THE APOSTLE'S POSITION AND CIRCUMSTANCES
PHILIPPIANS i. 12-20
Disloyal "brethren"--Interest of the paragraph--The victory of
patience--The Praetorian sentinel--Separatism, and how it was met--St
Paul's secret--His "earnest expectation"--"Christ magnified"--"In my
body"
St Paul has spoken his affectionate greeting to the Philippians, and
has opened to them the warm depths of his friendship with them in the
Lord. What he feels towards them "in the heart of Christ Jesus," what
he prays for them in regard of the growth and fruit of their new life,
all has been expressed. It is time now to meet their loving anxieties
with some account of his own position, and the circumstances of the
mission in the City. Through this passage let us follow him now; we
shall find that the quiet picture, full of strong human interest in its
details, is suffused all over with the glory of the presence and the
peace of Christ.
Ver. 12. +Now I wish you to know, brethren, that my position and
circumstances+ (_ta kat eme_, "_the things related to me_") +have come
out+, have resulted, +rather for the progress of the Gospel+ message
and enter-
Ver. 13. prise, than otherwise; +so that my bonds+, my imprisonment,
with its _custodia militaris_, +are become unmistakable+ (_phanerous_)
as being +in Christ+; as due to no social or political crime, but to
the name and cause of the Messiah of Israel, the Saviour of the world.
This is the case in the +whole Praetorium+,[1] in all ranks of the
Imperial Guard, +and among other people in general+ (_tois loipois
pasi_[2]). And
Ver. 14. another result is[3] +that the majority+ (_tous plaionas_)
+of the brethren in the Lord+, the converts of the Roman mission,
+feeling a new confidence in connexion with my bonds+,[4] animated by
the fact of my imprisonment, realizing afresh the glory of the cause
which makes me happy to suffer, +venture more abundantly+, more
frequently, more openly, +fearlessly to speak the Word+, the message of
Christ, of the Cross, of Truth, of Life. There is a drawback in this
Ver. 15. welcome phenomenon: +some indeed actually+ (_kai_) +for envy
and strife, while others as truly+ (_kai_) +for goodwill, are
proclaiming the Christ+. The latter[5]
Ver. 16. are at work thus +from+ motives of love, love to the Lord and
to me His captive Messenger, +knowing+ that on purpose +for the
vindication+ (_apologian_) +of the Gospel I am posted+ (_keimai_, as a
soldier, fixed by his captain's order) here. The former from
Ver. 17. motives of +faction+, partizanship (_eritheia_) in a
self-interested propaganda of their own opinions, +are announcing the
Christ, not purely, thinking+ and meaning +to raise up+ (_egeirein_, so
read) +tribulation for+ me in +my bonds+; as so easily they can do, by
detaching from me many converts who would otherwise gather round me,
and generally by the mortifying thought of their freedom and activity
in contrast to my enforced isolation. Shall I give way to the trial,
and lose patience and peace? Must I? Need
Ver. 18. I? Nay; +what matters it+ (_ti gar_)? Is not the fiery
arrow quenched in Christ for me? Is it not thus nothing to me?
Yes--yet not nothing, after all; for it brings a gain; it spreads the
Gospel so much further; so that to my "What matters it?" I may add,
+Only, in every way+, fair or foul, +Christ is being announced; and in
this I rejoice, aye, and rejoice I shall+; the future can only bring me
fresh reasons for a joy which lies wholly in the triumphs of my Lord,
and can only bring fresh blessings to
Ver. 19. me His vassal. +For I know that I shall find+ (_moi_) this
experience +result in salvation+, in the access of saving grace to my
soul, +through your supplication+ for me, which will be quickened by
your knowledge of my trials, +and+ through a resulting +full supply+
(_epichoregia_: the word suggests a supply which is ample) +of the
Spirit of Jesus Christ+; a developed presence in me of the Holy Ghost,
coming from the exalted Saviour, and revealing Him, and applying Him.
