A perfect church?

But I think it is necessary to send back to you Epaphroditus, my brother, co-worker and fellow soldier, who is also your messenger, whom you sent to take care of my needs. ²⁶ For he longs for all of you and is distressed because you heard he was ill. ²⁷ Indeed he was ill, and almost died. But God had mercy on him, and not on him only but also on me, to spare me sorrow upon sorrow. ²⁸ Therefore I am all the more eager to send him, so that when you see him again you may be glad and I may have less anxiety. ²⁹ So then, welcome him in the Lord with great joy, and honour people like him, ³⁰ because he almost died for the work of Christ. He risked his life to make up for the help you yourselves could not give me. Philippians 2:25-30

Do you ever think how good it must have been to be part of the early, New Testament church? The buzz! The excitement! The sense of being a wonderful new family, filled with love for Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit! The vibrant preaching! The dramatic answers to prayer! How dull – what a struggle – life in today’s church can seem by comparison.

All right, perhaps the church you belong to isn’t dull or a struggle at all; but for many it is. So it’s tempting to read the New Testament and feel a little wistful: “If only…!”

If ever we do feel this way, it’s time to pause and take what, in modern parlance, is called a reality check. The fact is that the early church was in many respects pretty much like many modern churches, both for good and for ill (just read, for example, the “seven letters to the churches” in Revelation 2-3). This is nowhere better illustrated than in Paul’s glowing little letter to the Christians of Philippi, written while he was in prison for Jesus’ sake.

Philippians oozes faith and love – it obviously warmed Paul’s heart just to think about the church there. We can read about what brought it into being by turning to Acts 16. But it didn’t have an easy birth; it started with Paul and his travelling companion Silas dumped in the local prison with their feet in the stocks. And now, probably some six or seven years later, Paul finds himself in prison again, very likely in Ephesus.

He has a particular reason for writing to them: to thank them for helping to “take care of my needs” (2:25) and to “share in my troubles” (Philippians 4:14) by sending him a gift, presumably of money. How did this gift reach him? – through the willing, sacrificial generosity of a man called Epaphroditus, about whom we know absolutely nothing beyond what Paul tells us in this letter. But Epaphroditus is a perfect illustration of both the joys and sorrows of those early churches. We can get to know him a little by asking a few questions…

First, what kind of man was he?

Answer: Paul describes him as “my brother, co-worker and fellow-soldier” (2:25). There’s no way of knowing how well Paul knew him personally, but that description is high praise indeed; he was no nodding acquaintance. Paul knew him well enough to value him highly.

I hope we all have people in our lives like Epaphroditus – people we can rely on and share our joys and sorrows with; solid, reliable people. My experience suggests to me that even small and struggling churches have at least a handful of such people (and they may, of course, be female as well as male). If we read through Paul’s life in Acts, plus also his letters, we find that his life was well populated with such people; Epaphroditus was by no means the only one.

That, of course, prompts another challenging question: do my fellow-Christians see me as an Epaphroditus?

Second, why in particular is Paul grateful to God for Epaphroditus?

Answer: as we saw a moment ago, he is the person who has served as the Philippian Christians’ courier to carry their gift to Paul in prison (4:18 again), where the gift is described as “a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God”. That puts a different light on “brother, co-worker and fellow-soldier” – Epaphroditus, no doubt precisely because of his rock-solid reliability, was the messenger-boy, the man the church in Philippi entrusted this heavy responsibility to.

In our modern world I don’t suppose prison food is anything very special. But in the days of the Roman empire it was probably completely non-existent; prisoners would have had to rely on well-wishers from outside. And this is the role Epaphroditus took on.

A glance at a map indicates that the distance from Philippi to Ephesus (assuming that that is indeed where Paul was during this imprisonment) is some three hundred miles as the crow flies. It could be done by either land or sea or a combination of the two; but whatever, it would have been an arduous and demanding journey, no easy matter for a man who no doubt had other duties to attend to, not to mention perhaps a family at home. “Brothers” and “sisters” like that are, surely, precious as gold!

Third, what in particular happened to Epaphroditus that caused anxiety to Paul?

Answer: he got sick “and almost died”. If we re-read the whole of 2:25-30 we find that for a time Paul was seriously anxious on his behalf, and apparently the members of the Philippi church were likewise very upset when the news reached them.

I can’t help smiling when we read that he, Epaphroditus, was “distressed” because he had heard that his fellow-church members were anxious about him. Isn’t that so typically human - and common, surely, to every age and generation? – he was distressed because they were distressed on his behalf.

I’m sure they were confident of Christianity’s eternal hope. But neither Paul nor the Philippian church were starry-eyed about “going to heaven” – they well knew the pain and sorrow of death, and weren’t ashamed to express it. (It’s worth reflecting that the same Paul who wrote 1:21 could also write 2:27.)

Well, Epaphroditus did eventually recover, and no doubt everyone breathed a big sigh of relief. It seems that those early churches weren’t so very different from ours after all! Perhaps this can prompt us to pray…

Loving Father, thank you for all the various Epaphrodituses who have blessed my life over the years. I find it hard to imagine how I would have got on without them. Please help me, in my turn, to be an Epaphroditus to others. Amen.