'I commend unto you Phoebe our sister, who is a servant
of the Church that is at Cenchrea: 2. That ye receive her
in the Lord, worthily of the Saints, and that ye assist
her in whatsover matter she may have need of you: for she
herself hath been a succourer of many, and of mine own
self.'--ROMANS xvi. 1, 2 (R.V.).
This is an outline picture of an else wholly unknown person. She,
like most of the other names mentioned in the salutations in this
chapter, has had a singular fate. Every name, shadowy and unreal as
it is to us, belonged to a human life filled with hopes and fears,
plunged sometimes in the depths of sorrows, struggling with anxieties
and difficulties; and all the agitations have sunk into forgetfulness
and calm. There is left to the world an immortal remembrance, and
scarcely a single fact associated with the undying names.
Note the person here disclosed.
A little rent is made in the dark curtain through which we see as
with an incandescent light concentrated for a moment upon her, one of
the many good women who helped Paul, as their sisters had helped
Paul's Master, and who thereby have won, little as either Paul or she
thought it, an eternal commemoration. Her name is a purely idolatrous
one, and stamps her as a Greek, and by birth probably a worshipper of
Apollo. Her Christian associations were with the Church at Cenchrea,
the port of Corinth, of which little Christian community nothing
further is known. But if we take into account the hideous
immoralities of Corinth, we shall deem it probable that the port,
with its shifting maritime population, was, like most seaports, a
soil in which goodness was hard put to it to grow, and a church had
much against which to struggle. To be a Christian at Cenchrea can
have been no light task. Travellers in Egypt are told that Port Said
is the wickedest place on the face of the earth; and in Phoebe's home
there would be a like drift of disreputables of both sexes and of all
nationalities. It was fitting that one good woman should be recorded
as redeeming womanhood there. We learn of her that she was a
'servant,' or, as the margin preferably reads, a 'deaconess of the
Church which is at Cenchrea'; and in that capacity, by gentle
ministrations and the exhibition of purity and patient love, as well
as by the gracious administration of material help, had been a
'succourer of many.' There is a whole world of unmentioned kindnesses
and a life of self-devotion hidden away under these few words.
Possibly the succour which she administered was her own gift. She may
have been rich and influential, or perhaps she but distributed the
Church's bounty; but in any case the gift was sweetened by the
giver's hand, and the succour was the impartation of a woman's
sympathy more than the bestowment of a donor's gift. Sometime or
other, and somehow or other, she had had the honour and joy of
helping Paul, and no doubt that opportunity would be to her a crown
of service. She was now on the point of taking the long journey to
Rome on her own business, and the Apostle bespeaks for her help from
the Roman Church 'in whatsoever matter she may have need of you,' as
if she had some difficult affair on hand, and had no other friends in
the city. Possibly then she was a widow, and perhaps had had some
lawsuit or business with government authorities, with whom a word
from some of her brethren in Rome might stand her in good stead.
Apparently she was the bearer of this epistle, which would give her a
standing at once in the Roman Church, and she came among them with a
halo round her from the whole-hearted commendation of the Apostle.
Mark the lessons from this little picture.
We note first the remarkable illustration here given of the power of
the new bond of a common faith. The world was then broken up into
sections, which were sometimes bitterly antagonistic and at others
merely rigidly exclusive. The only bond of union was the iron fetter
of Rome, which crushed the people, but did not knit them together.
But here are Paul the Jew, Phoebe the Greek, and the Roman readers of
the epistle, all fused together by the power of the divine love that
melted their hearts, and the common faith that unified their lives.
The list of names in this chapter, comprising as it does men and
women of many nationalities, and some slaves as well as freemen, is
itself a wonderful testimony of the truth of Paul's triumphant
exclamation in another epistle, that in Christ there is 'neither Jew
nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female.'
The clefts have closed, and the very line of demarcation is
obliterated; and these clefts were deeper than any of which we
moderns have had experience. It remains something like a miracle that
the members of Paul's churches could ever be brought together, and
that their consciousness of oneness could ever overpower the
tremendous divisive forces. We sometimes wonder at their bickerings;
we ought rather to wonder at their unity, and be ashamed of the
importance which we attach to our infinitely slighter mutual
disagreements. The bond that was sufficient to make the early
Christians all one in Christ Jesus seems to have lost its binding
power to-day, and, like an used-up elastic band, to have no clasping
grip left in it.
Another thought which we may connect with the name of Phoebe is the
characteristic place of women in Christianity.
The place of woman amongst the Jews was indeed free and honourable as
compared with her position either in Greece or Rome, but in none of
them was she placed on the level of man, nor regarded mainly in the
aspect of an equal possessor of the same life of the Spirit. But a
religion which admits her to precisely the same position of a
supernatural life as is granted to man, necessarily relegates to a
subordinate position all differences of sex as it does all other
natural distinctions. The women who ministered to Jesus of their
substance, the two sisters of Bethany, the mourners at Calvary, the
three who went through the morning twilight to the tomb, were but the
foremost conspicuous figures in a great company through all the ages
who have owed to Jesus their redemption, not only from the slavery of
sin, but from the stigma of inferiority as man's drudge or toy. To
the world in which Paul lived it was a strange, new thought that
women could share with man in his loftiest emotions. Historically the
emancipation of one half of the human race is the direct result of
the Christian principle that all are one in Christ Jesus. In modern
life the emancipation has been too often divorced from its one sure
basis, and we have become familiar with the sight of the 'advanced'
women who have advanced so far as to have lost sight of the Christ to
whom they owe their freedom. The picture of Phoebe in our text might
well be commended to all such as setting forth the most womanlike
ideal. She was 'a succourer of many.' Her ministry was a ministry of
help; and surely such gentle ministry is that which most befits the
woman's heart and comes most graciously to the woman's fingers.
Phoebe then may well represent to us the ministry of succour in this
world of woe and need. There is ever a cry, even in apparently
successful lives, for help and a helper. Man's clumsy hand is but too
apt to hurt where it strives to soothe, and nature itself seems to
devolve on the swifter sympathies and more delicate perceptions of
woman the joy of binding up wounded spirits. In the verses
immediately following our text we read of another woman to whom was
entrusted a more conspicuous and direct form of service. Priscilla
'taught Apollos the way of God more perfectly,' and is traditionally
represented as being united with her husband in evangelistic work.
But it is not merely prejudice which takes Phoebe rather than
Priscilla as the characteristic type of woman's special ministry. We
must remember our Lord's teaching, that the giver of 'a cup of cold
water in the name of a prophet' in some measure shares in the
prophet's work, and will surely share in the prophet's reward. She
who helped Paul must have entered into the spirit of Paul's labours;
and He to whom all service that is done from the same motive is one
in essence, makes no difference between him whose thirsty lips drink
and her whose loving hand presents the cup of cold water. 'Small
service is true service while it lasts.' Paul and Phoebe were one in
ministry and one in its recompense.
We may further see in her a foreshadowing of the reward of lowly
service, though it be only the service of help. Little did Phoebe
dream that her name would have an eternal commemoration of her
unnoticed deeds of kindness and aid, standing forth to later
generations and peoples of whom she knew nothing, as worthy of
eternal remembrance. For those of us who have to serve unnoticed and
unknown, here is an instance and a prophecy which may stimulate and
encourage. 'Surely I will never forget any of their works' is a
gracious promise which the most obscure and humble of us may take to
heart, and sustained by which, we may patiently pursue a way on which
there are 'none to praise and very few to love.' It matters little
whether our work be noticed or recorded by men, so long as we know
that it is written in the Lamb's book of life and that He will one
day proclaim it 'before the Father in heaven and His angels.'