In the Lord

Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, greets you. Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my colaborers, greet you too. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Philemon 23–25 (NET)

Read Philemon 23–25 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Epaphras, My Fellow Prisoner

The letter closes with greetings from five named companions. Paul has been alone, in a sense, throughout the appeal; his is the voice that has carried the letter from verse one to verse twenty-two. He is alone no longer. The closing greetings open the curtain on the apostolic company that has been around him in his imprisonment all along.

The first name is Epaphras. Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, greets you. Anyone who has worked through our third volume will recognize the name. Epaphras was the man who, by Paul’s own reckoning, planted the Colossian church. In Colossians 1:7 Paul named him as a dear fellow slave from whom the Colossians had learned the gospel; in Colossians 4:12–13 Paul named him as a man always struggling in prayer on your behalf for the believers in Colossae, Laodicea, and Hierapolis. Epaphras appears to have been the pastor-evangelist of the Lycus Valley, sent out from Paul’s mission to the cities Paul himself had not personally visited.

Now, in Philemon 23, we learn something further about Epaphras. He is Paul’s fellow prisoner, συναιχμάλωτος, in the Greek, “fellow prisoner of war.” The noun is martial in flavor; it names a comrade captured alongside one’s self in the same campaign. Some interpreters have read the phrase metaphorically, as if Epaphras were Paul’s fellow captive only in the spiritual sense of being captive to Christ. Many take it literally: Epaphras was in some form of custody alongside Paul, sharing his confinement. That reading is likely, though we cannot know the circumstances.

If so, this is the fifth and final mention of imprisonment in the letter to Philemon. Paul named himself a prisoner in verse one. He named himself a prisoner again in verse nine. He spoke of Onesimus as a son begotten in his chains in verse ten. He spoke of his imprisonment for the gospel in verse thirteen. And now in verse twenty-three Epaphras stands beside him in the same chains. Five mentions in twenty-five verses. The chains have framed the whole letter. They opened it; they close it; they have been the lever by which the appeal moved from start to finish.

There is something theologically important in the closing chain-mention. The apostle who has appealed for Onesimus, the runaway slave, has done so not as a free man in a position of power but as a man in custody, with a fellow pastor in custody beside him, surrounded by a company of co-workers who minister to them in their confinement. The letter we have just read is the work of an imprisoned church: a small cell of suffering Christians from whom the gospel goes out into the world. The wider church in Colossae is being addressed by a smaller church in chains. The kingdom of God does not come, in this letter, by means of institutional power. It comes by means of the suffering testimony of the saints.

A Lutheran reading will hear in this the theology of the cross at work in the most ordinary practical setting. God works His greatest works through what looks, to the world, like weakness and failure. The release of Onesimus from his bondage to sin has happened in Roman custody. The appeal for Onesimus’s reception as a brother has been written by a chained apostle alongside a chained fellow pastor. The five companions named in verses twenty-three and twenty-four are the wider circle of the apostolic mission as it actually existed at the moment of writing. They were not a triumphant institution. They were a small fellowship in chains. The Holy Spirit was using them anyway.

Mark and Aristarchus

The list continues: Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my colaborers, greet you too. Four names. Each carries its own history into the greeting. Paul does not pause over them; the letter is closing and the format does not invite expansion. But the names are not chosen at random, and we will pause where Paul does not.

Mark, Μᾶρκος. This is John Mark, the cousin of Barnabas (Colossians 4:10), whom the church’s ancient tradition names as the author of the Gospel that bears his name. His story with Paul is one of the most poignant in the New Testament. He had set out with Paul and Barnabas on the first missionary journey, recounted in Acts 13. Somewhere in Pamphylia he turned back. Acts 13:13 records the bare fact without explanation: John left them and returned to Jerusalem. Whatever his reason (homesickness, fear, disagreement over the Gentile mission, family obligation), he did not finish the journey he had begun. When Paul and Barnabas later set out on the second missionary journey, Mark’s name came up again. Barnabas wanted to take him along. Paul refused. The disagreement, Acts 15:39 tells us, was sharp: They had a sharp disagreement, so that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and went one way; Paul took Silas and went another. The missionary partnership that had carried the apostolic mission in its earliest years fractured over the question of John Mark. Whether the friendship itself ended we are not told; Paul later mentions Barnabas without any evident hostility (1 Corinthians 9:6).

