Colossians 3:22-25 — Working for Christ

LINDA BROWN: There is a word in today's passage that should not be there. It is sitting right in the middle of verse twenty-four, said to a room full of people who legally could not have it... and the word is "inheritance." Paul looks at the one person in the ancient house who was written out of every will by definition, and promises him an inheritance.

FRANK EDWARDS: The one person who could not inherit gets told he is an heir. That is the strange knot we get to untie today, and I am glad you are with us for it. Welcome to Dig Deeper. We are in Colossians chapter three, verses twenty-two through twenty-five, the part of the household code where Paul turns and speaks directly to slaves.

LINDA BROWN: The part most of us skip, if we are honest, because the first line sounds like it is going to be ugly. Read it for us, start to finish, and then I have a problem with it.

FRANK EDWARDS: Colossians three, twenty-two to twenty-five. "Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only to please them while they are watching, but with sincerity of heart and fear of the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with your whole being, as for the Lord and not for men, because you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as your reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. Whoever does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there is no favoritism."

LINDA BROWN: "Obey your earthly masters in everything." That is my problem, and I think it is the listener's problem too. Paul has the chance, right here, to say that owning a human being is wrong... and instead he tells the human being to obey. Why should I not read that as the Bible endorsing slavery?

FRANK EDWARDS: The honest answer starts with what a slave actually was in a Roman house, because we hear the word through our own history and the two are not the same picture. In the Roman world a slave was, in the legal language of the day, a living tool. He was counted with the livestock and the furniture. The jurists said outright that a slave had no legal person at all, which means no standing, no right to bring a case, no right to own what his own two hands produced. Perhaps a third of the empire lived that way, taken through war, through debt, through being born to it, through being left out as an infant and picked up by someone else. It was not about race. It ran the whole range from brutalized field hands to educated household managers and physicians. And a small town like Colossae, the believing households there would have held slaves as a matter of course. So when this letter was read aloud, masters and slaves were sitting in the same room, and the household code we walked through on day sixteen has now reached the bottom of the house.

FRANK EDWARDS: Now here is what should stop us before Paul gives a single command. He addresses them. Directly. "Slaves." Nobody spoke to slaves as moral agents in a public letter. You spoke about them, the way you would speak about a plough. Paul speaks to them as members of the church, people responsible before God, people whose work is seen and rewarded by Christ himself. He does not lay out a program to dismantle the institution, you are right about that. He does something that would, in time, dissolve its foundations: he tells a master that his slave has a Master in heaven, and he tells a slave that his true owner is the Lord Christ. Does the endorsement objection survive that?

LINDA BROWN: The address is the surprise, then, before the content is. Paul talking to them at all is the scandal in that room, and the "obey" is almost the least interesting word in the sentence. I can hold that. Though "in everything" still sounds like a lot to hand a person who has no recourse.

FRANK EDWARDS: The phrase that follows it tells you what kind of obedience he means, and the English flattens it. Behind "while they are watching" is one Greek word. Ophthalmodoulia. Eye-slavery. Work that only exists when the eye is on it. And you have to feel how natural that word was for the person hearing it, because think about a household servant's day in a place like Colossae. Up before the family, drawing water, kindling the fire, grinding the grain, waiting at the table, emptying the chamber pots, carrying messages across town, lying down last. And the labor was invisible by design... a well-run house was one where the work simply appeared done and the hands went unnoticed. If you were wronged, there was no court. If you were called to testify, your word was commonly taken under torture, because it was assumed worthless on its own. He worked, and another reaped. He served, and another was thanked. Of course you work for the eye. The eye is the only thing in that house that will ever pay you.

FRANK EDWARDS: And Paul says, there is another eye. "As for the Lord and not for men." Then he presses it into the shortest sentence in the passage: "It is the Lord Christ you are serving." That is the controlling claim, and I want to say it as plainly as I can. The lordship of Jesus reaches all the way down to the bottom of the social order, into the scrubbing of a floor when the overseer has walked away. The eye-service that fooled a Roman householder does not fool him. Every task in that house has just changed owners.

LINDA BROWN: Here is where it turns for me, and it goes back to that first word. "Because you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord." Why inheritance? He could have said reward, wages, anything. Why pick the one thing this person is legally barred from?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because he wants the contrast to be impossible to miss. The word is klēronomia, the portion a legitimate son receives when the father dies, the estate passed down by right of belonging to the family. Under Roman law a slave stood outside that entirely. He could not inherit, he could not be named in a will as an heir, and, as I said, he could not even own what he produced. So every clause of verse twenty-four overturns his daily experience. The one whose labor was invisible is told it is seen. The one who could inherit nothing is promised an inheritance. The one whose word counted for nothing will hear, in the next verse, that there is no favoritism with God. Alexander Maclaren put it in a single line over a century ago: "The stimulus of a great hope for the ill-used, unpaid slave, is added." A great hope. Given to the one person in the room who had none.

