'Salute Tryphena and Tryphosa, who labour
in the Lord.'--ROMANS xvi. 12.
The number of salutations to members of the Roman Church is
remarkable when we take into account that Paul had never visited it.
The capital drew all sorts of people to it, and probably there had
been personal intercourse between most of the persons here mentioned
and the Apostle in some part of his wandering life. He not only
displays his intimate knowledge of the persons saluted, but his
beautiful delicacy and ingenuity in the varying epithets applied to
them shows how in his great heart and tenacious memory individuals
had a place. These shadowy saints live for ever by Paul's brief
characterisation of them, and stand out to us almost as clearly and
as sharply distinguished as they did to him.
These two, Tryphena and Tryphosa, were probably sisters. That is
rendered likely by their being coupled together here, as well as by
the similarity of their names. These names mean luxurious, or
delicate, and no doubt expressed the ideal for their daughters which
the parents had had, and possibly indicate the kind of life from
which these two women had come. We can scarcely fail to note the
contrast between the meaning of their names and the Christian lives
they had lived. Two dainty women, probably belonging to a class in
which a delicate withdrawal from effort and toil was thought to be
the woman's distinctive mark, had fled from luxury, which often
tended to be voluptuous, and was always self-indulgent, and had
chosen the better part of 'labour in the Lord.' They had become
untrue to their names, because they must be true to their Master and
themselves. We may well take the lesson that lies here, and is
eminently needful to-day amidst the senseless, and often sinful, tide
of luxury which runs so strongly as to threaten the great and eternal
Christian principle of self-denial.
The first thing that strikes us in looking at these salutations is
the illustration which it gives of the uniting power of a common
faith. Tryphena and Tryphosa were probably Roman ladies of some
social standing, and their names may indicate that they at least
inherited a tendency to exclusiveness; yet here they occur
immediately after the household of Narcissus and in close connection
with that of Aristobulus, both of which are groups of slaves.
Aristobulus was a grandson of Herod the Great, and Narcissus was a
well-known freedman, whose slaves at his death would probably become
the property of the Emperor. Other common slave names are those of
Ampliatus and Urbanus; and here in these lists they stand side by
side with persons of some distinction in the Roman world, and with
men and women of widely differing nationalities. The Church of Rome
would have seemed to any non-Christian observer a motley crowd in
which racial distinctions, sex, and social conditions had all been
swept away by the rising tide of a common fanaticism. In it was
exemplified in actual operation Paul's great principle that in Christ
Jesus 'there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor
free, but in Him all are one.' Roman society in that day, as Juvenal
shows us, was familiar with the levelling and uniting power of common
vice and immorality, and the few sternly patriotic Romans who were
left lamented that 'the Orontes flowed into the Tiber'; but such
common wallowing in filth led to no real unity, whereas, in the
obscure corner of the great city where there were members of the
infant Church gathered together, there was the beginning of a common
life in the one Lord which lifted each participant of it out of the
dreary solitude of individuality, and imparted to each heart the
tingling consciousness of oneness with all who held the one faith in
the one Lord and had received the one baptism in the one Name. That
fair dawn has been shadowed by many clouds, and the churches of
to-day, however they may have developed doctrine, may look back with
reproach and shame to the example of Rome, where Tryphena and
Tryphosa, with all their inherited, fastidious delicacy, recognised
in the household of Aristobulus and the household of Narcissus
'brethren in the Lord,' and were as glad to welcome Jews, Asiatics,
Persians, and Greeks, as Romans of the bluest blood, into the family
of Christ. The Romish Church of our day has lost its early grace of
welcoming all who love the one Lord into its fellowship; and we of
the Protestant churches have been but too swift to learn the bad
lesson of forbidding all who follow not with us.
Another thought which may be suggested by Tryphena and Tryphosa is
the blessed hallowing of natural family relations by common faith.
They were probably sisters, or, at all events, as their names
indicate, near relatives, and to them that faith must have been
doubly precious because they shared it with each other. None of the
trials to which the early Christians were exposed was more severe
than the necessity which their Christianity so often imposed upon
them of breaking the sacred family ties. It saddened even Christ's
heart to think that He had come to rend families in sunder, and to
make 'a man's foes them of his own household'; and we can little
imagine how bitter the pang must have been when family love had to be
cast aside at the bidding of allegiance to Him.
