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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 681. The Request
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The Request
O My Saviour Christ, Christ my Saviour! who will grant that I may die rather than again offend Thee! Christ my Saviour, O my Saviour! Lord, let a new manner of life prove that a new spirit hath descended on me; for true penitence is new life, and true praise unremitted penitence, and the observation of a perpetual Sabbath from sin, its occasions, fuel, and danger. For as penitence destroys old sins, so do new sins destroy penitence.1 [Note: Bishop Andrewes.]
2. It is difficult for us to realize adequately the degradation of Onesimus' position. In the eyes of the ancient world a slave was a mere chattel, outside the ordinary rules of humanity. “Any act is lawful towards a slave,” wrote Seneca, and history supplies us with ample evidence that this maxim was generally accepted as a matter of course, even by the most enlightened pagans. Cruelty of the most repulsive kind was viewed as the merely normal and ordinary treatment of a slave: while the precepts of the Rabbis on this point scarcely differed from the laws of paganism. Onesimus, however, was not merely a slave, but a criminal slave, who had robbed his master and escaped. If he were caught, a quite normal penalty would be crucifixion. In any case he would be put to the torture and branded as a runaway with a red-hot iron. Such, then, was the miserable creature who came to St. Paul. And never did the Apostle show more clearly the fulness with which he had received his Master's teaching than by his kindness towards Onesimus. There was no pride of Roman citizenship, there was no shrinking from this criminal outcast. Underneath the degraded and sin-stained exterior, St. Paul saw the possibilities of goodness; he showed the love which believeth all things, the Divine optimism so perfectly exemplified by Christ. He preached the gospel to this wretched slave; he taught him to hate sin instead of merely dreading sin's consequence; he baptized him-and the slave became a member of the Body of Christ and the Apostle's “dear son.” For St. Paul's confidence was well founded. The better qualities of Onesimus were still alive, and, quickened by Divine grace, they transformed his character.
For disobedience, in short for anything which in the private court of the dominica potestas was a crime in his master's eyes, the slave might be privately executed, with any and every cruelty. In the reign of Augustus, the noon of Roman culture, one Vedius Pollio, a friend of the Emperor's, was used to throw offending slaves into his fish-pond, to feed his huge electric eels (murœnœ). He was one day entertaining Augustus at table, when the cupbearer broke a crystal goblet, and was forthwith sentenced to the eels. The poor fellow threw himself at the Prince's feet, begging, not to be forgiven, but to be killed in some other way; and Augustus, shocked and angered, ordered the man's emancipation (mitti jussit), and had Pollio's crystals all broken before him, and his horrible pool filled up; but he did not discard his friend. “If,” says Horace (Satires, I. iii. 80), “a man is thought mad who crucifies his slave for having filched something from … the table, how much more mad must he be who cuts his friend for a trifling offence!” In brief, the slave in Roman law is a thing, not a person. He has no rights, not even of marriage. To seek his good is in no respect the duty of his master, any more than it is now the duty of an owner to improve his fields for their own sake.1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule.]
3. Perhaps some one will say: But surely Philemon was the greater wrongdoer of the two? What right had he, a Christian, to have any slaves at all? And why does St. Paul not bluntly tell him he was dishonouring his Lord in keeping in bondage any man for whom Christ died?
This is a fair question, and the answer is very interesting. It opens up the whole relation of Christianity to social institutions. The Lord Jesus and His Apostles lived in a time when the institutions of social order were intertwined with grave injustice. Yet they never utter a word that could fairly be construed as an attack on social order or as in the accepted sense inciting to revolution. They saw concubinage, they saw tyranny, they saw slavery. But they denounced none of these things. What they did was, they undermined them. They enunciated new principles of a new social order which was certain in the end to make the older one obsolete and to displace it. Christianity did not attempt all at once to abolish an institution which was so deep rooted as slavery in Roman social life, however inconsistent it was with the religion of the Incarnation. Indeed, the revelation of the brotherhood of men in Christ made it especially necessary to emphasize (as the Apostle did) the fact that social differences were not thereby obliterated. Even if (which is doubtful) St. Paul was so much in advance of his age as to have grasped the idea that no man has a right to own another, to have proclaimed the iniquity of slavery to a world which was not prepared for it would have exposed society to the frightful dangers of a bellum servile, on the one hand, and would, on the other, have done more to arouse the hostility of the Roman imperial authorities than any other proclamation could have effected. Christians had to show at the very outset that Christianity was not inconsistent with good citizenship, and that the reforms which it hoped to promote in social life would not be imposed violently from without, but would be the outcome of the development of the national conscience, in which the seed of the gospel was to grow and fructify, secretly but surely, as the leaven spreads in the meal.
