I’m sure you all know by now that this year is the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in British territories. In fact, like me, you might be starting to get a little bit fed up of singing Amazing Grace and hearing the hagiography of William Wilberforce! He was a great man with a profound social conscience from whom today’s parliamentarians could learn a great deal about moral accountability. But recounting this episode can, for some Christians, often seem a little self-congratulatory and sometimes feels to me uncomfortably paternalistic.
That over-heroic telling of the story of abolition has quite rightly been tempered by a reflection on the Church of England’s own long-standing and scandalous collusion with slavery. Could it really have taken us 18 hundred years to realise that the notion of one person being the property of another was an affront to the human dignity exhibited to all people by Jesus Christ?
These questions are all thrown up for us again this morning as we hear about Onesimus, the slave who has become the companion of St Paul in prison. The two have got so close that Paul regards Onesimus as his own child and is writing to his master Philemon to ask him to take Onesimus back without inflicting on him the penalties that would be permitted by law for his running away. And some commentators read into Paul’s words even more than this. Perhaps in suggesting that Onesimus come back to work with him, he is implying the slave’s emancipation. Is St Paul the proto-Wilberforce? It’s difficult to tell.
St Paul has, in some circles, a rather unfair reputation when it comes to the issue of slavery. “Obey your masters” he writes to the slaves in Corinth, Colossae and Ephesus, and these texts have been misused by the defenders of injustice and the opponents of Christian faith alike for centuries. But a little historical examination of context goes a long way here. It is very significant that Paul’s letters were addressed to the urban metropolises of the Roman empire, where the slaves would not be those forced into the cruel labour of mines, gladiatorial shows or even agriculture. Many household slaves, in fact, enjoyed economic and social conditions superior to those of peasants. A small minority of urban slaves who worked for powerful people even wielded more wealth and power than most aristocrats; there is even some evidence of noble women marrying into slavery to improve their social station! It’s very important for the modern reader to realise that this kind of slavery, as part of the complexly differentiated society, looks very different from the kind of slavery that Wilberforce ended up abolishing in the nineteenth century.
Okay, we may say, but a slave is still a slave whose freedoms are curtailed by other human beings. And in our modern society, where the total autonomy of the human self is greatly prized, that is simply very hard to accept. And indeed, thank God for Wilberforce and all that he achieved. But the insight that is present in this letter and runs throughout all Paul’s writing is the notion that Onesimus’s slavery is relative to other forms of slavery. St Paul is convinced of the unfashionable truth that we’re all enslaved to something, for better or worse.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul famously described the human race as slaves to sin and I think many of us can relate to that feeling of how our mistakes and wrongdoings can really haunt us in that kind of way. But the unsettling part is that the liberation which Christ brings is itself a new kind of slavery; we become slaves of righteousness. Or as Paul puts it in this letter to Philemon, he is a prisoner, not just for Christ Jesus, but paradoxically of Christ Jesus.
The Book of Common Prayer’s second collect at matins captures that paradox: this is the God “whose service is perfect freedom”. This is the slavery that, in the stark language of our Old Testament reading, is the slavery that brings life in opposition to the many slaveries that bring death. So perhaps this is the truth that modern liberal democracy wants to ignore, that we are all slaves to something, be it the on treadmill of an unsatisfying job, in the pressures of mortgages and school fees, or caught up in the appetites of a society awash with consumerism and sexual superficiality. For St Paul, the service of Christ is the one enslavement which takes us to that deeper level of meaning, purpose and fraternity, the kind of fraternity that allows Paul to see Onesimus, no longer as a social inferior, but as a partner in the Gospel and a beloved brother. This is the slavery that brings life to all humanity.
I hope these reflections take us some way towards understanding some of the difficult sayings in our Gospel reading this morning. I cannot hate my family and don’t think that I should. But I do recognise that my calling as a disciple in the service of Christ relativises those relationships and requires me to ask the question that Jesus asked: “who ought I to count as my brothers and sisters?”.
And neither can I give up all my possessions and, again, I don’t think I should. But I do have to recognise that I am as liable as anybody to fall into the kind of enslavement to consumerism, the “fetishism of the commodity”, as Marx puts it, that denigrates human relationships. And that again would get in the way of my service of Christ.
So taking up the cross as a disciple of Jesus is sure to have its costs. Of that there can be no doubt. But it is also a liberation from many kinds of slaveries of death, the kinds that separate us from God who is the source of our flourishing and abundant living. And that’s why Onesimus, the slave, becomes for us a rather compelling but unsettling role model. His name means “profitable one”, which St Paul contrasts with the adjective “useless” in verse eleven. He came to Paul, and through Paul to Christ, as one with little to encumber him because he was just a so-called “useless” slave with no property or family ties. And now his faithfulness to Jesus, the one true master, has won Paul’s heart and made him a beloved brother in the Lord.
Indeed, as a corrective to the Wilberforce hagiography, it is striking to see how the very openness of 18th-century slaves to the Gospel message gave them the tools they needed to destroy their own oppression. Wilberforce’s bill was passed by Parliament in 1807, but it is often forgotten that the first successful revolt against slavery was in Haiti in 1797 and was led by a black slave and devout Roman Catholic, Toussaint L’Ouverture. Inspired by the gospel message, he led a slave rebellion that overthrew the French and ensured that slavery never returned to that colony.
So to return finally to Onesimus. Did his embracing of the Gospel turn him into a proto-Toussant L’Ouverture or did he return to Philemon as a slave? We don’t know. And what about us? Will we continue to be slaves to our jobs and our mortgages and shopping and so on? Probably we will yes.
But Paul’s trick on Philemon is that, now that Onesimus has embraced the servitude of Jesus Christ – now that he himself has chosen life – Philemon can no longer treat him just as a slave. He is more than a slave, he is a brother in the Lord. There is no way that that cannot tangibly change their relationship.
And for us too, since we are brothers and sisters in the Lord, our enslavement to money and status and expectations, those too are all relativised. Because we are one in the Lord, we have all chosen life.
In our baptism we have taken up the cross and we have one Lord and master who is the one before whom we kneel at this altar.
And as we kneel next to one another, let us know that we become a little less slaves to the things of this world, and a little more the joyful prisoners of Christ Jesus.
Amen
See B. Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, New York: Oxford, 1990