Colossians 4:10-11 — Fellow Workers

Frank: Grace turns a deserter into medicine.

Linda: That is a sentence. You are going to have to walk me the whole way there, because I do not know what you mean yet.

Frank: I will. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, glad you are here with us this afternoon. We are camped in Colossians four, verses ten and eleven today, right at the tail end of the letter, in a spot most people skim without a second thought.

Linda: The greetings. The part at the end of every letter where it is just names, names, names, and your eyes glaze over and you flip to the next chapter.

Frank: The part you skim. And Paul has hidden something in it that I think is one of the most tender things in the whole letter. So let me read it, and then we will slow it right down.

Linda: Read it. I want to hear these names.

Frank: "Aristarchus, my fellow prisoner, greets you, and Mark the cousin of Barnabas, concerning whom you received instructions, if he comes to you, receive him, and Jesus who is called Justus. These are my only fellow workers for God's Kingdom who are of the circumcision, men who have been a comfort to me."

Linda: Three names. And I will be honest, if you had not told me there was gold in here, I would have read straight past it. What am I supposed to see?

Frank: Mark. That one name. Because there was a time, years before this letter, when Paul would not have this man anywhere near him. You want to feel the weight of what is happening in verse ten, you have to know what happened back in Acts fifteen.

Linda: Which was what? Give me the short version.

Frank: Paul and Barnabas are out on the mission, and this young man, John Mark, is with them, and partway through, he quits. He walks. Goes home. And later, when they are planning the next trip, Barnabas wants to bring him again, and Paul says no. Flatly. And the argument over this one man gets so sharp, so heated, that Paul and Barnabas, these two giants who had done everything together, split up over it. They part ways. And here is the part that makes it sting: Barnabas was Mark's cousin. Paul mentions that right here in the text, cousin of Barnabas. So the family loyalty ran deep, and the fracture ran deeper. How deep did it go?

Linda: Deep enough that it blew up a friendship. Mark quit a job, but Mark quit and cost Paul his partner. The family loyalty won, and it severed everything else.

Frank: Over this guy. And now, years later, Paul is writing from house arrest in Rome, chained, and who is standing next to him? Mark. Not just tolerated. Look at what Paul actually does. He writes to the Colossians, "if he comes to you, receive him." He is vouching for him. He is spending his own name on someone who once walked out on him. Can you feel the weight of that reversal?

Linda: The guy Paul refused to travel with, the guy the whole argument was about, Paul is now writing a letter of reference for him. Personally putting his name behind him. How big is that gesture, really?

Frank: That is exactly the size of it, and it is even bigger than a reference in our sense. The Roman world ran on letters of recommendation. Think about it. A traveler shows up in a strange city, and there is no way to prove who he is. No records that follow him. No way for the people at the door to know if this is a brother or a con man or a spy. A written word from someone known and respected, that was your whole standing. It was everything. And in the young church, believers moving city to city lived or died on it. Arrive in a town where no one knows your face, and a commendation gets you welcomed as family, or its absence gets you turned away at the threshold. Those letters traveled the same roads as the travelers themselves.

Linda: Word gets around on those roads. If Mark bailed on Paul once, people talked. That story had already traveled everywhere a letter could go.

Frank: The same roads. So Paul knows. He knows the Colossians might have heard Mark ran away. And he writes anyway. Receive him. That is not a footnote. That is the apostle signing his name under Mark's welcome and daring anyone to shut the door.

Linda: Here is where it turns, though, because I want to push on this. That is a nice story about two men patching things up. But you opened by saying grace turns a deserter into medicine, and I am still not hearing the medicine part. Sell me on why this is more than Paul being a decent guy who forgave a friend.

Frank: Because of the word he uses for what these three men are to him. Verse eleven, "men who have been a comfort to me." That word, comfort. In Greek it is parēgoria. Here is what stops me every time: that word appears nowhere else in the entire New Testament. Not once. He chooses a word he uses nowhere else. Why?

Linda: What is he grabbing for when he picks that one?

Frank: It was a medical word. Parēgoria was the term physicians used for what eases pain. The relief you lay against a wound. There is an old word in English, paregoric, it was the name for a pain-relieving medicine, and it comes straight from this. So Paul, sitting there in chains, does not pick his usual cheerful word for encouragement. He picks the word a doctor would use for a man who is hurting. Do you hear what he is saying about these three men?

Linda: These men are his painkiller.

Frank: He is saying I am in pain, and these three are the relief laid against it. And you have to sit in what that admits. This is Paul. The one who wrote that he had learned to be content in any circumstance. And here he is naming, out loud, that he is worn thin. Aging. Chained. Watching some coworkers drift off. Feeling how few of his own countrymen stayed. And he does not pretend he is fine. He borrows the language of the sickbed to say it.

