The Letter

Seventy Times

Chapter 14: The Letter

On Wednesday night, Ezra read Philemon.

Not in the chapel. In the apartment. On Elena's couch. With Marcus's Bible open on his lap and the reading lamp on and the window dark and the sounds of the duplex around him — Donna's television through the thin wall, the hum of the refrigerator, the particular silence of a two-room apartment in a row of beige duplexes a mile from a federal prison in eastern Tennessee.

He read it from the beginning.

All twenty-five verses.

He had read the letter hundreds of times. He had taught it dozens of times. He had dissected it in seminary with a professor named Hartwell who wore bow ties and who approached Paul's letters with the reverence of a man who believed that close reading was a form of worship and that worship was a form of close reading, and who had said once, in a lecture that Ezra remembered more clearly than most sermons, that Philemon was the most dangerous book in the Bible because it was the only one that made its demand in the form of a personal request rather than a commandment, and personal requests were harder to refuse than commandments because commandments could be debated but a request from a friend in chains could only be accepted or denied, and the denial carried a weight that no theology could redistribute.

Verse 1. Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother, to Philemon our dear friend and fellow worker.

He had read this in the chapel the morning Darnell arrived. He had understood, in that reading, that the letter was asking him to live it. Now, two weeks later, the understanding had not changed, but it had deepened — the way a color deepens when the light shifts, not into a different color but into a more complete version of the same one.

Paul wrote from prison. To a free man. Calling him dear friend. The word in the Greek was agapetos — beloved. Paul loved Philemon. The request that followed was not a transaction between strangers or an obligation between parties. It was a plea from a man who loved another man and who was asking the man he loved to do the hardest thing love could require.

Verse 8. Therefore, although in Christ I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do.

Paul had the authority. He could have commanded. He was an apostle, a founder of churches, a man whose letters would outlast empires. He could have written: You will receive Onesimus back. This is not a request. And Philemon would have done it, because Paul's authority in the early church was the kind of authority that did not need to be enforced to be obeyed.

But Paul did not command.

Verse 9. Yet I prefer to appeal to you on the basis of love.

Love. Not authority. Not theology. Not the argument that receiving Onesimus was the doctrinally correct thing to do. Love. The appeal was personal. The appeal said: I am not ordering you as your apostle. I am asking you as your friend. And the asking is harder than the ordering because the asking gives you the freedom to refuse, and if you refuse, the refusal will not be a theological failure but a personal one, and personal failures are the ones that cannot be resolved by better doctrine.

Ezra set the Bible on his lap.

He looked at the wall. The bookshelf he had built after Elena died. The two photographs — Elena at the beach, Marcus at graduation. Marcus pointing at the camera. Hurry up. I have places to be.

He picked up the Bible.

Verse 10. I appeal to you for my son Onesimus, who became my son while I was in chains.

Onesimus. The name meant "useful." He had been Philemon's slave. He had run away — whether he had stolen something or simply fled, the scholars debated, and the debate was a debate about the moral status of the enslaved person's agency that had more to say about the scholars than about Onesimus. He had found Paul. He had become a Christian. And now Paul was sending him back.

Sending him back.

Not to punishment. Not to the fate that Roman law prescribed for runaway slaves, which was a fate that the word punishment did not adequately describe. Paul was sending him back to Philemon with a letter that asked Philemon to receive him no longer as a slave, but better than a slave — as a dear brother.

Ezra had taught this. He had explained it. He had set it in its historical context and drawn the theological conclusions and asked the men in the study to consider what it meant to be asked to transform the category in which you held another person — from slave to brother, from offender to beloved, from the one who wronged you to the one who sits in your room and shares your faith and asks to be received.

He had never, until this month, had a face to attach to Onesimus.

Now he did.

The face was Darnell Washington's. Brown eyes. Shaved head. The inclined head in the corridor. The voice in the study room — quiet, measured, speaking about the gap between the text and the life. The man who sat in the ninth chair and opened a Bible and did not look at Ezra when he spoke about crossing.

