Colossians 4:1 — Masters & Justice

FRANK: "Justice? For a slave? You might as well tell a man he owes justice to his plow." That is the Roman householder, standing at Paul's shoulder as this letter gets read out in Colossae, and he is not being cruel by his own lights. He is quoting the law. The law agreed with him. And Paul answers that man in one sentence... and by the end of the sentence, the ground between him and the people he owns has gone completely level.

LINDA: One sentence to answer the entire Roman world, that's a big claim to start a Monday with, and I am here for it. Welcome to Dig Deeper. We are in Colossians chapter four today, verse one, the very last line of the household code we have been walking through, and it's the line addressed to the person at the top of the house. Frank, read it for us, and then I want to hear how the plow gets its answer.

FRANK: Colossians four, verse one. "Masters, supply your slaves with what is right and fair, since you know that you also have a Master in heaven."

FRANK: One verse. Slaves get a whole paragraph back in chapter three, and the men who owned them get that. We spent day seventeen inside the Roman household, so I won't rebuild it, but one piece of it is load-bearing today and I want it in the room. Under Roman law the enslaved person was res... a thing, property, with no standing to bring a case against anyone. The master could feed generously or starve, reward or flog, free or sell, and no court would trouble him much. So justice, in that world, was simply not a category that applied. You did not owe fairness to a plow. And Paul's very first move is to reach into that vocabulary and say: supply them what is right and fair. Something is genuinely due to this person. That word "due" is where the sting starts. So what does the man who owns a plow do when he is told he owes the plow something?

LINDA: He laughs, probably. And honestly I want to push on this before we go further, because one sentence sounds less like a sting and more like Paul going easy on the men with the power. The slaves get a whole paragraph of "obey in everything," and the masters get... one line? Sell me on why that isn't Paul flinching.

FRANK: The slaves get the longer word because they had more to endure, and Paul is a pastor before he is anything else. But the master gets the sentence he cannot wriggle out of. Listen to where Paul grounds it. He does not say "because Roman custom is shifting," or "because a well-fed slave works harder." He says: since you know that you also have a Master in heaven. And the word matters here. The Greek is kyrios. It is the same word Paul has been using for "Lord" all through this letter, and it is the same word the household would have used for the man at the head of the table. Kyrios means the one with rightful ownership and command, the one who says "go" and it happens, the one whose word about you is the final word. Paul takes that single title and sets it on both ends of the house at once. In Ephesians he says the identical thing to the identical people: "give up your use of threats, because you know that He who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with Him." Their Master and yours. One word, one throne, two men standing under it.

LINDA: The man giving orders is a man taking them. Same word, both ends of the household. I get that as a picture... but isn't it a bit of semantics? Every religious person in Colossae already believed the gods were watching. Why does putting one Greek word on both people flatten anything that wasn't already flat in their heads?

FRANK: Because the gods of Colossae did not take the slave's side. They were watching, yes, the way a landlord watches. What Paul says is that this Kyrios shows no favoritism, and that has a long history behind it. Leviticus, centuries earlier, to Israelite masters: "You are not to rule over them harshly, but you shall fear your God." Job, even earlier, defending himself: "If I have dismissed the cause of my manservant or maidservant... when He calls me to account, what will I answer?" Job already knows that the lowest worker in his house has a case that will be heard at the highest court in existence. Deuteronomy tells the employer to pay the hired hand before sunset, every day, "because he is poor and depends on them... otherwise he may cry out to the LORD against you." And James, in the New Testament, says the withheld wages themselves are crying out. [short pause] So the flattening is not a mood. It is a courtroom. The person with no standing in a Roman court has full standing in God's, and the man who thought he sat at the top of the house is a defendant.

FRANK: Now the harder question. If something is due, what exactly is it? Paul uses two words. The first is dikaios, right, and it does not mean "within the local rules." It means lined up with God's own standard of what is straight, measured against him, not against the going rate in Colossae. The second word is the one I think English readers walk past. Isotēs. It means evenness, a balance on the scales, equal weight on both sides. Paul uses it in Second Corinthians when he tells the church to share with poorer believers "that there may be equality," so that the one with much and the one with little are drawn level. Put the two together and you get a test a master could actually run. Would this treatment balance if the roles were reversed? Would you, as the one being weighed out to, call this fair? And underneath that sits Genesis one. The enslaved man in that household bore the image of God as fully as the man who owned him, and ownership never touched that. Paul is asking the master to treat his servant according to a dignity the master did not confer and cannot cancel.

