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Thu · Nov 12, 2026 · Ordinary Time

Saint Josaphat, Bishop and Martyr

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First Reading · Philemon 7-20

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No verses found for this reference.
commentary

The joke in v. 11 is untranslatable and load-bearing. Onēsimos, Calmet notes, is Greek for useful, and the runaway slave had been living in contradiction of his own name — Paul calls him achrēstos, unprofitable, and then euchrēstos, profitable, so that the sentence turns on the man's name without ever pointing at it. He is now truly an Onesimus, useful to Philemon by his conversion and to Paul by the services he renders in chains. A second small word carries more than it looks. At v. 15 the departure was for a season — the Latin ad horam, the Greek pros hōran, for an hour — set against the for ever at the end of the same verse, and Witham reads the contrast as providence's arithmetic: God never permits an evil except for some greater good, and the price of an hour's loss is a brother kept permanently.

Calmet is fascinated by how the letter is built, and it repays the attention. Paul spends verses assembling every claim he could press — apostolic authority to command outright, the deference owed an old man, the moral weight of his chains — and then declines to use any of them, laying the dignity of his apostleship aside to beg. Only at v. 10, after all that preparation, does he dare pronounce the name, which Calmet says must have sounded harsh in the ears of a man who had been robbed; and he pads it on both sides with epithets, my son, whom I have begotten in my bands, so that the pardon he asks is not for a slave but for a child. Witham observes that Paul is angling for more than pardon: by refusing to keep Onesimus without Philemon's consent he leaves room for the master to send him back freely, a good deed not as it were of necessity, but voluntary. The decisive turn is at v. 16, where Estius has him doubly bound — dear in the flesh, since Philemon too was once a Gentile and Onesimus once his household servant, and dear in the Lord by a shared faith. Then Paul signs the note in his own hand, offers to pay the theft himself, and adds the line that quietly cancels the debt he has just assumed: not to say to thee that thou owest me thy own self also, which Witham glosses as the salvation of Philemon's own soul.

Jerome records that some hypercritics thought the whole affair beneath an apostle and used that to question whether Paul wrote it at all. The answer Haydock's note gives is the one that matters: such reasoning is unworthy of men who adore a God who did not refuse to die for rebellious and impious slaves. The modern version of the hypercritics' complaint is a ministry sorted by significance, where a single fugitive is a case to be processed rather than a person worth an apostle's rhetoric and an apostle's money; against it the letter shows pastors how solicitous they must be for the meanest of the flock, even one who looks obdurate and buried in the pit of sin. What it asks positively is harder than clemency — that the wrong be genuinely charged to someone and paid, and that the reconciliation be voluntary rather than extracted. The letter ends where it began, with the word for the seat of the affections: Philemon has already refreshed the bowels of the saints (v. 7), and Paul asks him now to refresh Paul's own, by receiving a thief as though he were receiving Paul himself.

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The complete public-domain commentary this reading's note draws from, unabridged. Every claim in the note traces to a passage here.