The story did not end there. By the time Paul writes Philemon, Mark stands beside him as a fellow worker, συνεργός, the same word Paul used for Philemon himself in verse one. The man who once departed has come back. The estrangement has been repaired. The friendship has been restored. By the time Paul writes the final letter we have from his hand (Second Timothy, written near the close of his life), he will say to Timothy: Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is a great help to me in ministry. The Greek behind a great help is εὔχρηστος, useful, the same adjective Paul used for Onesimus in verse eleven. Mark, like Onesimus, has become useful in the work of the gospel.

The restoration of Mark is part of what the gospel does. The man who failed has been brought back. The friendship that broke has been mended. The story that looked, for a time, like permanent rupture has reached a place of common labor. Paul, who could not work with Mark at one point in his life, now works alongside Mark in the closing chapter of his ministry. The gospel-grace that restores Onesimus to Philemon is the same gospel-grace that has restored Mark to Paul.

Aristarchus is the next name. Ἀρίσταρχος, the Thessalonian. He is one of the most faithful traveling companions Paul ever had. Acts 19:29 places him in Ephesus during the riot of the silversmiths, dragged into the theater alongside Paul’s other co-worker Gaius. Acts 20:4 lists him among the delegation of Macedonian and Asian Christians who accompanied Paul on his final journey to Jerusalem. Acts 27:2 places him aboard ship with Paul as the voyage toward Rome began, and in Colossians 4:10 Paul names him my fellow prisoner. The same word, συναιχμάλωτος, that Paul uses here in Philemon for Epaphras.

This is a curious detail. In Colossians, written at the same time as Philemon and carried by the same couriers, Aristarchus is the fellow prisoner; in Philemon, Epaphras is the fellow prisoner. Both letters were written from the same Roman confinement. We do not know why. One possibility, often suggested, is that Paul’s co-workers took turns sharing his confinement; another is that fellow prisoner is used in a looser sense, of one who shares the apostle’s captivity for Christ. We cannot be certain. What is certain is that Paul did not endure his imprisonment alone. The faithful co-workers came to him and stayed with him, and in their staying they shared, in part, the cost of his chains.

Demas, in This Letter

The third name in verse twenty-four is Demas. Δημᾶς. The name is given here with no further description; he is simply one of the fellow workers. The same name appears in Colossians 4:14, again without elaboration: Our dear friend Luke the physician and Demas greet you. At the moment of writing, Demas is with Paul. He is one of the apostolic company. He is among the fellow workers who labor at the gospel alongside the chained apostle.

But the story of Demas does not end where it appears to be ending here. A few years later, near the close of Paul’s life, the apostle will write to Timothy and include this painful line: For Demas deserted me, since he loved the present age, and he went to Thessalonica. The Greek is unsparing. Δημᾶς γάρ με ἐγκατέλιπεν ἀγαπήσας τὸν νῦν αἰῶνα. Demas has forsaken me. The verb ἐγκαταλείπω is the same verb the Septuagint uses in Psalm 22, the psalm Christ would pray from the cross: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46). The verb names a deep abandonment. Demas has abandoned Paul, and the reason is given: since he loved the present age. The age that is passing has captured his affections, and he has gone, not to martyrdom, not to a hostile field, but to Thessalonica, where the comforts of ordinary life were more available than they were beside an apostle in chains awaiting death.

When we read Philemon 24, we cannot help but read it against the later verse. Demas is here a fellow worker. He will not always be. The faithfulness of one moment is not, by itself, a guarantee of the faithfulness of all moments to come. The Christian life is lived from day to day, by daily faith in the daily mercies of Christ. Demas, in this letter, stands among the apostolic company. By the time the lights go out on Paul’s life, Demas will not be there.

This is a sobering note to sound in the closing greetings of a letter that has just preached the gospel of substitution and the brotherhood of believers. But the sobering note belongs here, because the letters of Paul do not pretend that every Christian perseveres. The New Testament is honest about the possibility of falling away. Hebrews 6 and Hebrews 10 are honest about it; the parables of the seed are honest about it; the warnings throughout the Pauline corpus are honest about it. Demas’s desertion warns that attachment to this present age can draw a Christian away from the fellowship of gospel labor, and perhaps from faith itself. Our Confessions say plainly that those once justified can lose the Holy Spirit and fall from grace (AC XII; SA III.iii.43–45).