Such blessing will be exactly
Ver. 20. +according to my eager expectation+ (_apokaradokia_) and
hope, that in no respect shall I be disappointed (_aiochunthesomai_:
with the "shame" of a miscalculation), +but that in all outspokenness+
(_parresia_) of testimony, whether in word or deed, +as always, so also
now, Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether by means of life or
by means of death+.
The passage is full of various points of interest. It is interesting,
as we saw in our first chapter, in regard of the historical criticism
of the Epistle. It gives a strong suggestion (I follow Lightfoot in
the remark) in favour of dating the Epistle early in the "two years" of
Acts xxviii. For it implies that the fact of the Apostle's
imprisonment was a powerful stimulant to the zeal of the Roman
Christians; and this is much more likely to have been the case when the
imprisonment was still a new fact to them, than later. St Paul's
arrival and first settlement, in the character (totally new in Rome, so
far as we know) of a "prisoner of Jesus Christ," would of itself give a
quickening shock, so to speak, to the believing community, which had
suffered, so we gather, from a certain decadence of zeal. But when he
had been some time amongst them, and the conditions of the "hired
house" had become usual and familiar in their thoughts, it would be
otherwise; whatever else about St Paul might rekindle their ardour, the
mere fact of his imprisoned state would hardly do so.
The passage is further interesting as it indicates one particular
direction of the Apostle's influence upon the pagans around him. It
was felt, primarily, "in all the Praetorium," that is to say, in the
large circle of the Imperial Life-guards.[6] We gather here, with
reasonable certainty, that from the Life-guards were supplied, one by
one, "the soldiers that kept him" (Acts xxviii. 16); mounting guard
over him in turn, and fastened to him by the long chain which clasped
at one end the wrist of the prisoner, at the other that of the
sentinel. It needs only a passing effort of imagination to understand
something of the exquisite trial to every sensibility which such a
custody must have involved, even where the conditions were favourable.
Let the guardian be ever so considerate and civil, it would be a
terrible ordeal to be literally never alone, night or day; and too
often, doubtless, the guardian would be not at all complaisant. To
many a man, certainly to any man of the refined mental and moral nature
of St Paul, this slow fire of indescribable annoyance would be far
worse to endure than a great and sudden infliction of pain, even to
death. It is a noble triumph of grace when such a test is well borne,
and turned by patience into an occasion for God. When Nicholas Ridley,
for a long year and a half (1554-5) was committed at Oxford to the
vexatious domestic custody of the mayor and his bigoted wife, Edmund
and Margaret Irish, it must have been nothing less than a slow torture
to one whose fine nature had been used for years to the conditions of
civil and ecclesiastical dignity and of a large circle of admirable
friends. And it was a spiritual victory, second only to that of his
glorious martyrdom (Oct. 16, 1555), when the close of that dreary time
found the once obdurate and vexatious Mrs Irish won by Ridley's life to
admiration and attachment, and also, as it would seem, to scriptural
convictions.[7] But it was a still nobler result from a still more
persistent and penetrating trial when St Paul so lived and so witnessed
in the presence of this succession of Roman soldiers that the whole
Guard was pervaded with a knowledge of his true character and position,
evidently in the sense of interest and of respect. It must have been a
course of _unbroken_ consistency of conduct as well as of openness of
witness. Had he only sometimes, only rarely, only once or twice,
failed in patience, in kindness, in the quiet dignity of the Gospel,
the whole succession of his keepers would have felt the effect, as the
story passed from one to another. As a fact, the "keeping power of
Christ" was always with him, and always used by him, and the men went
out one after another to say that here was a prisoner such as never was
before. Here was no conspirator or criminal; his "bonds" were
evidently (ver. 13) due only to his devotion to a God whom he would not
renounce, and whose presence with him and power over him were visibly
shewn in the divine peace and love of his hourly life.
We can please ourselves if we will by imagining many a scene for the
exercise of that influence. Sometimes the Saint would be left much
alone with the Praetorian. Sometimes a long stream of visitors would
flow in, and for a whole day perhaps the two would scarcely exchange a
word; the Guardsman would only watch and listen, if he cared to do so.
