The Crossover Cameo--March 4, 2021

 The Crossover Cameo--March 4, 2021

"He [Tychicus] is coming with Onesimus, the faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you. They will tell you about everything here." [Colossians 4:9]

The church-nerd in me is geeking out here, because this is quite probably a New Testament crossover cameo moment, and those are pretty rare and extremely cool.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  First, let's talk a bit of pop culture.  Every generation, and just about every genre of storytelling, has its spin-offs.  In the late 1800s, the success of Tom Sawyer meant the world got the spin-off/sequel that was Mark Twain's classic, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."  Happy Days spun off Laverne and Shirley, Joanie Loves Chachi, and oddly enough, Mork and Mindy.  Cheers spun-off Frasier.  Law and Order had a million spin-offs.  And of course both the universes of Star Trek and Star Wars have seen sequels, reboots, spin-offs, and more.  And if you're a fan of any one of those shows, it's really cool when a character from one show makes a guest cameo appearance on another.  When (spoiler alert!) Luke Skywalker shows up on The Mandalorian, all the internet reverberates with giddy excitement.  When Woody Harrelson would make a guest appearance on Frasier, we ate up the nostalgia for the old gang around the bar at Cheers.  It was always a cool thing to see characters interconnect in ways that didn't usually happen--it made these characters seem a little more alive, a little more three-dimensional, to see them interact with one another in different settings, I guess.  

That's harder to do in the Bible, honestly, because many of the different books of the Bible were written in vastly different eras of time, so that you can't have Noah talking with King David, or Paul having a beer with Moses as they discuss the finer points of the Law.  Just can't happen a lot of the time.  (And when you do get moments like that, like, say, Moses and Elijah making cameo appearances on the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus, you know that someone has bent the rules of time and space and life and death to make it happen, so it's got to be pretty important.)  It's even harder to see one of those "cameo" moments in one of Paul's epistles, because, well, because they're not stories but letters, and people only rarely get mentioned by name in multiple epistles.

But this is one of those times--and if we're talking about people it appears we're talking about, it's a pretty cool thing.  We very likely have a crossover cameo in the person named "Onesimus." Here's the short version of that backstory.  In one of Paul's shortest letters, a personal letter to a man named Philemon, Paul writes to his friend Philemon, a man who had enslaved another man named Onesimus.  Funny thing--both Philemon and Onesimus became Christians.  In fact, Onesimus may well have become a Christian when he escaped and ran away and somehow made his way to Paul himself!  Anyway, Paul wrote a letter, in our New Testament, in which he basically guilt trips Philemon into freeing Onesimus, and basically saying, "I could press you on this further, but I'm going to ask you kindly now to do the right thing and set him free, so that he can be in your life as a brother in Christ and not as a slave.  I'm giving you the chance to do the right thing without me making a thing out of this. Your move, Phil."  And in confidence that Philemon will do what Paul is clearly pushing him to do, Paul sends Onesimus back to Philemon, trusting that he will release him from slavery.  What an act of faith--on Onesimus' part, for sure!

Well, the difficult thing about a bunch of letters (which is what our New Testament is) is that you only get half of the conversation at best, and only a glimpse of what has happened or will happen next.  There's no sequel or spin-off show, "Philemon and Onesimus," where we find out that they became roommates with wacky misadventures a la "Laverne and Shirley" or "Mork and Mindy." We don't get so much as a "Nanu nanu" at the end of Philemon to find out how things turned out.  The life-stories of at least Philemon and Onesimus hang in the balance here, and we don't get to find out what happened when Onesimus finally went back to the man who had enslaved him.

Except... here at the end of Colossians, it sure seems like we've got the same man mentioned.  Paul is sending someone named Onesimus along with the fellow Tychicus we met yesterday, as they deliver Paul's letter.  And in just a little bit, we'll get another name, "Archippus," who shows up in that other letter to Philemon, too.  So there is a good amount of evidence that we're talking about the same Onesimus here.  We can't know for sure when each of these was written, and there are no dates stamped on any of these letters--the letters themselves only give the indication that both were written at times (or the same time period) when Paul was imprisoned or under house arrest.  But there is a strong indication here that this Onesimus is not enslaved, but free to go where Paul sends him in this verse.  There is, in other words, reason to believe that ol' Philemon saw the light and set Onesimus free.  There was no way that Paul the lone apostle was going to end the institution of slavery overnight, but he could use his influence and leverage his relationship to try and get at least Onesimus set free.  And if that worked... maybe from there another person would hear the story and realize that they needed to release their slaves... and maybe another and another.  We can't know for sure, this side of glory, but there is every reason to believe that in this momentary cameo of a reference to Onesimus we get the sequel we were after: we get to see that Philemon did release his slave and received him as a brother in Christ, rather than a possession to be owned.  At least, we can hope.

I know--some part of me wishes we had something more definitive, something chiseled in stone or verified by eyewitnesses who then notarized their testimonies.  But sometimes in this life, hope is all we have to go on... and sometimes, it turns out that such a slender hope is enough.

May it be so for us as well.  May you, in this day, be given hope enough to see a glimpse of how a moment of goodness and truth, offered up to God in faith, ripples out and leaves marks on the world for the better.

Lord God, let us be useful in bringing good to someone else's life today, and let us somewhere along the way be given a glimpse of how you use that good.