During the past few weeks, our first readings have been from the letters of Paul rather than readings from the Old Testament. Today our reading is from his letter to Philemon. Many Christians probably could not even name this book as a part of the New Testament. It is by far the shortest of Paul’s letters, not even being organized in chapters, and containing only 355 words in the original Greek, which makes for a very short book of the Bible compared with books like Isaiah and Jeremiah that have more than 50 chapters each.
What strikes me about this letter is that Paul wrote it while he was in prison himself, probably in Rome. But Paul is not interested in his own safety and well-being, but rather in the welfare of the runaway slave Onesimus, who was returning to his owner, Philemon. Paul’s journey is so interesting, as he started out being a prosecutor of Christians, wanting them to be arrested or to be killed. Now, Paul is willing to do anything to spread the message of the Gospel to the world, even to go to prison for the sake of the Gospel. When I was in Rome back in 2010 at the Basilica of St Paul just outside the walls of the ancient city of Rome, I even got to see a piece of the chains that enslaved Paul when he was in prison. Paul wrote to so many different Christian communities as their spiritual father, one who spent so much time nurturing them in the faith. Paul even calls Onesimus his spiritual son in the faith, his own very heart.
For Paul, God was not some ambiguous concept or some far away being in the heavens. Jesus was his Lord and his Savior. Jesus led Paul to the faith and to salvation. Do we see ourselves nurturing others like Paul did, reaching out to others in the faith?
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