Sometimes it would be a case where ignorant and ribald blasphemies
would have to be met in the power of the peace of God. Sometimes a
really wistful heart would at once betray its presence under the Roman
cuirass. Perhaps the man would attack the Apostle with ridicule, or
with enquiries, after some long day of religious debate, such as that
recorded in Acts xxviii., and the silent night would see St Paul
labouring on to win this soul also.
"These ears were dull to Grecian speech;
This heart more dull to aught but sin;
Yet the great Spirit bade thee reach,
Wake, change, exalt, the soul within:
I've heard; I know; thy Lord, ev'n He,
JESUS, hath look'd from heaven on me.
* * * * *
"A Christian, yes--for ever now
A Christian: so our Leader keep
My faltering heart: to Him I bow,
His, whether now I wake or sleep:
In peace, in battle. His:--the day
Breaks in the east: oh, once more pray!" [8]
The passage before us is interesting again because of the light it
throws on the very early rise of a separatist movement in the Roman
mission-church, and on the principles on which St Paul met it.
Extremely painful and perplexing the phenomenon was, though by no means
new in its nature to St Paul, as we well know. It was a trouble
altogether from within, not from without. The men who "preached Christ
of envy and strife" bore evidently the Christian name as openly as
their sincerer brethren. They were baptized members of the community
of the Gospel. And their evangelization was such that St Paul was able
to say, "Christ is preached"; though this does not mean, assuredly,
that there were no doubtful elements mingled in the preaching. Now for
them, as for all the Roman Christians, he had every reason to regard
himself as the Lord's appointed centre of labour and of order. There
he was, the divinely commissioned Apostle of Christ, at once the
Teacher and the Leader of the Gentile Churches; only a few short years
before he had written to these very people, in his inspired and
commissioned character, the greatest of the Epistles. Yet now behold a
separation, a schism. That such the movement was we cannot doubt.
These "brethren," he tells us, carried on their missionary efforts in a
way precisely intended to "raise up trouble" for him in his prison.
The least that they would do with that object would be not only to
teach much that he would disapprove of, but to intercept intercourse
between their converts and him; to ignore him altogether as the central
representative of the Church at Rome; to arrange for assemblies, to
administer Baptisms, to practise the Breaking of Bread, wholly apart
from the order and cohesion which he would sanction, and which he had
the fullest right to enjoin. All this was a great evil, a sin,
carrying consequences which might affect the Christian cause far and
wide. Is it not true that no deliberate schism has ever taken place in
the Church where there has not been grievous sin in the matter--on one
side, or, on the other, or on both?
Yet how does the Apostle meet this distressing problem? With all the
large tolerance and self-forgetting patience which come to the wise man
who walks close to God in Christ. No great leader, surely, ever prized
more the benefits of order and cohesion than did St Paul. And where a
fundamental error was in view, as for example that about Justification
in Galatia, no one could meet it more energetically, and with a
stronger sense of authority, than he did. But he "discerned things
that differ." And when, as here, he saw around him men, however
misguided, who were aiding in the "announcement" of the Name and
salvation of Christ, he thought more of the evangelization than of the
breach of coherence, which yet most surely he deplored. He speaks with
perfect candour of the unsound spiritual state of the separatists,
their envy, strife, and partizanship. But he has no anathema for their
methods. He is apparently quite unconscious of the thought that
because he is the one Apostle in Rome grace can be conveyed only
through him; that his authority and commission are necessary to
authenticate teaching and to make ordinances effectual. He would far
rather have order, and he knows that he is its lawful centre. But "the
announcement of Christ" is a thing even more momentous than order. He
cannot stay to speak of that great but inferior benefit, while he
"rejoices, aye, and is going to rejoice," in the diffusion of the Name
and salvation of the Lord.
It is an instructive lesson. Would that in all the after ages the
Church had more watchfully followed this noble precedent! The result
would have been, so I venture to hold, a far truer and stronger
cohesion, in the long run, than we see, alas, around us now.
