper resonance in this pun that the church has long noticed. The Greek adjective χρηστός, meaning useful or good or kind, sounds very nearly identical to Χριστός, meaning Anointed One, the title we render Christ. The two words differ only in a single vowel; in the spoken Greek of the first century, in many dialects, they were pronounced almost the same. Patristic writers played on this near-identity. The Christian, they said, is the one who has been made chrēstos by Christ. Useful by union with Christ. Good by participation in the Good One. Onesimus, formerly useless, is now useful, because he now belongs to Christos, whose name, in the ears of many early Christians, rang with chrēstos, goodness and kindness.
We should not press the wordplay too hard. Paul does not labor the chrēstos/Christos near-pun in this verse. He plays the Onēsimos pun openly and lets the deeper resonance hover in the background. But the resonance is real, and it is worth hearing. The conversion of Onesimus is not just a man becoming useful in some ordinary sense. It is a man being remade in the image of Christ, so that his name now matches his life, because his life now belongs to Christ.
The line useful to you and me deserves a quiet note. Onesimus is now useful to both Philemon and Paul. To Paul, because he has been serving Paul in his imprisonment. To Philemon, because, Paul will say in a moment, he is being sent back. The communion of saints is not abstract here. Onesimus’s usefulness flows in two directions, to the apostle in Rome and to the master in Colossae. The same Christian belongs, in his vocation, to more than one part of Christ’s body. The gospel reorders even the question of whom a Christian is useful to. Onesimus, now in Christ, is useful in the way Christians are useful: by belonging to one Lord and serving wherever the Lord places him.
Sending My Very Heart
Verse twelve gives us a sentence that, in its English, is almost too brief to register the weight it carries. I have sent him (who is my very heart) back to you. The Greek is a relative clause with an appositive attached: ὃν ἀνέπεμψά σοι, αὐτόν, τοῦτ’ ἔστιν τὰ ἐμὰ σπλάγχνα. “Whom I am sending back to you, him, that is, my very inward parts.” The word that opens the second clause is the word we noticed in Session 2: σπλάγχνα, the visceral noun for the inward parts where the deepest love resides.
Onesimus is Paul’s σπλάγχνα. Paul’s heart. Paul’s gut, in the older English idiom, where love settles deepest. The man Paul fathered in his chains has become so dear to him that Paul cannot speak of him without using the word he reserves for what is most inward.
The thanksgiving has come round. In verse seven, Paul wrote: the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you. The saints’ σπλάγχνα, refreshed by Philemon’s love. Now in verse twelve: who is my very heart. Paul’s own σπλάγχνα, sent to Philemon in the person of Onesimus. The same noun. The same emotional register. The thanksgiving deposited the word; the appeal picks it up.
What Paul is asking of Philemon is now visible. Philemon has refreshed the σπλάγχνα of the saints. He is now to receive Paul’s σπλάγχνα (sent to him in the person of Onesimus) and refresh that σπλάγχνα by his welcome. The receiving of Onesimus is, in Paul’s reckoning, the receiving of Paul’s own inward parts. To welcome Onesimus is to welcome Paul; to refuse Onesimus is to refuse Paul. The man Philemon owes a great deal, the man through whose ministry Philemon came to faith, is now sending him the part of his own heart that he loves most. The appeal is being made not in legal categories but in the categories of family and the body.
This is what the gospel does to the relations between Christians. It does not abolish the civil and social relations (master and slave still exist as a social fact in the Greco-Roman world of Philemon’s house), but it relativizes them. Underneath the civil and social relations, the gospel has built a different web of relations. Paul, the apostle, fathers Onesimus, the slave. The slave becomes Paul’s σπλάγχνα. Philemon, the master, becomes the brother to whom Paul writes. The categories of master and slave do not disappear from the text; they remain in the language of the letter. But they are no longer the deepest categories. Underneath them, in the gospel-built family of God, there is father and child and brother, and these new categories are the ones the letter uses to make its appeal.
Not by Compulsion but of Your Own Accord
Verses thirteen and fourteen close the appeal with a remarkable confession. I wanted to keep him with me so that he could serve me in your place during my imprisonment for the sake of the gospel. However, without your consent I did not want to do anything, so that your good deed would not be out of compulsion, but from your own willingness.
Paul wanted to keep Onesimus. The honest admission is worth pausing over. Onesimus, having converted, has been serving Paul in his imprisonment. He has been useful in the way the apostle’s own household servants and traveling companions had been useful in earlier years. He has refreshed Paul, in the same vocabulary that ran through verse seven. Paul, in chains and aging, has a fellow Christian beside him whose ministry to him is welcome. He wanted, ἐβουλόμην, “I was wishing” or “I had been wanting”, to keep this arrangement going.
And he does not. He sends Onesimus back. He sends Paul’s own heart back to Philemon. The reason is given in the next clause: he wants Philemon’s goodness (τὸ ἀγαθόν σου, your good) to be not out of compulsion, but from your own willingness. Μὴ ὡς κατὰ ἀνάγκην ἀλλὰ κατὰ ἑκούσιον. Not by necessity but voluntarily. Not because Philemon had no choice in the matter but because Philemon chose freely.
Lutherans will hear this note gladly, and it is here without any need for our interpretation to put it there. Paul has just told Philemon, in plain words, that the good Philemon might do under compulsion would not count as good in the way Paul wants it to count. The good must be willing. The good must be free. The good must come from a heart that has been moved, not from a will that has been coerced.
