SOME PROPER NAMES
‘Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, Hermes.’
Romans 16:14
The chapter which contains these names, and a great number more just as lifeless and unsuggestive as these, is in our Bible. It is sometimes read to us as the second lesson in church. When you hear these names read out, what thought do they suggest to you? Do you even take the trouble to ask, Why are we called upon to listen to these names which are only noises, and tell us no more than an auctioneer’s old catalogue might tell? Or do you fail even to care what is read, even to miss from your lesson its usual teaching or inspiration? Is it much the same to you whether the clergyman reads out, ‘The God of all comforts comfort you,’ or ‘Philologos, Julias, Nereus and his sister.’
If so, this is a lesson which the catalogue teaches; a serious and alarming lesson: a warning and exposure. But if you have noticed this apparent waste of force, you may have gone on to observe that what it suggests is part of a much greater question, Why is the Bible written as it is?
I. The Bible does not aim chiefly at making sound theologians, but holy men and women.—Theology it does teach; but only because theology helps life; and only so far as it helps life, including in life emotion as well as behaviour.
II. Therefore your Bible gives you, not theories, doctrines stated so as learned books define them, but the active, working, practical side of truth, truth actually applied to the errors of ancient Rome and Corinth, not because these very errors would be constant (though it is wonderful how small the variety in human error really is), not for this, but in order to exhibit the truth at work as it ought to be at work in us. And again, it shows us truth grappling with the very failings and vices which assail us, and shall assail men to the end of time—idleness and indulgence, pride and intellectual scorn.
III. St. Paul’s love for Christ kept his heart fresh for all honest love.—Some good old woman, of whom we know nothing, not even her name, was kind to him, nursed him perhaps in illness, or soothed him when his heart was breaking; and he remembers, and writes, ‘Salute Rufus, the chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine.’ ‘And mine’! After so many centuries one reads all that he ever wrote with more hearty real human interest for the sake of that most exquisite touch.
IV. These names also remind us what his work was like, for what cause he endured so much. ‘He founded churches,’ we say. Yes, truly; but his churches consisted of living men and women whom he loved. They were builded, according to the Russian proverb, not of beams but of ribs. And what this chapter tells us, most of all, is the value of obscure lives, of tradespeople, perhaps of runaway slaves, like Onesimus, for whose sake St. Paul wrote a canonical epistle. Asyncritus and Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, and Hermes—it is a mere guess whether there survive one intellectual effort, and that not very intellectual, of one of them. Only their names are left, and this, that they loved the great Apostle, and he loved them: that they lived holy lives, though silent, obscure, uncultivated, save with the rich culture of souls which are taught of Christ.
—Bishop G. A. Chadwick.