We do not know the rest of Demas’s story. Paul names his departure in 2 Timothy 4:10 and does not write of him again. Scripture does not reveal his final state. Whether he simply abandoned Paul’s dangerous mission, or fell from faith, or later repented and returned, we cannot say. The silence of the New Testament is the only word we have, and we should not presume to finish a story it leaves unfinished. We leave Demas where Scripture leaves him, in the hands of the Lord who judges justly and delights in mercy.

What the reader of Philemon must do, having read Demas’s name here and Demas’s name in 2 Timothy 4:10, is take seriously the warning his story contains. The grace of Jesus Christ that has been with Paul’s spirit is the same grace that must be with the reader’s spirit, day by day, to the end. Christian perseverance is not an autonomous achievement. The Lord preserves His people through Word and Sacrament, while believers are exhorted to cling daily to Christ and to resist the love of this passing age. He who began a good work in us will carry it to completion (Philippians 1:6), and He does it through the very means He has given: the preached Word, the absolution, Baptism daily remembered, the Supper often received. Demas’s name appearing in two letters of Paul, one early and one late, with two different reports attached, is a small piece of New Testament realism about what the Christian life is like in time.

Luke, the Beloved Physician

The last name in verse twenty-four is Luke. Λουκᾶς. In Colossians 4:14, written at the same moment, Paul names him more fully: our dear friend Luke the physician. Here in Philemon, Luke is simply named, with no description, as one of the fellow workers. These two letters, with 2 Timothy 4:11, are the only places the New Testament names Luke, and they tell us little. He was a physician. He was beloved. He was Paul’s companion. He wrote, by tradition the church has always held, the Gospel that bears his name and the book of Acts.

The Acts narrative contains the most direct evidence of Luke’s place beside Paul. The narrative shifts at certain points into the first-person plural: the so-called we sections, beginning in Acts 16:10. We attempted immediately to go over to Macedonia. The shift to we suggests that Luke was an eyewitness, traveling with Paul, recording what he saw. The we sections continue intermittently through the rest of Acts, including the voyage to Rome. If, as the church has long held, Luke is the narrator of those sections, he was there.

He is here too, in the closing of Philemon, beside Paul in the Roman imprisonment. He is one of the named companions in the apostolic company that has surrounded the chained apostle.

And he is still there at the end. Second Timothy 4:11, the same verse that names Demas’s departure, contains the line: Only Luke is with me. Λουκᾶς ἐστιν μόνος μετ’ ἐμοῦ. At the close of Paul’s life, when other co-workers have gone (some to other fields of service, some, like Demas, to abandonment), Luke remains. The beloved physician, the gospel-writer, the man whose pen has given us the Acts of the Apostles, is the one who does not leave. He is with Paul to the end.

There is a quiet but important note to sound here as we close this volume and this series. The Christian life, lived faithfully to its end, is most often lived not in spectacular gestures but in the steady company of fellow believers who simply do not leave. Luke does not appear in the New Testament as a great preacher or a great miracle-worker. He appears as the man who is there. He is in the Acts narrative because he was there. He is in Philemon and Colossians because he was there. He is in 2 Timothy at the end because he was still there. The faithfulness of being there, day after day, year after year, in the small attentive presence of a friend; this is the form Christian perseverance often takes. Luke gives it a face.

In Lutheran terms, this is the vocation of the lay believer at its most ordinary and most powerful. Luke was a physician. Whether he continued to practice while traveling with Paul we are not told; it is possible, but Scripture is silent. What we know is that he wrote the Gospel and Acts, he sat beside the apostle in chains, and he was with Paul to the end. The doctrine of vocation we encountered in Session 1 of this study, when we considered Philemon as a Christian householder, finds another instance in Luke. His callings as physician, companion, and chronicler were the stations through which he served the apostle and bore witness with his faithful presence to the end. The means were ordinary. The fruit was extraordinary.

The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ

The letter closes with the line: May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Ἡ χάρις τοῦ Κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ μετὰ τοῦ πνεύματος ὑμῶν.

The benediction is the standard Pauline close. He uses the same form, with small variations, at the end of nearly every letter he writes. Galatians 6:18 has the same wording almost word for word: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters. Amen. The benediction is not unique to Philemon. It is the way Paul ends his letters.

