CRITICAL NOTES
Romans 16:1.—In the East women were not permitted to mix in the society of men as in the Western world they are at present. Women were kept in a secluded room, γυνὰ κείον. Thus it might be necessary to have deaconesses as well as deacons, that the former might look to the indigent or sick. After all, Phœbe may not have been a deaconess in an official sense. The word means a servant higher than δοῦλος; one who has charge of the alms of the Church, an overseer of the poor and sick. It is significant that this epistle was conveyed by the hands of a woman from Corinth, where woman was degraded, to Rome. How great the reformation wrought by the gospel!
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Romans 16:1-2
Phœbe as a champion.—Some women of the present day are champions of what they are pleased to call “women’s rights.” They would subvert divine arrangements. Eve and not Adam is now to be lord of the creation. It is true the party is small; it is also true that they do not bear in mind how much Christianity has done for the ennobling of women. To all classes we fancy Paul’s words may be addressed: “I commend to you Phœbe our sister, … a champion of many, and of myself also.”
I. Phœbe the champion of a great cause.—Phœbe was a servant of the Church which is at Cenchrea. A deaconess, according to some. This not necessary. The expression seems to denote the devotion of a Christian woman to the service of the poor and of the sick. Noble knight-errantry, to visit as an angel of goodness the abodes of poverty, to give bread to the hungry, and good cheer to the sick, to make the widow’s heart sing for joy, to dispel the gloom of earth with the light of heaven, and to reap the blessing of those that were ready to perish. A noble ministry, in which angels rejoice and which the Saviour discharged. Many modern women are thus champions of the poor and of the sick. All hail to the Christian champions of all time!
II. The champion of a great apostle.—Picture a melancholy man walking beneath the pine trees that stretch from Corinth to Cenchrea. His mind is burdened with the care of the Churches; he is distressed for his unsaved countrymen; the disorders of the Corinthian Church rend his sympathetic soul; he almost wishes for death. But Phœbe, with buoyant nature, and with loving trust in the infinite possibilities of goodness, champions the strong man, and charms him out of his momentary weakness. Or again, overcome by his various labours and exposures, his strength gives way. Phœbe champions in sickness, and refits the tempest-tost vessel to encounter fresh seas where more spiritual treasure is to be gained. Earth’s records do not tell half the tale of the championships of the Church’s women.
III. The champion of a great composition.—If Phœbe went to Rome on legal business, she carried two important documents—her own legal document and St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. The success of the former might tend to her own enrichment; the safe transmission of the latter may enrich the ages. Look well to the roll, Phœbe; for its preservation includes thy immortality and the salvation of millions. But thou hast faithfully discharged thy trust, and we thank thee in the name of the Lord.
1. Champions may require championship. Paul may require a Phœbe. Phœbe may need the assistance of Roman saints. Thus the greatest of us are taught our littleness.
2. A great man confesses his obligation. St. Paul seeks to pay his debt of gratitude by appealing to the Christian generosity of the Roman Church. 3. Learn the oneness of the true Church. The Church at Rome bound to the Church at Cenchrea by the Christian work done there by Phœbe. Spiritual work reaches through undreamt spheres.
4. Let all our receptions be in the Lord as becometh saints. As we receive one another in the Lord, so may we joyfully expect that the Lord will receive us in the great day of final triumph.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Romans 16:1-2
Difference between man and woman one of degree.—Now to put the truth in this way may seem to teach the inherent inferiority of woman; in reality it teaches nothing of the kind. The difference between man and woman is not a difference of degree, but of order. Woman does not and cannot emulate man in many departments of physical activity. It is not for her to lead armies, to guide fleets upon the ocean, or to stand in the more laborious ranks of toil upon the land. It is for her to share all the knowledge, all the wisdom, all the intellectual activities of the world. But essentially man is ever the worker and fighter, the bread-winner, the husband or band of the house, cementing its walls with the sweat of labour, and guarding it against the forces of dissolution which are without. The glory of a young man is his strength; and in so far the pagan ideal of manhood has a truth to express and enforce. On that ground woman cannot challenge or displace man.
“For woman is not undevelopt man,
But diverse. Could we make her as the man,
Sweet love were slain; his truest bond is this—
Not like to like, but like in difference.”
But difference does not imply inferiority. There are other qualities which go to the making of perfect human life besides strength, just as there are other qualities besides the untempered wealth of sunlight which make the springtide and the summer. Perfect human life needs sweetness as well as strength, the element of tenderness as well as of force. Life is not all lived in the arena and in the street, and behind the victories of the market-place lies the fact of the home. When a man steps out into the glare of public labour, he is already what the home has made him. It is the eternal and unalienable heritage of woman to mould man; to nurture his body into strength and his mind into soundness; to equip him for the warfare of life and inspire him for its victories; to breathe through him the wishes of her soul, and teach him how to gain the ideals which her purity reveals, her ambition craves, her love demands. The good woman by her intuitions reaches a realm of truth often denied to man in his most logical deductions, and then she becomes virtually the inspiration of man, and it is thus woman who makes the world. “The souls of little children,” says one of the noblest women writers of our time, “are marvellously tender and delicate things, and keep for ever the shadow that first falls on them, and that is a mother’s, or, at least, a woman’s.” There never was a great man who had not a great mother; it is scarcely an exaggeration. The first six years of our life make us; all that is added later is veneer. The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes something higher when her children look up into her face and ask her questions. It is the only education we have which they cannot take from us. It is a mistake to say that this is the only education; but, at least, is it not a great education? What higher dignity can we conceive than the dignity of shaping in silence and patience the forces that mould and guide the world? Can that sphere be called narrow from which such potent influences stream? That which woman confers on man is moral light and sweetness,
“Till at the last she sets herself to man
Like perfect music unto noble words.”
