Colossians 4:7-9 — Tychicus & Onesimus

LINDA BROWN: A man with no legal rights, who could be branded on the forehead if the wrong person recognizes him on the road. And in the bag over his shoulder, the most valuable piece of writing in Asia Minor. Same man. Same road.

FRANK EDWARDS: That is the picture in the last verses of Colossians four, and I love that you put it that way, because the two halves of it should not fit. The letter this church is about to hear says Christ is the head of every power and authority, all things hold together in him... and the person who hands it over is a fugitive slave walking back toward the people he ran from. Welcome to Dig Deeper. Frank here, with Linda, and we're in Colossians four, verses seven through nine.

LINDA BROWN: Three verses, two names, and honestly the part of a letter most of us skip on the way to the closing blessing. Read it for us, Frank, and then I want to argue with you about why it's even in the Bible.

FRANK EDWARDS: [laughs] Fair enough. Colossians four, seven to nine. "Tychicus will tell you all the news about me. He is a beloved brother, a faithful minister, and a fellow servant in the Lord. I have sent him to you for this very purpose, that you may know about us, and that he may encourage your hearts. With him I am sending Onesimus, our faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you. They will tell you about everything here."

LINDA BROWN: That reads like a shipping notice. Two guys are coming, they'll fill you in, more news to follow. I believe it's true, I'm not doubting it happened, but I'm sitting here thinking... why is this Scripture? Why does the Holy Spirit want me to know Paul's travel arrangements?

FRANK EDWARDS: The travel arrangements are doing more than you think, and the reason is that there is no such thing as a letter arriving by itself in the first century. No envelopes. No postal service a private citizen could use. If Paul wants a scroll to reach Colossae from wherever he is imprisoned, a person has to walk it there, for weeks, over hundreds of miles of open road with bandits on it. That person is Tychicus. He is the one who carried this letter, and the church has already told us how the thing works when Paul says, "I have sent him to you for this very purpose, that you may know about us." Think about what a scroll cannot do. It cannot answer a question. It cannot tell you how Paul's voice sounded when he dictated chapter one, or whether his chains are heavy today, or what the Colossians should make of some sentence that puzzles them. So the bearer was never a courier dropping a package. He was part of the message. He vouched for the sender's identity, he supplied the tone, he stood in a room Paul could not enter and spoke for him. To hand a man months of your voice while you sit in prison is to hand him your reputation. Why does Paul pile up three titles on Tychicus in one breath, beloved brother, faithful minister, fellow servant? Because the church needs to know that when this man speaks, they are hearing Paul.

LINDA BROWN: The letter is only half the letter, then. The other half has legs. That is what you're saying? Because that still sounds like a lot to hang on "he will tell you the news." A modern reader would call that a footnote.

FRANK EDWARDS: Half with legs is a good way to put it, and I would push it further than a footnote, because we can watch Paul do this on purpose. Open Ephesians six, verses twenty-one and twenty-two, and you find Tychicus commissioned almost word for word, same titles, same "that you may know how I am," same "encourage your hearts." Two letters, the same hands, carried at the same time to churches a few days apart. Acts twenty names him among the trusted men who travelled with Paul and carried the collection for the poor, which is to say he had already been trusted with other people's money over dangerous miles. Second Timothy four, near the end of Paul's life, "Tychicus I have sent to Ephesus." One man, tested for years, binding scattered congregations together by physically walking the same news and the same comfort from one to the next.

FRANK EDWARDS: And Scripture already has an image for what that man is. Proverbs twenty-five, thirteen. "As the cold of snow in the time of harvest, so is a faithful messenger to those who send him, for he refreshes the soul." Picture cutting wheat in the heat of the day and someone puts something cold in your hand. That is what Paul says Tychicus is for, "that he may encourage your hearts." Notice the direction of it. The man in chains is the one sending refreshment outward. Paul is not asking Colossae to comfort him. He is spending his best friend to comfort them.

LINDA BROWN: And that raises the second name, which is the one I actually can't get past. Onesimus, "who is one of you." We covered back on day seventeen who this is, Philemon's runaway, Philemon being a member of this very church. So Paul is sending a fugitive back into the house of the man he robbed, and in the introduction to the whole assembly he just... leaves that out. "Faithful and beloved brother, one of you." Isn't that a little dishonest? Everyone in that room knows what he did.