But its placement here is fitting. Grace opened the letter in verse three: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace closes the letter in verse twenty-five: May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. The whole content of the letter (the appeal for Onesimus, the offer of substitution, the climactic petition that Philemon refresh Paul’s heart in Christ) is bookended by grace. The first word and the last word, in effect, are the same word. Whatever Paul has asked in the middle of the letter, the asking has been framed by the grace that is named at both ends.

A Lutheran reading will recognize this as a structural confession of the gospel. The Christian life begins in grace and ends in grace. The first word God speaks to the sinner is grace; the last word He speaks at the close of the believer’s life is grace. Everything between is the working-out, in the practical relations of believing life, of what grace makes possible. Philemon’s reception of Onesimus, the climactic act the letter has been calling for, is itself an act of grace flowing from grace. The grace named in verse three has produced the love that produces, in Philemon, the welcome of his brother. The grace named in verse twenty-five is the grace that will sustain that welcome and every welcome to come. Grace at the beginning. Grace at the end. Grace in everything in between.

The pronoun in the benediction is plural: with your spirit, μετὰ τοῦ πνεύματος ὑμῶν. Ὑμῶν is the plural your. The benediction is addressed not to Philemon alone but to the church gathered in Philemon’s house, the household and the congregation that have heard the letter together. The grace is for all of them. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit: with Philemon, with Apphia, with Archippus, with the saints who meet in the house, with Onesimus, with everyone within the hearing of the letter being read aloud.

And the grace is with your spirit: singular noun, plural pronoun. The Greek does not say with your spirits. It says with your spirit. The singular may be no more than an ordinary Greek idiom, and grammatical number alone cannot carry a doctrine. But read this way, the congregation, gathered as one body, is addressed as having one spirit. The community of believers is, in some real sense, one. The grace that comes is one grace, addressed to one body of brothers and sisters who together share one spirit because they share one Lord. The communio sanctorum we have spoken of in earlier sessions is on the page here too, in the singular noun. The saints share one life.

The letter ends. The closing words of Philemon are the words that have ended Paul’s letters all the way through: the grace of his Lord, asked to attend the community he has addressed. And so the apostle, in chains, in the company of a small band of co-workers and a fellow pastor in custody, lays down the pen. The letter is finished. The couriers named in Colossians 4:7–9 (Tychicus, with Onesimus beside him) will carry it to Colossae. The household will receive it. The church will gather. The letter will be read aloud. And, somewhere within that hearing, the appeal Paul has made will be answered.

And So the Letter Ends

We have come, in this volume, to the end of the smallest of Paul’s letters. Twenty-five verses. Six sessions. Three names of recipients, five names of companions, one name at the heart of it: Onesimus, the runaway slave received back as a beloved brother. The letter is among the shortest documents in the New Testament. It is not, on that account, among the smallest. The brevity is concentration. The brevity is the point.

We have also come, in this study, to the end of The Pauline Captivity Letters. Four volumes. Many sessions of careful walking through the four New Testament epistles that Paul wrote, or is traditionally held to have written, while in chains. Ephesians taught us that we have been raised together with Christ and seated in the heavenly places in Christ. Philippians taught us, by the example of an aging apostle facing his possible death with steady joy, that living is Christ and dying is gain. Colossians taught us that Christ in you is the hope of glory, the mystery that God has now revealed to His saints. And Philemon, this small final letter, has shown us, on the practical canvas of one ordinary household, what brotherhood in Christ looks like when the gospel works itself out in the relations among believers.

The four phrases name four facets of the same reality. To be in Christ; to live as Christ; to have Christ in us; to receive one another as brothers in Christ. The four are not separable. To be in Christ is to live as Christ; to live as Christ is to have Christ in one; to have Christ in one is to receive every brother and sister whom Christ has died for as one beloved brother or sister of His own. The four volumes have walked through these realities in their separate registers. They belong, in the end, to one single reality. The gospel of Jesus Christ poured out into the lives of His saints, working itself out in the practical particulars of the believers’ common life, is what the four volumes have been about.

