“Letter from an Ephesian Jail”: a sermon for the SECOND SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS (04 JANUARY 2026)
Other people’s mail. I don’t know about you, but I really enjoy
reading other people’s mail. Just to be
clear, I mean to say that I enjoy reading letters that some people (or, more
often, their literary executors) have chosen to
publish for public consumption. Whether
it be the correspondence of Henri Nouwen, J.R.R. Tolkien or Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, I always find it enriching to read these personal dispatches, which
were most probably not composed with their eventual publication in mind. All this to say that a good part of the New
Testament is made up of just this type of communication. Paul’s letter to Philippi is a brief,
personal piece of writing, composed in a buoyant and affectionate spirit and
addressed to people whom Paul knew well and whom he obviously loved (cf. Phil.
4.1).
Two
letters about gospel-justice. This
letter – dictated in a Roman jail, perhaps located in Ephesus – shares several
characteristics with a more recent letter, dispatched “from a Birmingham Jail”[1]
in April of 1963, after Martin Luther King, Jr. had been arrested during a direct-action
campaign. Indeed, in his letter, and in
response to criticism from Alabama (white) clergy that he was “an outsider
intruding on their turf”, MLK Jr. draws a comparison between his campaign of
non-violent activism with the activity of the author of Philippians:
“…just as the
Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus
Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am
compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown.”[2]
Like Paul, MLK Jr. worked tirelessly for a cause to
which he had dedicated his life – the cause of civil rights for African
Americans. Paul, for his part, and
following his Damascus-road experience, had dedicated himself to what he calls
“the work of the gospel” (cf. Phil. 1.3-7), the strange-but-good news
of how the God of Israel had proven himself faithful to his promises, i.e. shown
himself to be “just/righteous” (cf. Rom. 1.16-17). Through the death and resurrection of his
Son, Yahweh had demonstrated his faithful justice (i.e.
“righteousness”) to both his people and the nations of the world. Indeed, for the past five centuries, debates
have raged in certain quarters of the Church as to the precise meaning of both
Paul’s “gospel” and the “justice/righteousness[3]
of God”, as well as how these two concepts are related (cf. Phil. 3.7-9).[4] However, when we travel back behind the
Protestant Reformation to Paul’s world – the world of the first century – we
discover that these notions of “gospel” and “justice” had quite different – and
shocking! – connotations. Indeed, just
what Paul meant by “the gospel” goes a long way to explaining why the return
address on his letter to Philippi was that of an imperial prison. Yes, “the work of the gospel” amounted
to nothing less than – to quote contemporary historian Tom Holland – placing “a
depth charge which exploded underneath the fabric of Roman society”[5]
and the imperial ideology that legitimated the systemic injustice of the empire
(and whose reverberations are still being felt). Paul’s understanding of the gospel also
serves to explain why Paul’s life, like that of MLK Jr., would end violently. And yet, there remains something mysterious
about the letter “to the Philippians” – the author, though he be chained and
facing possible death, is bubbling over with…joy…
Paul’s
absurd gospel. Paul’s
“gospel” was not in fact “a formula for getting to heaven”. Rather, the gospel that Paul proclaimed was
“news” about something that had happened to Jesus – he had been
crucified, resurrected and enthroned as Lord of the world (cf. 1 Cor. 15.1-4;
Rom. 1.1-5). In the world of the first
century (and often in our own), this message was patently absurd. In the Roman empire, the term “gospel” meant one
of two things – either a battle had been won by the legions, or a new emperor had
been crowned as “Lord” of the Roman world; indeed, it often meant both
things, with the former resulting in the latter. The irreducible content of Paul’s
message about Jesus demanded that his audience undergo what (the late) New
Testament specialist Richard B. Hays called “a conversion of the imagination”.[6] As Paul himself admitted to the Christians in
Corinth, the message of a crucified Lord is an oxymoron, “foolishness”[7]
to Greeks and a scandal to Jews (1 Cor. 1.18ff). Paul proudly proclaimed that – against all
expectations and conventions – a crucified Jew (a common enough phenomenon) had
been raised from death and had ascended to “the right hand of (the one true)
God”[8]
and now reigned as Lord of the cosmos. Ergo,
“every knee must bow and every tongue confess” this new state of affairs (cf.
Phil. 2.10-11). In God’s strange
providence, Paul’s gospel did indeed accomplish its mission of converting
imaginations and lives (cf. 1 Cor. 1.21; 2.1-5).[9] Paul’s “Christ-communities” – like the one in
Philippi – were composed of women and men who believed that this news was
indeed good and who strove to live in the light of the disorienting
new world which had been created by the resurrection and its aftermath. If Jesus was Lord, that meant that
Ceasar’s claim to that title was now meaningless.