FRANK EDWARDS: Everyone in the room knows, and that is exactly why the omission is the loudest thing in the verse. In the Roman world a returned fugitive had no rights and every reason to expect punishment, sometimes death. Masters branded such men. They worked them in chains as an example to the others. That is the category Onesimus belongs to when he walks up the road. And Paul, who knows all of it, who is writing the short letter to Philemon in the very same sitting to deal with the debt, introduces him to the church with the word adelphos. That is the plain word for a sibling by blood, the word you use for the brother you grew up with, and Paul sets it on Onesimus in nearly the same sentence he set it on Tychicus. A free man and an enslaved man, described in the same terms, placed on the same shelf. In Philemon the language is still climbing. "No longer as a slave, but better than a slave, a beloved brother." Here in Colossians it has finished climbing. The old category is not corrected. It is gone. And this is what I find staggering, that the church receives its grand theology of Christ over every power, and then watches that theology walk through the door on two legs, in a man they are now bound to receive as family.

LINDA BROWN: "Brother" was just what Christians called each other, though. Every letter, everybody's a brother. So you're building a whole doctrine on Paul being polite. Sell me on why that word is heavier here than it is in verse seven.

FRANK EDWARDS: The weight is in the word next to it. Agapētos. Beloved. Now, the English tells you it means loved, which is true and not very useful. What the word carries is the sense of someone who is the object of settled, chosen affection, the one you have set your heart on, and the place you have to hear it from is the Jordan River. "This is my beloved Son." The Father speaks that word over Jesus at his baptism, and Paul takes the same word and speaks it over a runaway slave. Has Onesimus earned it? He has done the opposite. He receives it because he is in Christ, and this is what theologians call union with Christ. Everything that is true of the Son begins to be spoken over the people hidden in him. Beloved is not Onesimus's record. It is Christ's standing, given away.

FRANK EDWARDS: And it is not free in the sense of costing nothing. Read the letter that travelled in the same bag. Paul tells Philemon, "if he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge it to my account." One man absorbs the debt so another can be received without shame. You know that shape. That is the cross. Christ takes the ledger of what you owe and writes his own name across the top of it, and you are received not as a servant on probation but as a son. Jacob the deceiver becomes Israel. Rahab the outsider ends up in the line of the Messiah. The prodigal gets a robe and a ring before he finishes his speech. God has been doing this reversal since Genesis, and Onesimus is one more name on a very long list.

LINDA BROWN: [short pause] There is a name in my head right now. Someone who did something, and I have quietly filed them away, and I am good at it, I can be in the same room and be perfectly pleasant and never let them back in. And what you're describing costs me that. It costs me the wall.

FRANK EDWARDS: The wall. Which is why I want you to see the room from Onesimus's side for a moment, because the courage in this passage is not only Philemon's. Onesimus has to walk in. He has to stand in front of people who know exactly what he did, in a city where he could legally be branded for it, and read aloud from a scroll that calls him beloved while they decide whether to believe it. He can do that for one reason. Christ has already made him a new man before Colossae has said a word. And the church can open its arms for the same reason, in reverse. They were received while they were still enemies. Paul said that to them in chapter one, "you who were once alienated and hostile in mind." That is where the strength for the door comes from. Not from working up warmth toward the person who hurt you, but from remembering the terms on which you got in.

LINDA BROWN: Which brings up the other man, because I don't want to skip him now. Tychicus travels weeks on a bad road so a church can hear how a friend is actually doing, face to face. And the way most of us handle a friend who has gone quiet is a thumbs-up on a message they sent three weeks ago. Paul sent a person. Not a memo.

FRANK EDWARDS: A person, because hearts are encouraged by presence and honest words, and information alone has never done that for anybody. And this is where I want to go back to where you started us, the fugitive and the scroll that should not be in the same bag. What closes that gap? One word does. Beloved. It is spoken over the letter's carrier and over the letter's Lord, and in Christ it turns out to be the same word meaning the same thing. Isaiah says, "How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news." Two pairs of tired feet on the road to Colossae, one of them belonging to a man who by every human measure should be running the other way. That is what the good news looks like when it walks.

LINDA BROWN: Hold that next to your week. There is someone in it you could greet warmly before you feel ready to, and there is someone gone quiet who needs a person and not a notification. Which one is God putting in front of you today? And when the wall goes up, remember the terms you got in on.

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