By Jamin Roller
In reading our passages today, I thought of the TV show, Undercover Boss. Each episode is about an owner, CEO, or someone in a high-level management position of a large company going undercover as an entry-level employee in their own business. The audience knows the true identity of the boss, but the people in each episode have no idea. The tensest moments in each episode are when someone treats the boss in a way they would not treat them if they knew they owned the company. As a spectator it makes me want to warn them and say, “you would not act like that if you knew who they really were.”
At times, the show reveals how our culture often treats people differently based on their standing in life. We treat entry-level employees differently than we treat CEOs. People with greater influence and authority are treated with greater honor and respect.
It was the same in first century culture when Paul wrote these letters. Masters were prone to take advantage of slaves, while it seems slaves wrestled with who they were working for and performed based on impure motives. That way of behaving was even present in the churches. Paul called Christians to treat one another not according to the way of the world but the way of the kingdom. He told slaves to see their masters not simply as people to please but to see their work as being done in honor of Jesus. They have a true and better master in heaven who sees all they do and is pleased when they work, “with a good attitude, as to the Lord and not to people” (Ephesians 6:7).
Paul later wrote to Philemon on a similar subject, pleading with Philemon to see Onesimus for who he really was. Though a slave, Onesimus had a deeper identity than his station, and because of Jesus, Philemon had a relationship with Onesimus that existed outside of being his master. Therefore, Paul asked Philemon to welcome him back, “no longer as a slave, but more than a slave—as a dearly loved brother” (Philemon 16).
Each episode of undercover boss ends with a big reveal. The true identity of the boss is made known to all the employees they had worked with. Those who treated the boss with honor are excited. Those who treated them poorly are at best nervous and at worst ashamed. In a similar way Paul makes a big reveal in these passages. If we are in positions of lower authority, we think we are just working for a master or boss. But in reality we are working for the Lord. To the masters, he reminds that we are not simply dealing with a servant but to see everyone as a brother or sister in Christ.
In the kingdom of God, we are to treat one another based on this truer identity we share as the family of God according to the love of Christ.
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