But though the stress of that separation between those most nearly
related in blood by reason of unshared faith is alleviated in this
day, it still remains; and that is but a feeble Christian life which
does not feel that it is drawing a heart from closest human embraces
and constituting a barrier between it and the dearest of earth. There
is still need in these days of relaxed Christian sentiment for the
stern austerity of the law, 'He that loveth father or mother more
than Me is not worthy of Me'; and there are many Christian souls who
would be infinitely stronger and more mature, if they did not yield
to the seductions of family affections which are not rooted in Jesus
Christ. But still, though our faith ought to be far more than it
often is, the determining element in our affections and associations,
its noblest work is not to separate but to unite; and whilst it often
must divide, it is meant to draw more closely together hearts that
are already knit by earthly love. Its legitimate effect is to make
all earthly sweetnesses sweeter, all holy bonds more holy and more
binding, to infuse a new constraint and preciousness into all earthly
relationships, to make brothers tenfold more brotherly and sisters
more sisterly. The heart, in which the deepest devotion is yielded to
Jesus Christ, has its capacity for devotion infinitely increased, and
they who, looking into each other's faces, see reflected there
something of the Lord whom they both love, love each other all the
more because they love Him most, and in their love to Him, and His to
them, have found a new measure for all their affection. They who,
looking on their dear ones, can 'trust they live in God,' will there
find them 'worthier to be loved,' and will there find a power of
loving them. Tryphena and Tryphosa were more sisterly than ever when
they clung to their Elder Brother. 'There is no man that hath left
brethren, or sisters, or mother, or father, for My sake, but he shall
receive a hundredfold more in this time, brethren, and sisters, and
mothers, and in the world to come eternal life.'
The contrast between the names of these two Roman ladies and the
characterisation of their 'labour in the Lord' may suggest to us the
most formidable foe of Christian earnestness. Their names, as we have
already noticed, point to a state of society in which the parents
ideal for their daughters was dainty luxuriousness and a withdrawal
from the rough and tumble of common life; but these two women,
magnetised by the love of Jesus, had turned their backs on the
parental ideal, and had cast themselves earnestly into a life of
toil. That ideal was never more formidably antagonistic to the vigour
of Christian life than it is to-day. Rome, in Paul's time, was not
more completely honeycombed with worldliness than England is to-day;
and the English churches are not far behind the English 'world' in
their paralysing love of luxury and self-indulgence. In all ages,
earnest Christians have had to take up the same vehement remonstrance
against the tendency of the average Christian to let his religious
life be weakened by the love of the world and the things of the
world. The protests against growing luxury have been a commonplace in
all ages of the Church; but, surely, there has never been a time when
it has reached a more senseless, sinful, and destroying height than
in our day. The rapid growth of wealth, with no capacity of using it
nobly, which modern commerce has brought, has immensely influenced
all our churches for evil. It is so hard for us, aggregated in great
cities, to live our own lives, and the example of our class has such
immense power over us that it is very hard to pursue the path of
'plain living and high thinking' in communities, all classes of which
are more and more yielding to the temptation to ostentation,
so-called comfort, and extravagant expenditure; and that this is a
danger--we are tempted to say _the_ danger--to the purity, loftiness,
and vigour of religious life among us, he must be blind who cannot
see, and he must be strangely ignorant of his own life who cannot
feel that it is the danger for him. I believe that for one professing
Christian whose earnestness is lost by reason of intellectual doubts,
or by some grave sin, there are a hundred from whom it simply oozes
away unnoticed, like wind out of a bladder, so that what was once
round and full becomes limp and flaccid. If Demas begins with loving
the present world, it will not be long before he finds a reason for
departing from Paul.
We may take these two sisters, finally, as pointing for us the true
victory over this formidable enemy. They had turned resolutely away
from the heathen ideal enshrined in their names to a life of real
hard toil, as is distinctly implied by the word used by the Apostle.
What that toil consisted in we do not know, and need not inquire; but
the main point to be noted is that their 'labour' was 'in the Lord.'
That union with Christ makes labour for Him a necessity, and makes it
possible. 'The labour we delight in physics pain'; and if we are in
Him, we shall not only 'live in Him,' but all our work begun,
continued, and ended in Him, will in Him and by Him be accepted.
There is no victorious antagonist of worldly ease and self-indulgence
comparable to the living consciousness of union with Jesus and His
life in us. To dwell in the swamps at the bottom of the mountain is
to live in a region where effort is impossible and malaria weakens
vitality; to climb the heights brings bracing to the limbs and a
purer air into the expanding lungs, and makes work delightsome that
would have been labour down below. If we are 'in the Lord,' He is our
atmosphere, and we can draw from Him full draughts of a noble life in
which we shall not need the stimulus of self-interest or worldly
success to use it to the utmost in acts of service to Him. They who
live in the Lord will labour in the Lord, and they who labour in the
Lord will rest in the Lord.