Seeing Differently

Twenty-Third Sunday of the Year. Fr Bede Mullens considers the difficulties raised by the Letter to Philemon.

Article Four of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights runs: ‘No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.’ I think most right-minded people in the modern world would agree. We should not let unanimity deceive us: slavery and the slave trade still exist – the International Labour Organisation estimated last year that human trafficking generates an annual profit of US$236 billion. Yet we can be grateful that this is widely recognised for what it is, an evil scourge that ought to be eliminated. Slavery is no longer legally sanctioned.

That was not the case in St Paul’s day and many Christians today find themselves uncomfortable with Paul’s apparent acquiescence in the abhorred institution. Onesimus is the runaway slave of a Christian master, and has now himself become a Christian. Paul in fact was the one who took him away. But why does Paul write so apologetically to Philemon, Onesimus’s master? He hints very strongly that Philemon can hardly treat Onesimus as a slave, now that he is a brother in Christ; yet he does not insist that Philemon set Onesimus free. He writes as if the whole case depends on Philemon’s ‘kindness’ and ‘consent’. Is Paul not like the man in Jesus’s parable? He assembles several reasons a Christian has to reject slavery, and yet he finds himself unable to ‘finish the work’ and draw the necessary conclusion.

Historically, many Christians have themselves drawn the unfortunate conclusion from Paul’s silence that slavery is in some degree acceptable. Tradition does not bind us to that conclusion; on the contrary, the gradual unmasking of slavery as an inherently debasing institution is an example of the long and slow progress of tradition. How long the Gospel takes to permeate the human spirit! ‘The reasonings of mortals are unsure and our intentions are unstable…It is hard enough for us to work out what is on earth, laborious to know what lies within our reach.’ For as long as slavery existed and was practised, it exercised a kind of deceit over the enslavers as much as it entrapped the enslaved. It passed itself of as an everyday and ordinary arrangement, just the way people do things. In the heyday of British slavery in the West Indies, people could buy and sell slaves on great plantations rather like we buy and sell shares, to derive a segment of the profits. They might never meet the people they enslaved.

Where social and ethical matters are concerned, the Gospel often teaches by changing our perspective, unsettling our ordinary ways of seeing. Jesus today makes a very unnerving declaration: ‘if any man comes to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes, and his own life too, he cannot be my disciple’. In fact, what he says is very closely related to the points that St Paul makes. Jesus pulls away the sacred aura and the animal defensiveness that surround the natural family. Only once this is done, can St Paul begin to envision a spiritual family, in which he, a Jew, can be father to the gentile Onesimus, and Philemon can be a brother to the man he has enslaved. In a fallen world, slavery seemed almost a natural institution: later forms were justified that way by racial pseudo-science, and in the ancient world it only seemed fair to claim ownership of a people you had conquered in battle. St Paul gives Philemon a way of seeing which would make even a claim of natural justice secondary to the wonderful work of grace.

What Paul also gives is a way for the slave to see beyond his circumstances. Onesimus, it seems is the one carrying this letter to Philemon. And what Paul teaches Onesimus is unequivocal: no matter what Philemon decides, Onesimus himself is truly a son of God and the brother of his master – before God, the equal of his master, if not before a human tribunal. He can no longer think of himself a slave. If his master failed to see aright, however, Paul had a further consolation to offer. Paul himself writes as an old man, in prison and chains. He himself suffers persecution for the Gospel he preaches. It is not a persecution that can be justified, since he speaks the truth; at the same time, there is little he could do about it. History does not record Philemon’s final decision. If he freed Onesimus, it was all for the best. If he insisted on keeping Onesimus in chains, he was only calling down judgment on himself, by making Onesimus even more clearly the image of Paul in prison, the image of Christ crucified. How often we fail to learn except from the scars we inflict, and the Spirit of Wisdom blows unpredictably to straighten out the paths of those on earth.

Yes, and how many years can a mountain exist, before it is washed to the sea?
Yes, and how many years can some people exist, before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn’t see?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind;
The answer is blowing in the wind.

Readings: Wisdom 9:13-18 | Philemon 9-10,12-17 | Luke 14:25-33

Image: ‘Stone Town Slave Trade 5’ by Son of Groucho (CC BY 2.0)