The letter had changed.

Not the words. The words were the same words they had been for two thousand years. What had changed was the distance between the words and the chaplain, which was no longer the distance of a teacher to a text but the distance of a person to a demand, and the demand was specific, and the demand had a name, and the name was on a form in the outbound tray and on a cell assignment in Unit C and in a room in Ezra's chest where the facts of March were stored next to the facts of September, and the two sets of facts were no longer in separate rooms because the letter had knocked down the wall between them.

Verse 12. I am sending him — who is my very heart — back to you.

My very heart.

Paul called Onesimus my very heart. The man who had wronged Philemon was described by the apostle as his own heart. The identification was complete. Paul was saying: what you do to Onesimus, you do to me. How you receive him is how you receive me. He is not an obligation I am imposing on you. He is a part of me I am trusting you with.

Ezra closed his eyes.

He thought about Marcus.

Not the facts of March. Not the convenience store. Not the orange juice on the shelf or the shot or the ambulance. He thought about Marcus at the kitchen table in their mother's house in Memphis, sixteen years old, arguing about scripture with the focused intensity of a teenager who had read the text and disagreed with the interpretation and who would not rest until the interpretation had been corrected or the boy had been exhausted, and exhaustion usually came first but not always, and the times it did not come first were the times Marcus was right.

He thought about Marcus saying, once, at Thanksgiving, in the year before the year he died: "Zeke, you know what the problem with forgiveness is? The problem is it costs the person who was wronged more than it costs the person who did the wrong. That's bad math. And God is a bad mathematician."

Marcus laughed when he said it.

Marcus laughed at everything that was true and painful, because laughter was Marcus's way of acknowledging that a thing was both, and that the both-ness was the point, and that trying to resolve the both-ness into one or the other was the mistake most people made with truth.

God is a bad mathematician.

Ezra opened his eyes.

He read the last verse.

Verse 25. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Grace.

The word the study had discussed in the first session. The word Ray had said meant breath. The word Khalil had said meant giving what the other person hadn't earned. The word Jerome had said you needed when you couldn't earn anything.

The letter began with grace and ended with grace, and between the beginning and the ending was the demand — receive back the person who wronged you, receive him as a brother, receive him as my heart — and the grace was not a reward for meeting the demand. The grace was the condition that made the demand possible. Without the grace there was no receiving. Without the grace the letter was just a letter and the demand was just a demand and the man in the ninth chair was just a man and the room was just a room.

With the grace the letter was alive and the demand was real and the man was a person and the room was a covenant.

Ezra closed the Bible.

He held it in his lap.

The leather was cracked. The spine was bent. The flyleaf said Zeke — don't lose this one too. M.

He had not lost it.

He was beginning to understand what keeping it cost.

He turned off the lamp.

He sat on Elena's couch in the dark in the apartment that was a mile from the prison where eleven hundred men were preparing for sleep, and among those men was one who prayed every night for the chaplain who held the room where the letter lived, and the prayer and the letter and the room and the man and the dark were all part of the same thing, which was the thing Paul had written about from prison two thousand years ago and which had not gotten easier since and which the letter did not promise would get easier, because the letter did not promise anything except grace.

Grace, which was the beginning and the end.

Grace, which was the part that could not be earned and could not be paid back and could not be managed by institutional procedures or theological frameworks or the particular architecture of a sealed room in a chaplain's chest.

Grace, which was the word for what happened when the gap was too wide to cross and you crossed it anyway.

Ezra sat in the dark.

He did not pray.

But something in the dark prayed for him, and whether it was God or the room or the ghost of a brother who had laughed at bad math, it was enough to carry him through the night and into the morning and into the next Sunday, which was coming, which was always coming, which was the thing about Sundays in a prison — they came regardless of whether you were ready, and the readiness was not a condition you could achieve in advance but a thing that happened in the room or did not happen at all.

The night continued.

The letter waited.

The room held.