FRANK EDWARDS: And this is where it stops being abstract, because there was a face in that room. His name was Onesimus. He was a runaway slave belonging to Philemon, a believer in Colossae, and Paul sent him home carrying this very letter, along with a short personal letter to Philemon asking him to receive Onesimus back no longer as a slave but as a beloved brother. So when Colossians three, twenty-four was first read aloud... "you will receive an inheritance from the Lord"... a fugitive, a piece of property in the eyes of the law, was standing there hearing it, with his owner somewhere in the same congregation. Grace makes the lowest servant an heir with an inheritance no master could grant or withhold. Onesimus was the living proof.

LINDA BROWN: Onesimus is the one I want to keep, because he makes it real, and then it gets uncomfortable in a different direction. I am not a slave. Nobody owns me. But I do have someone I answer to whom I do not respect, and this passage takes something from me. It takes my right to work badly for them. The task that comes in late in the day from the person I like least, the message I am about to fire off carelessly, the job I am going to leave three-quarters done because they will never know... Paul just removed the excuse. And I want to say that costs something, because I have been treating my effort as a wage I pay people for treating me well.

FRANK EDWARDS: The wage picture is the thing you have named rightly, and it is the thing the passage refuses. Your effort was never a payment to them. It is an offering to Christ, and he is not petty, and he does not underpay, and he is watching the part they never check. Go back further than Paul for a moment. Genesis two, fifteen: "The LORD God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it." Before sin, before wages, before any master existed, work was placed in human hands as a good gift and a trust under God's eye. Paul is not baptizing drudgery into a meaning it never had. He is recovering the original one. Which is why he can widen it in first Corinthians, "whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God," eating, drinking, everything. And there is one more thing that keeps this from being a lecture from a comfortable man. The Lord who asks for whole-being service from a slave is the Lord who, Philippians two, took the form of a slave himself and was obedient to death. He asks nothing he has not already done. But where does the resentment go, Linda? Because you cannot simply decide not to feel it.

LINDA BROWN: I suppose it goes into the last verse. "Whoever does wrong will be repaid, and there is no favoritism." My instinct is to read that as, God will get them. The boss, the coworker who takes my credit, they will get theirs. Is that what it is for?

FRANK EDWARDS: Half of it, and the half you find comforting is the half you should be a little careful with. The word is prosōpolēmpsia, and the picture inside it is "receiving a face." A judge lifts his eyes, sizes up who is standing before him, and tilts the verdict toward the well-dressed and the well-connected. In an ancient courtroom the powerful expected the scales to lean their way. Paul says of the divine court, not there. Christ receives no faces. Rank, wealth, legal status, how many people are under your command, none of it moves him. So to the slave who has been wronged and has no court to go to, that is sweet. Your case is not lost. It is filed with a Judge no master can buy. And the very next verse, chapter four, verse one, turns to the masters, and for them the same sentence is a warning. Your position buys you nothing at that bench. Romans two, eleven, Acts ten, thirty-four, James two, it is one of the load-bearing beams of the Bible. The same trait of God consoles the crushed and unsettles the powerful in a single stroke.

FRANK EDWARDS: [short pause] Which means the resentment does not get to become a weapon, because the Judge who sees the wrong done to you sees the wrong done by you with the same clear eyes. And that is where the gospel has to come in, or this passage crushes everyone in the room. The Judge who cannot be bribed became the Advocate who cannot be defeated. Christ pleads your case not on the merit of your standing but on the merit of his blood. Every wrong done to you is seen and kept. Every wrong done by you is already answered at the cross, for everyone who is his. So you can hand the accounts over. Both columns.

LINDA BROWN: Seen. That is the word that is going to follow me out of this. Not rewarded, not vindicated... seen. The report nobody reads carefully, the corner nobody would notice I cut, the thing that gets done and nobody says thank you for. One Master sees it, and he is the one worth serving.

FRANK EDWARDS: Then let that be the thing you keep. The lowest work of the lowliest person in that Roman house was worship rendered to Christ himself, and nothing has changed about the Christ who was watching. He worked out your salvation with his own hands, and your labor is never invisible to him. Linda, you send us out today.

LINDA BROWN: Paul already wrote it, so I will let him. "Whatever you do, work at it with your whole being, as for the Lord and not for men... It is the Lord Christ you are serving." Take that into today, into the one task nobody will ever check.

FRANK EDWARDS: Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

LINDA BROWN: Thanks for listening. Go work as for the Lord, and we will see you next time.