Thursday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 494

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/111512.cfm

MSF Picnic
2012

I have experienced much joy and encouragement from your love,
because the hearts of the holy ones
have been refreshed by you, brother.
Therefore, although I have the full right in Christ
to order you to do what is proper,
I rather urge you out of love,
being as I am, Paul, an old man,
and now also a prisoner for Christ Jesus.

Saint Paul’s Letter to Philemon may be the strangest document in the Bible. He wrote this letter to a fellow Christian and close friend, the slave owner Philemon, asking him to welcome a runaway slave, Onesimus, back to his household as a free man. Beyond what we find in the document we know nothing. Apparently Onesimus carried the fateful letter with him as he anxiously returned to his legal owner. We have to wait for eternity to find out if Philemon obeyed Saint Paul’s pastoral command.

The letter reminds us of the serious cost of discipleship. As the poet Yeats said of the Easter Monday Revolution, since the death and resurrection of Jesus, “Changed, all changed, a terrible beauty is born.” But seventeen centuries would pass before slavery would disappear from England, and two more centuries before freedom arrived in the United States.

The gospel will always challenge our way of life; but, as the resilience of "peculiar institution" demonstrates, change comes slowly. Slavery had nearly disappeared from Europe until the sixteenth century discovered sugar. Suddenly everyone from wealthy to poor wanted sweet foods and sweeter drinks, and African slaves were shipped to the Americas to produce sugar. The Enlightenment with its notions of human dignity, plus the advance of technology eventually undermined the slave economy and it seemed to perish in America's baptism of blood, the Civil War.

But the institution persists today as impoverished refugees are exploited as sexual and sweatshop slaves. Thailand is known as the brothel of the world but they are found in every major city. Just as Negro slaves were trapped by their ignorance of geography in the antebellum South, so are today's slaves trapped by their ignorance of English and their fear of deportation. 

Most of us find their plight unimaginable; we are stunned to realize this still goes on. Even people in law enforcement, who are often too familiar with evil, overlook what they cannot imagine.

As Jesus said to his disciples after healing the boy who was possessed by a demon, "This kind can only come out through prayer.” We must beg God to save us from chattel slavery; we are helpless.