Subversive
news. Indeed, Paul’s gospel was not
only logically absurd, it was also politically subversive. Jesus’ crucifixion had not been a lynching,
after all; rather, it had been sanctioned by the imperial justice system. As the vanquished members of Spartacus’ slave
revolt (71 BCE) discovered, crucifixion was the Roman way of keeping
(as-yet-cooperative) slaves in their place.[10] The message was clear: victims of crucifixion
had simply gotten what they deserved for having had the hubris to rebel against
the divinely sanctioned order[11]
that gave Roman masters the power of life and death over those whose lives were
their property, to be exploited at will.
For Paul to grant the title of “Lord” (a title claimed by the emperors)
to a crucified criminal was, to put it mildly, an outrage. It was to discredit the very system of
“justice” that sustained the empire.
Liberating
news. Indeed, Paul’s gospel was
absurd, subversive and…liberating. If
Jesus, who had been crucified by the empire, had been raised from death and now
offered the life of the Age to Come to those who followed him, then one could
inhabit an alternative kingdom, one could live a life whose terms would be
dictated, not by the imperial machine, but rather by the reign of the
crucified-and-risen One. This was a way
for imperial victims to achieve victory; a means for them, to borrow the
language of the book of Revelation, to “overcome” (cf. Rev. 2.7, passim).
Divine
justice. So, that was Paul’s
gospel. What about his notion of justice? The “justice” introduced by the gospel is the
result of opening oneself to the embrace of the Creator’s faithful love (i.e.
God’s justice), and then looking at all those around you and realizing that
they too have received the same embrace.
Paul’s communities were surprising places where ethnic identities, class
distinctions – even traditional gender roles! – were radically relativized (cf.
Gal. 3.28; Col. 3.11). Even slaves
were welcome to worship beside their believing masters in Paul’s
Christ-communities, and, in his letter “to Philemon”, we see Paul beginning to
subtly undermine the very idea of a Christian master “owning” a Christian
slave.[12] The evil fortress of slavery was not by any
means destroyed by Paul, but in the New Testament, we can see cracks beginning
to appear in the foundation (cf. 1 Cor. 7.21-24; 12.13). Historian Tom Holland has reminded us how the
Romans viewed/treated their slaves; when read alongside his accounts, the New
Testament shows itself to be light-years ahead of its time with its vision of
the dignity of all people, be they “slave or free”. Indeed, I would go so far as to claim that
the work of our first-century apostle made the struggle of our
twentieth-century activist plausible.
Paul’s letter “to the Philippians” helped pave the way for MLK’s Letter
from a Birmingham Jail. As MLK said:
“Wherever the
early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and
immediately sought to convict them for being "disturbers of the
peace" and "outside agitators." But they went on with the
conviction that they were "a colony of heaven" (cf. Phil. 3.20) and
had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in
commitment…They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and
gladiatorial contest.”
How
should we then live? How do we
function as a community in such a way that true justice can flourish? Listen to Paul:
“…this is
my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and
full insight to help you to determine what really matters, so that
in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the
harvest of righteousness (i.e. justice) that comes through Jesus
Christ...” (Phil. 1.9-11)
As we all know, much of the world’s injustice flows
from the prideful domination of “the weak” by “the strong”, whether that be in
the context of global politics or of our own household. In Philippians chapter 2, we find a
fantastical poem (hymn?) about the pre-existent Jesus choosing to become
incarnate and thereby undergo a “double descent” – first, to adopt the status
of a slave, and, second, to die the death of a (rebellious) slave, i.e. to
undergo crucifixion (cf. Phil. 2.6-11).
Only afterwards can Jesus then re-ascend and reclaim his divine
prerogatives and receive “the name that is above every other name”. This is an amazing turning-inside-out of all
conventional ideas about God/the gods.
This Christological vision is a complete deconstruction of the notion of
power in the ancient world (indeed, in the world at any given moment). What is even more bracing is that Paul
exhorts us to adopt the mindset (Phil. 2.5) that inspired Jesus to “empty
himself”.
Deconstructing
normality. It must be
said, the New Testament is chock-full of irony, paradox and subversive
rhetoric. The New Testament’s rhetorical
objective is to deconstruct the value-system of its world – a system based on
honour (i.e. prestige), power and glory.
The underbelly of these values – to be avoided at all costs – consisted
of shame, weakness and disrepute. The 19th-century
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844—1900) went so far as to call
Christianity a “slave religion” that promulgated a “morality of
resentment”. For Nietzsche, Christianity
was the religion of the weak, and he despised it for precisely this
reason. He called for a “revaluation of
all values” so that humanity could free itself from this “weak” morality and
attain its full potential, that of becoming the “over-man”, the Übermensch. In the 20th century, we saw what
happened when such ideas were taken up by people with the power to “engineer”
society according to their whims and prejudices… Of course, today’s values are much the same
as those of the ancient world – who are we invited to admire, to “follow”, to
take as examples? Answer: the rich, the
powerful, the successful. It’s the
same old story. Actually, the New
Testament did for its world what Nietzsche would have liked to do for 19th-century
Europe – it completely transformed the values of its society. To quote historian Tom Holland once again –
in the centuries before Christianity was legitimized by the imperial
authorities, the Church created a “welfare state” within its structures which
served as a refuge for the most vulnerable subjects of the Roman empire, those
people who had nowhere else to turn.
