Homily for the 23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Sept. 7, 20225. Gospel of St. Luke 14:25-43. Philemon 9-10, 12-17. Theme: The Hard Sayings of Jesus
I want to focus on our Second Reading, but I can't pass on explaining some potentially confusing words of Jesus that we hear in the Gospel today. So let me touch briefly on that first and then we’ll dive into the unusual and powerful Letter to Philemon.
When Christ talks about hating one's family and hating one's life, he is using a common idiom in his culture that means “to love less than”. He does not mean hate as we understand it as “detest” or “despise”. What Jesus is emphasizing is that our love and allegiance must be given to him first and above all of our other relationships. And when he talks of “renouncing” ones’ possessions, it’s another way of saying that we must be detached from the money we have and indifferent to the material goods we have accumulated. In other words, should our wealth and personal goods be taken away, it would not change our attachment to him. So, “hating” and “renouncing” are other ways of saying that we stand in need of conversion of heart, renewal of mind, and reorientation of priorities with Jesus as the Center.
We see these “hard sayings of Jesus” (as they have come to be called) lived out in a powerful way in the Letter to Philemon from which our Second Reading is taken. There are three main characters involved in the story: the Apostle Paul (the letter-writer), Philemon (the letter’s primary recipient) and Onesimus (the subject of the letter). Another thing we need to know in order to understand the full impact of our Second Reading is the backstory that leads up to the passage read at Mass. Philemon is such a short letter (it fits on one side of a sheet of paper) that I strongly recommend reading the whole thing so as to put today's passage in its proper perspective.
Ok so on to the backstory. Philemon was a well-respected Christian leader. We know he was extremely wealthy and prominent because the Christian community in his city gathered for Mass in his spacious home (there were no churches in early Christianity due to persecution). We also know of his upper class status because he had slaves and one of them, a pagan named Onesimus, seems to have done him some serious wrong and then hightailed it out of town! But the runaway eventually got arrested and was thrown into prison where he met Paul, who converted him to Christianity. The two of them formed a tight bond with one another.
It’s at this point that we come into the story in our Second Reading. Paul calls Philemon to have mercy on Onesimus and gives him accountability by making sure the letter is not private. It is also addressed to Apphia (Mrs. Philemon) and Archippus (his pastor) as well as to the entire parish! So everyone knows what is going on and is watching to see if Philemon will rise to the occasion and do the right thing. Paul urges him to reorient his relationship with Onesiumus now that the two of them had been made one in Christ by Baptism. Philemon was to see that they were equals and Onesimus was to be treated as a brother and not a slave. This might all sound pretty neat and clean to us but in 1st century Roman culture it was radical and revolutionary!
Paul was calling Philemon to a radical revamping of his attitudes based on Christ’s hard sayings in today’s Gospel. As a disciple of the Lord, Philemon was to love God more than his role as church-leader, more than his reputation, and more than himself. He was being asked to carry the cross of possible social humiliation by being a master who sees himself as equal to his slave. He was being called by Paul to give a real life example to his home-church parish of Jesus’ teaching about detachment and renunciation for the sake of the Kingdom of God!
The Letter to Philemon is a summons for all of us to reexamine our lives, our relationships, and our attitudes in the light of the hard sayings of Jesus. This means that we probably will need to reform and revamp our relationships with people and possessions as well as how we see ourselves. But like Philemon, we can find hope and help to do so in our parish community. For it is there that we celebrate and receive the Eucharist that gives us the supernatural strength to actually live these (and other) hard sayings of Jesus. And in our parish community we should be able to meet like-minded Christians whose example and spiritual support help us along this difficult pathway. A parish should be more than just where we show up on the weekend for Mass.
Oh! Do you wonder what happened to Philemon and Onesimus? Did they do as Paul said or did they have a bigger falling out? Well, Philemon was so deeply changed by Paul’s words that he sent copies of the letter to all of the Christian churches so that they, too, could learn that all the baptized are equal in God’s eyes and all are to live at-oneness with each other: rich or poor, slave or free, man or woman. As for Onesimus, he became a missionary of the Gospel and later in life was made the Bishop of Ephesus in Turkey, eventually becoming a martyr for Jesus Christ. Isn’t it amazing what God's grace can do to change hearts and transform lives once we choose to lower our pride and humbly set out to put the hard sayings of Jesus into practice?