Luther’s small treatise of 1520, On the Freedom of a Christian, is the closest historical companion this letter has in the Lutheran corpus. In that treatise, Luther argues that the Christian is free in the inner man (justified by faith, indwelt by the Spirit, no longer under the lash of the law) and that this inner freedom produces, of itself, the kind of life that the law could only have required externally. The Christian does what God commands not because God’s command has bent his will but because God’s love has remade his heart. The law continues to operate as a curb on the flesh, as a mirror, as a guide; the law has not been abolished. But for the new man in Christ, the law’s commands have become, in a sense, descriptions of what he now freely wants to do. Yet because the old Adam still clings to every Christian in this life, the regenerate still need the law’s instruction and admonition, even as the new man delights in the very will of God that the law declares (FC SD VI).
Paul applies this to Philemon in verse fourteen. He could compel Philemon. He has the apostolic authority. He could keep Onesimus and put Philemon in the position of having to ratify what had already been done. He does not. He sends Onesimus back, with this letter, and asks Philemon to make the choice himself, freely, in the new man, in Christ.
There is a lesson here about how Christian love operates in the relations among believers. We do not deploy authority where love can do the work. We do not coerce where freedom would yield the same fruit. We do not impose what could be received. The apostle who could have commanded Philemon has chosen instead to give Philemon the dignity of a free choice. The Christian master, addressed by his apostle as a brother in Christ, is asked to act as a brother in Christ would act, not because Paul has compelled him but because the Holy Spirit, who indwells him by faith, will move him to act as the gospel calls him to act.
This is also why the letter has the structure it has. The greeting names Philemon and his household and his church. The thanksgiving names what Philemon has already done. The appeal is now being made not as a command from above but as one brother to another, in a congregation that hears the letter together, with the request laid plainly on the table. Philemon will respond. He will respond because he is a Christian, because his faith works through love, because the Spirit who indwells him moves him toward the good. He will respond freely. That is the only kind of response Paul wants.
Gathering the Threads
Seven verses, seven movements. We have followed Paul through the careful construction of the appeal.
First, Paul named the apostolic authority he holds. He could have commanded Philemon. The right was his. The naming of the right is essential to what follows; without it, the laying-aside of the right would not register.
Second, for love’s sake, Paul chose to appeal rather than to command. The gospel does not work by coercion in the inner man. Christian love is the freely given response of a heart remade by the Holy Spirit. Paul leads with love, not with the law’s demand, though he never pretends the new covenant has no commands.
Third, Paul named himself as an old man and a prisoner. The chains are again the lever. The aging apostle in custody is not speaking from a position of institutional strength. He is asking from a position of voluntary weakness.
Fourth, Paul named Onesimus, but only after he had named him my child. The relation precedes the identification. Onesimus is, in Paul’s reckoning, the spiritual son begotten in chains by the preaching of the gospel.
Fifth, Paul played the pun on Onesimus’s name. The man whose name meant useful was formerly useless; he is now useful, in Christ. The wordplay is a small touch of joy in a careful letter. The conversion of a runaway slave is allowed to produce, in the apostle, the pleasure of a good joke.
Sixth, Paul named Onesimus my very heart, picking up the word σπλάγχνα from the thanksgiving and applying it now to the man being sent home. To welcome Onesimus is to welcome Paul. The receiving of the slave is the receiving of the apostle’s own inward parts.
Seventh, Paul confessed that he would have liked to keep Onesimus and explained why he was sending him back: he wants Philemon’s goodness to be voluntary, not coerced. The good that is compelled is not the good that Christian love produces. The freedom of the Christian, recovered by the Reformation, is already on the page in Philemon 14.
We are now ready for the appeal’s climax. Verses fifteen through seventeen will name what Paul is asking. The ground has been so carefully prepared that the request, when it comes, will feel like the only thing that could have come next.
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.
In verse eight Paul says he has quite a lot of confidence in Christ and could command Philemon. Why does he name the authority before setting it aside? What is the rhetorical effect of confessing a right and then refusing to use it?
I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love. What does it mean that Paul’s appeal is on account of love and not on account of authority? In what situations should Christians make appeals rather than commands, even when they have the right to command?
Paul names Onesimus my child, whose spiritual father I have become during my imprisonment. What does it mean for the apostle to call himself a spiritual father? In what sense does the preaching of the gospel produce spiritual paternity?
The pun on the name Onesimus, formerly useless, now useful, is the only joke in the letter. Why does Paul allow himself a joke in this serious context? What does the wordplay tell us about how Paul sees the conversion of Onesimus?
Paul calls Onesimus my very heart, picking up the word σπλάγχνα from verse seven. What is the effect of identifying Onesimus so closely with the apostle himself? How does this prepare for the request that will come in verse seventeen?
Paul wants Philemon’s good deed to be not out of compulsion, but from your own willingness. Why does the gospel insist on free, voluntary response rather than compelled obedience? How does this connect to Luther’s teaching on Christian freedom in the inner man?
Looking Ahead
In the next session we will reach the heart of the letter. Verses fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen contain the request Paul has been preparing to make. They are three short verses in which the apostle finally names what he is asking Philemon to do: receive Onesimus no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, as a dear brother, and welcome him as Philemon would welcome Paul himself.
This will be the session to read most slowly. The categories of master and slave, the gospel’s reordering of social relations, the meaning of brotherhood in Christ, all of it concentrates in these three verses. Read Philemon 15–17 before our next session, and read them more than once. Notice what Paul says and what he does not say. The letter does the work it does because of what these three verses contain.
Closing Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, who has given to Your church the office of the ministry for the sake of the gospel and Your saints: we give You thanks for fathers in the faith who, in the place where You have set them, beget Your children by the preaching of Your Word. Make us such Christians as Paul, who in chains became a father; and make us such Christians as Philemon, who could be appealed to in love rather than commanded by authority. Teach us to act freely, in the freedom of the inner man, where Your Spirit moves us toward the good. And when we are called to receive what You send to us (even what we did not expect, even what is hard), give us hearts to receive it as Your gift, in Your love, for the sake of Your name. Amen.