Philemon

What Philemon is about

Philemon is the shortest of Paul’s letters and the only one that deals with a single domestic situation. Onesimus, a slave belonging to Philemon, has run away — apparently having wronged his owner in the process — has met Paul in prison, and has become a Christian. Paul is sending him back, and this letter goes with him.

What Paul asks is carefully phrased. He says he could command, and then declines to: for love’s sake I prefer to appeal to you. He calls Onesimus his own heart, plays on the man’s name, which means useful, and offers to pay whatever is owed out of his own pocket — while noting, with a light touch, that Philemon owes him his very self. And he asks Philemon to receive Onesimus back no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother.

He does not spell out what that should mean in practice. He says he is confident Philemon will do even more than he asks, and leaves it there — a letter written to be read aloud in the church that met in Philemon’s house, which puts the request in front of witnesses.

Where it sits in the story

Philemon is one of the prison letters. Colossians mentions Onesimus as travelling with Tychicus, which suggests the two letters went to the same city by the same hand.

Its later history is significant. Christians who worked to abolish slavery returned repeatedly to this letter’s logic — that a slave and an owner who are brothers in Christ cannot go on relating as slave and owner — and its language outran anything the surrounding society was prepared to say.

Why it is worth reading

Because it shows the gospel arriving in one specific relationship and changing what is possible there. Twenty-five verses, one runaway, one awkward homecoming, and an argument that has echoed for two thousand years.