In Christian thinking, Christ works in the world reconciling all things. To be reconciled in Christ is first of all to be reconciled with God in Christ and then with each other and with ourselves. It is in Christ that we are reconciled, that we come into right relationship with God, each other, and ourselves; just as we are commanded to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbors as ourselves.
Reconciliation is with God and thanks be to God through Christ with others and with ourselves. And that plays out in how we differ and how we are united. Stephen J. Patterson, in “The Forgotten Creed: Christianity's Original Struggle against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism” (Oxford University Press, 2018) argues that the most primitive creed is this: there is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no male and female.
And that means… We are all children of God, we are all one in the Spirit.
So guess what Paul says to Philemon in his brief letter: Onesimus – his name means “useful” – was useless to you as a slave but I am returning him to you useful as a brother, more than a slave a brother: and Paul makes the somewhat veiled request of Philemon that he set Onesimus free and even somewhat hints that it would be best to send him back again to Paul but now as a freedman.
In many passages in the Hebrew and Greek scriptures slavery is taken as a fact of society of the time: that doesn’t mean it’s condoned so much as accepted as part of how life and society were, so that in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) readings there is slavery even of Jews and sometimes of Jews by others and in the New Testament we encounter Paul at his best: this passage in Galatians (3:26-29):
“In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.”
Today our challenge is to come to an understanding in our full maturity in our current social context of what it means to be free, what it means to be freed, and what it means to have been enslaved in the first place. Over the centuries, as my teacher Neal Flanagan OFM has pointed out, the church has dealt with these three bondages: the ethnic and racial conflicts that “no longer Jew or Greek” represents, especially in the ancient world but on up through our own peril-fraught times; the justice conflict of “slave or free” including historic chattel slavery on up through the mid-19th century, and its aftermath on into our own century; and lastly the inequity of male-female relations, which the church began to address afresh only in the middle years of the 19th century and the various feminist movements to follow. The reconciliation of peoples means that “there is no male and female” in terms of precedence or power or right.
And, to return to our original theme, what it means to be reconciled in Christ: first to God, and then to others and ourselves … and we are learning that ‘others’ includes all of creation, including all created beings and certainly one another. And this helps us move forward in one challenge of our age: reconciling with other people not like ourselves. It is in Christ, in his work, in his life as well as his death, from incarnation on through crucifixion to resurrection, that we find our hope and the new possibility and even power to come to a right relationship with each other, ourselves, and God. That is the Christian hope.
The Rev. Dr. John Leech is priest associate at the Episcopal Church of Saint Matthew in Tucson.