Dolling, writing of the evils of overcrowding, concludes: But when statesmen have spoken their last word the Christian has still a word to speak. Create within the respectable poor the longing for all these things; stir the soul till it is utterly discontented with and abhors its present surroundings; make the father and mother realize that all duty to their children is impossible as things are. The task seems well-nigh impossible. The truth is we have not got the vigour of body or the keenness of mind to care about these things. We have always lived in them; we feel we cannot alter them. And nothing but Christian enthusiasm can alter them-ay, Christian enthusiasm could alter even the loafer and his slum. And so, while we must do our best to insist upon present legislation being put into force and future legislation being created, Christianity must labour on in making the heart and conscience of the man right, and then he will insist upon an environment which will be possible for himself and his fellows.1 [Note: C. E. Osborne, The Life of Father Dolling, 244.]
4. Here is the secret of the gospel's power to destroy slavery, that it teaches the slave-owner to regard his slave as his brother-his brother in Christ. So far as this doctrine was recognized by the slave-owner-and the acceptance of the gospel was an impossibility without the acceptance of this principle-so far as this principle was accepted, slavery, of course and of necessity, ceased to exist. The slave-owner's bondsmen became his brethren.
Lowell labours to open the eyes of his readers to the eternal sanctities of love, and to make them share with him in that comprehensive passion of brotherhood to which nothing is common or unclean, nothing in all nature too small to have its divine meaning and mission.2 [Note: W. H. Hudson, Lowell and his Poetry, 47.]
A touching little story is told of Tolstoy; he moves out one day, and meets a poor peasant; and being asked to give a coin, puts his hand in his pocket but finds it empty; then with compassionate love he looks into the eyes of the peasant and says: “Brother! I am sorry I have nothing to give.” And the poor peasant tells Tolstoy: “Say not, you have nothing: you have given me much: you called me brother!”3 [Note: T. L. Vasvani, The Path of Service, 13.]
While running along the road with hoop and stick, Catherine Booth saw a drunkard being dragged to the lock-up by a constable. A jeering mob was hooting the unfortunate culprit. His utter loneliness appealed powerfully to her. It seemed that he had not a friend in the world. Quick as lightning Catherine sprang to his side, and marched down the street with him, determined that he should feel that there was at least one heart that sympathized with him, whether it might be for his fault or his misfortune that he was suffering.4 [Note: The Life, of Mrs. Booth, i. 77.]
5. What happened to Onesimus we cannot know certainly. Tradition, as usual, has been active in filling the void places of history, and has woven much legend around his name, but we know nothing certainly. We may, however, agree with Bishop Lightfoot, that “it is reasonable to suppose that Philemon would not belie the Apostle's hopes; that he would receive the slave as a brother; that he would even go beyond the express terms of the Apostle's petition and emancipate the penitent.”
But even if he did not go so far, he and Onesimus were in a new relationship-master and man they might still continue, but above that there was a common bond of brotherhood, of disciples and followers of Jesus the Saviour of men. If they lived together for years as master and man, how would their days be spent? Onesimus would go about his work, and Philemon would still be the gentleman employing him, but they would daily talk to each other of Jesus their crucified Lord, of Paul the Apostle, of the judgment to come, of the future home in store for the servants of God. They would join in worship together; they would comfort each other on the pilgrimage of life; and when one of them came to his journey's end, the other would close his eyes in the sure and certain hope of a resurrection to eternal life, where they should meet again.
Oh from the hush and dying of the splendour
Take thou a patience and a comfort then!
Oh let thine eyes be satisfied and tender
Knowing the common brotherhood of men!
Children of God! and each as he is straying
Lights on his fellow with a soft surprise,
Hearkens, perchance, the whisper of his praying,
Catches the human answer of his eyes.
Then having met they speak and they remember
All are one family, their sire is one,
Cheers them with June and slays them with December,
Portions to each the shadow and the sun.
Therefore His children hold to one another,
Speak of a hope and tarry till the end,
Strong in the bond of sister and of brother,
Safe in the fellowship of friend and friend.1 [Note: F. W. H. Myers, Poems, 94.]