What was the secret of this happy harmony of the love of order and the
capacity for tolerance in the mind of St Paul? It was a secret as deep
but also as simple as possible; it was the Lord Jesus Christ. Really
and literally, Jesus Christ was the one ruling consideration for St
Paul; not himself, his claims, position, influence, feelings; not even
the Church. To him the Church was inestimably precious, but the Lord
was more. And all his thoughts about work, authority, order, and the
like, were accordingly conditioned and governed by the thought, What
will best promote the glory of the Lord who loved us and gave Himself
for us? If even a separatist propaganda will extend the knowledge of
HIM, His servant can rejoice, not in the separatism, not in the unhappy
spirit which prompted it, but in the extension of the reign of Jesus
Christ in the human hearts which need Him. Surely, even in our own
day, with its immemorial complications of the question of exterior
order, it will tend more than anything else to straighten the crooked
places and level the rough places, if we look, from every side, on the
glory of the blessed Name as our supreme and ruling interest.
This view of the supremacy of the Saviour in the thoughts of St Paul
about the Church leads us to a view, as we close, of that supremacy in
all his thoughts about his own life. Our paragraph ends with the words
which anticipate a great blessing, a new developement of "salvation,"
in the writer's soul, in answer to the believing prayers of the
Philippians; and then comes the thought that this result will carry out
his dearest personal ambition--"that Christ may be magnified in my
body, whether by life or by death." Let us take up those final words
for a simple study, before God.
"According to my eager expectation," my _apokaradokia_, my waiting and
watching, with outstretched head, for some keenly wished-for arrival,
or attainment. Such is this man's thought and feeling with regard to
the "magnification" of Christ through his life and death. It is his
"hope," it is his absorbing "expectation." It is to him the thing with
which he wakes up in the morning, and over which he lingers as he
prepares to sleep at night. It is the animating inner interest which
gives its zest to life. What art is to the ambitious and successful
painter, what literature is to the man who loves it for its own sake
and whose books have begun to take the world, what athletic toil and
triumph is to the youth in his splendid prime, what the fact of
extending and wealth-winning enterprise is to the man conscious of
mercantile capacity--all this, only very much more, is the
"magnification of Christ in his body" to the prisoner who sits, never
alone, in the Roman lodging. It is this which effectually forbids him
ever to find the days dull. Its light falls upon everything; comforts,
trials, days of toil, hours of comparative repose, prospects of life,
prospects of death. It quickens and concentrates all his faculties, as
a great and animating interest always tends to do; it is always present
to his mind as light and heat, to his will as rest and power. It
secures for him the quiet of a great disengagement and liberty from
selfish motives; it continually drives him on, with a force which does
not exhaust him (for it is from above) in the ambition and enterprise
which is for Christ; giving him at once an impulse toward great and
arduous labours, and a patience and loving tact which continually
adjusts itself to the smallest occasions of love and service.
Reader, this is admirable in St Paul. But after all, the ultimate
secret of the noble phenomenon resides not in St Paul but in Jesus
Christ. "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me" (Gal. i. 15, 16).
The man had seen his Saviour with his whole soul. And because of--not
the man who saw but--the Saviour who was seen, behold, the life is
lifted off the pivot of self-will and transferred to that of "the glory
of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The same "revealing" grace can
lift us also. We are not St Pauls; but the Jesus Christ of St Paul is
absolutely the same, in Himself, for us. We will, in His name, place
ourselves in the way of His working, that He may so shew us His fair
countenance that we may _not be able not_ to live, quite really, for
Him as the enthralling Interest of life.
Let us look at the words again: "That Christ may be _magnified_," may
be made great. In what respect? Not in Himself; for He is already
"all in all"; "filling all things"; "higher than the heavens." Such is
He that "no man knoweth the Son but the Father"; the mind of Deity is
alone adequate to comprehend His glory. But He may be
magnified--relatively to those who see Him, or may see Him. To eyes
which find in Christ only a distant and obscure Object, however sacred,
He may be made to occupy the whole field of the soul with His love and
glory. As when the telescope is directed upon the heavens, and some
"cloudy spot" becomes, magnified, a mighty planet perhaps, or perhaps a
universe of starry suns; so it is when through a believer's life
"Christ is magnified" to eyes which watch that life and see the reality
of the power within.