Imitatio
Pauli. Having instructed the
Philippians to imitate the Christ’s radical “self-emptying”[13],
Paul then makes an even bolder move – he invites them to imitate him
(cf. Phil. 3.17; 1 Cor. 11.1). Paul made
it his life’s goal to “become like Jesus”.
In Philippians chapter 2, Paul shared the hymn which described Jesus’
self-imposed humiliation through his incarnation and death on the cross
(2.6-11). In chapter 3, as he warns the
Christians of Philippi against Judaizers (who insisted that circumcision was
necessary in order to become a Christian), Paul describes the “confidence in
the flesh” that he had previously as a Pharisee (3.4-6). Paul tells the Philippians that he has
gone through an emptying process similar to that of Jesus – indeed, he “has
lost all things on Christ’s account” (3.8).
Moreover, he considers all the things that had previously given him
confidence and status to be “excrement”[14]
and a liability. Paul turned his back on
each and every prerogative that his religious pedigree had given him. Paul has done this because he had discovered,
in Jesus, the path to true glory.
The way up is the way down. Just
as Christ descended to the lowest depth of shame and pain, only to be exalted
to the highest place (2.9), so Paul is “striving towards the mark for the prize
of God’s call upward” (3.14). For Paul,
Jesus is the standard of human “completeness” (i.e. “perfection”), the one
member of the human race who has been exalted to share in the very glory of God
(cf. Rom. 3.23; 2 Cor. 4.6).
Slave of
all. The hymn in Philippians 2
describes Jesus making himself a slave, and this is precisely how Paul
identifies himself at the opening of the letter – the slave of the
Messiah.[15] Paul has gone from being a rising
academic/clerical star among the Pharisees to being the slave of the One in
whose condemnation as a blasphemer many of his former colleagues had been
complicit. The slave of a crucified
heretic – that’s a long way to fall (from our world’s upside-down
perspective). However, from Paul’s right
side-up vantage point, it’s a cause for “boasting” (cf. Gal. 6.14). Paul is a free “slave”, he has been liberated
from his slavery to self, in order to serve Jesus, and everyone else for his
sake (cf. 2 Cor. 4.5; 1 Cor. 9.19). Such
is his desire to imitate his divine master, that Paul even renounces his own
rights as an apostle (i.e. he supports himself financially while serving the
very Christ-communities he had founded: 1 Cor. 9.1-27) and makes himself “all
things to all people”.
Resolution. To quote Martin Luther King, Jr. once again:
“…human
progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the
tireless efforts and persistent work of people willing to be coworkers with God
(cf. 1 Cor. 3.9)...”
So, how to be a community of gospel-justice in this
new year? How to experience life
together in a manner that both MLK and Paul would approve of? “Let the same mind be in you that was in
Jesus” – let us serve our God who became a slave, and each other, with humility
and gratitude. And – this is the New
Testament’s strange promise – as we go about this humble, selfless work, we
will experience true, unquenchable…joy. May
it be so.
[1] https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html (accessed December 31, 2025).
[2] cf. Ac. 16.19-21, 35-39; 17.6-7.
[3] Gr: dikaiosyne. For Paul’s Hellenic contemporaries, Dikaiosyne
was the goddess of justice, a daughter of Zeus.
[4] In some traditions, they are nearly synonymous; e.g.
the gospel = God justifying sinners.
[5] https://youtu.be/1oVzFmt_SGw?si=xrxPPx5PYaXHNIJ7 (accessed December 31, 2025).
[7] Gr: moria, moros, moron.
[8] What any emperor might expect his subjects to believe
about him upon his death, or often enough, before it – apotheosis:
“becoming a god”.
[9] Cf. C.S. Lewis’ experience of having his
imagination “baptized” by the works of George MacDonald.
[10] Following their defeat by Crassus,
thousands of slaves were crucified along the Appian Way leading to Rome. Imperial propaganda at its finest!
[11] I.e. by the gods of Rome.
[12] Paul’s “household codes” notwithstanding (cf. Eph.
6.5-9; Col. 3.22—4.1).
[13] Gr: kenosis.
[14] Gr: skybalon.
[15] Phil. 1.1; cf. Rom. 1.1; Gal. 1.10; Titus 1.1.
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