LINDA: The scales, then. Fair is measured by whether the person under me would call it fair when I am not in the room. And the moment I hear that, I want to duck. I don't own anyone. Nobody in my life is property. So who is this verse for now? Because "you have authority over someone's livelihood" sounds like a stretch when I just have a job.

FRANK: The room you are not in is bigger than it sounds. Think about who has a say over whether another person eats this month. The manager building the schedule, deciding whose name goes on the weekend shift for the fourth time. The person who hires a cleaner, or a babysitter, or a contractor, and decides when the payment actually goes out... Deuteronomy says before sunset, and it says that because the worker is depending on it tonight, not at your convenience. The one who knows a raise is deserved and has been stalling because nobody is forcing the question. The person about to send a correction to someone junior, and the email drips. Every one of those is a small Colossian household. Someone's daily bread or dignity is sitting in your hand, and you get to decide what to do with it, and no earthly court will notice either way. That is exactly the position Paul is speaking into. He is not asking whether you own anybody. He is asking whether you hold anything over anybody, and almost everyone does.

LINDA: That one costs money. That is the part I want to name plainly, without a story attached. The cheapest option is the one that shortchanges somebody, and nobody is forcing my hand, and the cursor is hovering over "leave it as it is." Knowing there's a Master in heaven is one thing. Actually changing the number is a loss I could avoid.

FRANK: A loss you could avoid... and Paul knows a master who is very good at avoiding losses. Here is the sharpest edge of the historical picture. The one power that defined a Roman master was manumission, the legal act of setting a slave free, and it was entirely his to give or withhold. A slave could work forty years, save a little fund, even negotiate a price for himself, and the master could simply say no. Freedom did not belong to the slave as a right. It sat in another man's fist, to open or clench at will. And that is the exact man Paul stops. You, who hold other people's futures closed in your hand... you also have a Master. And what has that Master done with the freedom he held over you? He opened his hand. Deuteronomy already said it to Israel: "Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you. That is why I am giving you this command." Christ, Mark tells us, came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom. The Master in heaven bought his own servants with his blood. So the master is told to be just, precisely because he has been shown a mercy he never earned. Alexander Maclaren put it this way: "Christ's command is my law, His will is supreme, His authority absolute, His example all-sufficient." His example. The hand that was opened for you is the pattern for every hand you close. So what does that man do the next morning?

LINDA: He pays. He fixes the number, and he takes the loss, because the loss he was spared was infinitely bigger. [laughs softly] And that brings me back to the plow. Our Roman gentleman at the top of the episode, saying you can't owe justice to a plow... his whole argument was that the plow has an owner. Paul just told him he has one too.

FRANK: An owner who was also, for our sake, owned. That is where the great hymn of chapter one comes down to earth. We sang that all things were made through him and hold together in him, and it sounded cosmic. Here it is a specific man in a specific house deciding how to treat a specific person, and the cosmic Lord is standing right behind him. Your authority is real, Paul says. It is also leased. Above your head is a Head. And I want to say clearly that this is not written as a threat. The same Lord who stands over you stands over every person you have the power to help or to harm, and he looks at them with a Father's eyes. He died for the servant and the master alike, one blood, one table. Under that Master the scales are already level. The verse is asking you to live as if they are.

LINDA: Never the highest authority in the room. Which forces the next thing, honestly, because most people listening are not the master today. They're the one on the weekend shift, with the boss who reads a verse like this and shrugs. What does the sentence do for them?

FRANK: The sentence is addressed to the master, but it was read aloud in a room where the slaves were standing. They heard it. They heard that their case has standing at a court their owner cannot bribe, and that the one holding the gavel there knelt to wash feet. It does not fix the boss on Monday. It does name, out loud and in front of everyone, who is watching him, and whose eyes are on you while he does it. That is not nothing to a person with no other court.

LINDA: Do something with that today, then, and I'll let Paul say what. Supply what is right and fair. Since you know. That's the charge, in his words. If there is a wage sitting in your hand tonight, pay it before the sun goes down, the full amount you promised, on the day you promised... and if there is a name in your head right now whose dignity you've been keeping a little unlevel because it was cheaper, that is the person to pray for before you sleep.

FRANK: This conversation is part of the Dig Deeper app, and if you're new here you'll find Dig Deeper in your app store or the Play Store.