If this study has done its work, the reader has come out of it not with more information about four ancient texts but with a deeper sense of what the gospel has done to the structures of ordinary life. The Christian master and the Christian slave are brothers. The Christian apostle and the Christian householder are fellow workers. The Christian woman of the house and the man with a ministry in the Lord are sister and fellow soldier. The aging apostle in chains and the fellow pastor in custody alongside him are fellow prisoners. The mature believer and the recent convert are father and child. The faithful companion and the one who has left for love of the present age both stand within the same letter’s address, and the difference between them is the difference between remaining in the grace given and turning back to love the present age. The whole landscape of the believing community has been laid out before us, in twenty-five verses, by an apostle in chains.

And the whole landscape rests on grace. Grace called the saints into being; grace will sustain them to the end; grace will gather them in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. The benediction of Philemon is the benediction of every Christian gathering. It echoes in the benedictions the church speaks over herself at the close of her services. It is the word with which we close this volume, and this series, and our walking together through the four captivity letters of the apostle Paul. Grace. To you. Amen.

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. Epaphras is named as Paul’s fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus. This is the fifth and final mention of chains in the letter. What has the chain motif done across the letter? Why does Paul mention his imprisonment so often?

2. Mark, who once departed from Paul mid-mission, now stands beside him as a fellow worker. What does Mark’s restoration tell us about the gospel’s power to repair broken relationships between believers? Where in your own life does such a restoration need to happen?

3. Demas is named here as a fellow worker; in Second Timothy 4:10 he is named as one who has deserted Paul, since he loved the present age. What does the trajectory of Demas’s life teach us about Christian perseverance? Why is his name a warning as well as a witness?

4. Luke remained with Paul to the end. The Acts narrative records him present through the we sections; Second Timothy says Only Luke is with me. What is the form of Christian faithfulness that simply does not leave? How does the vocation of an ordinary believer, like a first-century physician, become a setting for this kind of faithfulness?

5. The letter is bookended by grace: grace and peace to you in verse three, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit in verse twenty-five. What does it mean that the whole content of the letter rests, at both ends, on grace? How does this shape our reading of everything in between?

6. We have now reached the end of The Pauline Captivity Letters. In Christ, To Live Is Christ, Christ in You, Brother in Christ. What does the four-fold phrase together name about the Christian life? Which of the four has had the most weight in your own walking?

A Closing Word

The letter to Philemon ends on its last word of grace, and so does this study. There is no Looking Ahead. There is no next session. The series has come to its close.

A word of thanks is owed to those who have walked through these four volumes from the beginning. The reading of Scripture together is one of the small joys of the Christian life, and the chance to read with a body of fellow believers across many months is a chance not everyone gets. The reader who has been with us since Ephesians has spent time in the company of the apostle Paul, in chains, in four cities of the early church, in the working-out of the gospel in the practical particulars of believing life. That company is itself a small gift from God.

A second word is owed to the saints of the local congregation where these studies have been read. The Bible study, in the Lutheran tradition, is not a substitute for the gathering of the church around Word and Sacrament. It is a help to the church’s hearing of the Word, a deepening of what the church reads on Sunday, a small additional time of attention given to the texts that the church confesses as Holy Scripture. May this study have served its purpose in that way. May the reader return to the Sunday gathering with deeper appreciation for what is preached there, what is sung there, what is given in bread and cup, what is the church’s life from week to week.

And a third word is owed to the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who is the subject and source of every faithful Bible study, every faithful sermon, every faithful gathering of believers. He is the Word made flesh. He is the One in whom we are gathered, the One in whom we live, the One who dwells in us, the One who makes us brothers and sisters. The four volumes have been about Him. The Christian life is about Him. The reading of Scripture is, in the end, the church listening for His voice in the words His apostles wrote down. May the reader, having heard, go on listening.

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and forever: we give You thanks for the letter to Philemon, small in length and rich in grace; and we give You thanks for the four letters of the apostle’s imprisonment, in which we have walked these many months. Thank You for the apostle who wrote them under chains, for the saints who preserved them through the centuries, for the church that reads them in every generation as Your Holy Scripture. Make us such Christians as Paul, who never tired of writing for his churches; as Epaphras, who prayed with wrestling for his people; as Mark, restored from failure to faithful labor; as Luke, who was simply there to the end. Keep us from the path of Demas. Hold us in Your grace, that grace which opens the letter and closes the letter and holds the believing life from beginning to end. To You with the Father and the Holy Spirit be all glory now and forever. Amen.