Ah, have we not known such lives ourselves? Has not the Lord been made
very near to us, and very luminous, in the face of father, mother,
brother, sister, friend, or pastor? Have we not seen Him shining large
and near us in their holy activities, and in their blessed sufferings,
shedding His glory through all they were and all they did? He has been
magnified to us by saints in high places, whose dignity and fame have
been to them only so much occasion for the exercise of their "ruling
passion"--the glory of Christ. And He has been magnified to us also by
saints in comfortless cottages, imprisoned upon sick-beds in gloomy
attics, but finding in everything an occasion to experience and to
manifest the power of their Lord. May He make it always our ambition
to be thus His magnifiers. But may He keep it a really pure ambition.
For even this can be distorted into the misery of self-seeking; an
ambition not that Christ may be magnified, but that His magnifier may
be thought "some great one" in the spiritual life.
"In my _body_." Because through the body, and only through it,
practically, can we tell on others for the Lord. Do we speak to them?
Do we write to them? Do we make home comfortable and happy for them?
Do we "meet the glad with joyful smiles and wipe the weeping eyes"? Do
we travel to those who want us? Do we nurse them? Do we think for
them? All has its motives in the regenerate spirit, but all has its
effect through the body. Without brain, eyes, ears, lips, hands,
feet--how could we serve, how could we shine? Our life would have no
articulation to others, nor our death.
"I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye
present _your bodies_ a living sacrifice." So be it, for writer and
for reader. Then blessed will be our life, as day by day brings
ceaseless occasions for the pursuit of our dear ambition--"that Christ
may be magnified."
--------
*** _En holo to praitorio_ (ver. 13).--The word _praitorion_ occurs in
e.g. Matt. xxvii. 27. Acts xxiii. 35, in the sense of the residence of
a great official, regarded as _praetor_, or commander. The A.V. here
evidently reasons from such passages, and takes the word to mean the
residence at Rome of the supreme _praetor_, the Emperor; the
_Palatium_, the vast range of buildings on the Mons Palatinus which has
since given a name to all "palaces." Bishop Lightfoot however has made
it clear (_a_) that such a use at Rome, by Romans, of the word
_Praetorium_ was probably not known; (_b_) that the word _Praetorium_
was a familiar word for the great body of the Imperial Life-guards; and
that it would probably be often so used by the (praetorian) "soldiers
who kept him." On the whole it seems clear that, at Rome, the word
would denote a body, not a place. It never appears as a name for the
great _camp_ of the Praetorians, outside Rome at the east.
[1] See note at the end of this chapter.
[2] The A.V. rendering "in all other _places_" is obviously due to the
belief that _praitorion_ signified a place, not a body of men.
[3] I thus convey the force of _hoste_, across the break we have made
in the original sentence.
[4] Literally perhaps, "relying on my bonds," as a new _ground_ for
their assurance of the goodness of the cause.--It is possible to render
here, "the brethren, _having in the Lord confidence_, are, in view of
my bonds, much more bold," etc. But the rhythm of the Greek is in
favour of our rendering (which is essentially that of A.V. and R.V.).
[5] I adopt here the order of the Greek clauses which is best attested.
[6] See note at the end of this chapter.
[7] I venture to refer to my book, _Bishop Ridley on the Lord's Supper_
(Seeley), pp. 54, 55, 72.
[8] See the close of the volume.
_THE CHRISTIAN'S PEACE AND THE CHRISTIAN'S CONSISTENCY_
O God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just
works do proceed; Give unto Thy servants that peace which the world
cannot give; that both our hearts may be set to obey Thy commandments,
and also that by Thee we being defended from the fear of our enemies
may pass our time in rest and quietness; through the merits of Jesus
Christ our Saviour. Amen.
_The Second Collect at Evening Prayer_.