Linda: The great apostle Paul admitting he needs a painkiller. I did not expect the tough guy to say that part out loud. How does God respond to pain like that?

Frank: Not with a vision. Not by striking off the chains. Not by getting him out. He sent people. Three men who stayed. Human company became the medicine God applied to Paul's wound. That is how the Lord has always mended his people. Through his people. Think about the irony here.

Linda: The medicine, one dose of it, is the guy who used to be the wound. Mark, who once failed him, becomes the one who heals him.

Frank: Mark, once a deserter, is now a comfort. Say that slowly. The failure became the relief. That is not sentiment, Linda, that is the gospel moving through time. The same grace that grabbed Paul the persecutor and made him an apostle is the grace that took Mark the deserter and made him useful. And it held. Because years after this, from yet another prison, Paul writes to Timothy, "Take Mark and bring him with you, for he is useful to me for service." The man Paul once refused became the man Paul sent for. There is a full arc there, from beginning to end.

Linda: Mark fails, hard. Splits up a friendship. Years go by. Instead of being written off forever, he ends up not just forgiven but the guy Paul wants in the room. The one Paul actually asks for.

Frank: The one he asks for. No one is written off in the economy of God. And there is one more layer, and I have to name it, because it is easy to walk past. Paul says these are his only fellow workers who are "of the circumcision." Only three. Only three of his own Jewish people still standing with him.

Linda: Only. That word has an ache in it.

Frank: It has a whole life's ache in it. Because Paul carried this grief his entire ministry, that most of his own people rejected the gospel. And here, at the end, it is down to three faces. But I do not want you to hear only as defeat, because Paul would not. This is an old, old pattern in Scripture. Think of Elijah, collapsed under a tree, certain he is the last faithful man alive, and God says, no, I have kept seven thousand you never saw. God counts a remnant. The number is never large. Does it reach zero?

Linda: It never reaches zero, does it.

Frank: It is never absent. Never large, never absent. God has always kept a faithful few when it looked like no one was left, and these three names on a prisoner's letter are the living proof of it. Flesh and blood evidence that grace still preserves a believing few. And notice where they are laboring. Paul calls it fellow workers for God's Kingdom. A Jewish apostle, comforted by Jewish men, working for a kingdom that has now been flung wide open to Gentiles in a little bypassed town like Colossae. That thread runs straight back to the promise to Abraham, that through him all nations would be blessed. It is all breathing right here in a greeting list.

Linda: I want to bring this down to the floor, because I already know where it is landing on me. I have got a name. A person at work who dropped the ball, badly, and everyone knows it, and I have been keeping them at arm's length ever since. And this is telling me Paul opened the door.

Frank: Paul opened the door and put his own name on the hinge. And the old preacher Maclaren caught something about how Paul opened it. He wrote, "the best comfort Paul could have was help in his work." Think about that. Paul did not receive Mark back with a soft nice to see you again. He handed him the job. He gave him the work. The door reopened by trust, not just by feelings. How does forgiveness actually work when you mean it?

Linda: The second chance is not I forgive you. It is here, take this, I still trust you with it. That is the shape of real reconciliation.

Frank: You can do that this week. There is somebody who failed and knows it, and the medicine is not a speech, it is a task. Hand them back the responsibility in a way that lets them feel the door swing open. Let them feel received.

Linda: And the other side, the Aristarchus side. There is a coworker who has quietly made my whole week easier and I have never once said it plainly. Not you're great. The actual thing.

Frank: The actual thing. You covered my shift and it took real pressure off. Say it before you leave today. Because Paul, chained and worn down, remembered Aristarchus stayed. Presence gets remembered. And here is the harder edge under all of it, the only edge. Being one of the few who stays when staying is inconvenient. The commitment you made in a burst of zeal that now just feels like a chore. There is a quiet voice that offers you the exit. You're tired, someone else can cover it. Paul's word only names the people who ignored that voice.

Linda: And I cannot white-knuckle that. If it is just willpower, I will quit like everybody else did.

Frank: You do not grind it out on willpower. Christ was faithful to you unto a cross, and his Spirit supplies what your tired heart cannot. Your Comforter now sits at the Father's right hand—he wept at a grave, he knows what it is to need company in the dark. He does not leave his own untended.

Linda: So the failure becomes the comfort. That is the thing I am taking out the door.

Frank: Take that into today. Someone near you failed, and grace is not asking you to forget it. It is asking you to hand them the work back. Let that be the medicine. And before the day is out, tell the faithful person beside you the actual thing they did.

Linda: Go find one person who quietly stayed, and one person who quietly failed, and do the harder thing with both of them.

Frank: That is the charge. This episode is part of the Dig Deeper app, and if you have not got it yet, just look for Dig Deeper in your app store.