Saturday, October 8, 2022

 

Saturday, October 8, 2022


Psalm 89:1-18

Zechariah 3:1-4:7

Philemon 15:25


See, I have taken your guilt away from you, and I will clothe you with festal apparel.


I wonder what crime Onesimus committed that was so heinous for Philemon to send him away. Paul has described Philemon as being famous for his love, and Paul is not known for his flattery, so I am inclined to trust Paul’s character assessment. Sin is an awful thing, and the closer we get to God, the more we are horrified by it. If Philemon was particularly close to Jesus, then he would have had a good eye for the things repulsive to God.


Paul is not here to diminish the crime of Onesmius, or to teach Philemon to look past evil in favour of some amorphous, ill-defined notion of free love. Paul has a robust, hairy-chested, hard soap-style of spirituality, based in the reality of scripture and human relationships. He has spoken to Onesimus, found him to be a fellow lover of Jesus, and appeals to Philemon on the basis of a fundamental truth: the beauty of forgiveness and restoration. Perhaps this is why any of us are separated from one another; so that we might return to each other in a relationship more beautiful than we had previously.


Forgiveness and restoration is a fundamental truth because it is the nature of God when interacting with us humans. As we get closer to God, and the conviction of sin gets greater, it is too easy to lose a loving attitude towards our fellow sinful creatures. Worse still is the ease by which we may be tempted to lose faith in our own salvation. In these situations we hang on to scripture: it is God-breathed, permanent and true. No-one thought about these struggles better than the old Puritans: “[The irksomeness of sin] force the soul to all spiritual exercises, to watchfulness and a more near walking with God, and to raise itself to thoughts of a higher nature, such as those which the truth of God, the works of God, the communion of saints, the mystery of godliness, the terror of the Lord, and the excellency of the state of a Christian and a conversation suitable to it, do abundantly minister.” (Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed) Whether it be our sin, or the sin of another, we are forced into a fork on the road. Let us choose the path of forgiveness; the path of God.



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