Seeing People through the Eyes of Christ
Devotional from Professor Benjamin Reese
“So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me” (Phlm, 17).
A Runaway in Need of Mercy
Onesimus was in trouble. He was running away from Colossae, away from his home, and traveling the road through the Lycus Valley en route to Ephesus. The journey would take about six days on foot. Onesimus would have plenty of time to think about the trouble that he was in.
The trouble was this: Things had gone sour with his master, Philemon. Onesimus had screwed up, and his master had every reason to punish him. In his fear and anxiety, Onesimus had only complicated his situation further by fleeing. But he had come up with a plan. He would go to Ephesus, and there he would enlist the help of a religious friend of his master, an old man, who he must have known to be gracious. The man was Paul.
How Paul Saw Onesimus
The way Paul responded to the situation of Onesimus would have shocked any Roman and almost any living person at the time: He treated Onesimus as a person that was valuable to God and inquired about his relationship with God’s son, Jesus. The runaway slave was at the bottom of the social heap, but Paul welcomed him in and became his spiritual father (Phlm 10).
In Christ, Paul believed there was neither “slave nor free.” Onesimus was not known by the category of “slave,” Paul only came to know him by the category of “belonging to Jesus, the Messiah,” and he treated him accordingly.
An Outrageous Request
Eventually, Paul knew that there had to be a reconciliation between Onesimus and Philemon. Paul also cared about Philemon, and he wanted his faith to take on the challenge of seeing Onesimus in the way that Jesus had helped him see the young boy.
At the center of the letter of Philemon, there was a clear but outrageous request: “So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me” (Phlm, 17).
The Ministry of Reconciliation
Paul here is enacting within his life the “ministry of reconciliation.” Philemon and Onesimus are not in fellowship; they are completely separated from one another by class and conflict. But Paul steps in and says, “you all are connected because I love you both, and we have fellowship, so treat each other on that basis.” In that way, Paul takes on the role of Jesus.
At the heart of the Gospel, there is the same outrageous request. If we have fellowship with Christ, then we need to treat fellow believers first and foremost as those belonging to Christ, as Jesus himself. That’s how dearly Jesus loves us. He identifies with us. “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Rom. 15:7).
Learning to See Others through the Eyes of Christ
We often talk about the “eyes of faith” when it comes to our personal situation (“My situation is bad, but I believe God can do something”). But we also need to apply it to how we see one another. I would encourage you to begin praying the following prayer: Lord, help me see people how you see them. Help me believe that what is most important is not who they are to me but who they are to you. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:16, we should regard no one simply from a human point of view. This new way of seeing can only be enacted by coming to know one another as we pray for them. That’s how Paul opens up the letter by telling Philemon that he remembers him in his prayers. We think about people on our own very differently than we think about them in our prayers. We talk about someone a lot differently around the people that love them, like their spouse or parents. Such accountability is good, and the greatest accountability is to talk about someone in the presence of the one who loves them most.
Think about the change that could happen if our interactions with one another were mediated by the thoughts produced by prayer rather than the ad hoc concoctions of our own, quite fleshly brain?
Note: Some of the above is a reconstruction of the implicit narrative of Philemon. I’ve relied on N.T. Wright’s Paul and The Faithfulness of God for this analysis. Of course, scholars disagree on some of the details.