There is no strife for pre-eminence between them, no superiority or inferiority. The difference is of order, not degree, and that is what St. Paul means when he says that “woman is the glory of the man.” It is not enough to say that the glory of woman is that she is the helper of man. No great cause succeeds without woman. No nation can be great that does not reverence woman and does not offer the freest scope and sphere for her influence to be felt; and I confess that we, as Protestant Churches, have not yet recognised to the full the power of service that is in woman. We have left it to Catholics to form sisterhoods of merciful visitation. We, in our dread of mariolatry, have forgotten the women who ministered to Jesus and have ignored the presence of women in the Church. Not altogether, indeed; we, too, have had Jur Dinah Morrises in the early days of Methodism; we have to-day our Sisters of the People working in the slums of London; and here and there we have had our Protestant St. Theresas, our Florence Nightingales, our Elizabeth Frys, our Sister Doras. I do not say that every one of you should go and do likewise. This is not the lesson or the message of Mary’s life. You cannot all find your mission in the slums, in the prison, in the hospital; but I will tell you what you can do,—you can attain the private sainthood of self-denial and sympathy; you can find some sick sister to whom your visit would be sunlight, some little child to be made cheerful with your love, some obscure spot of earth to be brightened by your charity. You cannot row out against the darkness of the night, as Grace Darling did, to rescue the shipwrecked; but you may find next door to you some forlorn soul, tossed in the wild storms of life, to succour and to save. You cannot find cloistral seclusion, as the virgins of the early Church did, nor is it well you should; but you can make the nursery a cloister where the fruits of God ripen, and the store, the school, the home, a place where the fragrance of holiness may be felt.—Dawson.
Christianity exalts woman.—The Rev. S. Swanson, speaking some time ago at Manchester, showed that the religions of the East were powerless to regenerate the heart and purify the life, and that, however excellent some of them may appear in theory, they utterly failed in practice. Among other things he said, “I ask what adaptation have we found in these religions to meet the wants, to heal the wounds of woman, and to give her her proper and rightful position? What have they done to free her from the oppression that imprisons, degrades, and brutalises her? What has ‘the light of Asia’ done to brighten her lot? What ray of comfort have these religions shed into the shambles where she is bought and sold? What have they done to sweeten and purify life for her? Why, her place in the so-called paradises of some of them, in the way in which it is painted, only burns the brand of shame more deeply on her brow!”
The deaconess should be free.—“I commend unto you Phœbe our sister, which is a servant of the Church which is at Cenchrea” (Romans 16:1). If the Greek word here translated “servant” had been rendered as in the sixth chapter of Acts, the third of the First Epistle to Timothy, and in many other passages of the apostolical writings, the verse would have run thus: “I commend unto you Phœbe our sister, which is a deacon of the Church which is at Cenchrea.” Reserving, therefore, all questions as respects the functions of the persons whom the word designates, but adhering to the form which is nearest to the Greek, we may say that undeniably there is mention of female “deacons” in the New Testament. The deacon Phœbe must, moreover, have been a person of some consideration. St. Paul begins with her name the list of his personal recommendations or salutations to the Roman Church, and recommends her at greater length than any other person. “That ye receive her in the Lord, as becometh saints, and that ye assist her in whatsoever business she hath need of you: for she hath been a succourer of many, and of myself also.” Evidently this “servant of the Church,” this “succourer” of apostles, could have been no mere pew-opener, no filler of a purely menial office. Now there is one most subtile way of sterilising that eternal wedding. It is, without wholly debasing either sex in the other’s eyes, to teach them to live apart, think apart, love apart, for the greater glory of God and of themselves, as if they were different species of one genus, the union of which could produce nothing but hybrids. Where thus marriage assumes in the eyes of the candidate for superhuman sanctity the shape of a fleshly pollution; where woman ceases to be man’s earthly helpmeet—where it becomes good for man to live alone—the familiar mingling of the sexes in the active ministrations of religion, unfettered and untrammelled, is impossible. The deaconess should be free as the deacon himself to leave her home at any time for those ministrations; she should be in constant communication with her brethren of the clergy. But place her under a vow of celibacy, every fellowman becomes to her a tempter whom she must flee from. Hence the high walls of the nunnery, in which eventually we find her confined; hence the vanishing away of her office itself into monachism. The details above given are sufficient, I think, to show that there is a wide difference between the Deaconesses Institute of our days and what is recorded of the early female diaconate. That was essentially individual; and the only analogy to it lies in the “parish deaconess,” who goes forth from Kaiserswerth or elsewhere to devote herself to a particular congregation; although even she is far from holding that position as a member of the clergy (cleros) which is assigned to her by the records of Church history.—J. M. Ludlow.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 16
Romans 16:2. A succourer of many.—A Christian lady of ample means, large culture, fine intelligence, and, better than all, of noble heart, was watching at the bedside of her only child, who lay a-dying. What promise of future greatness lay in the well-shaped brain! What sweet castles had the loving mother built as she trained and watched her darling; and now the goodly castle was fast falling before her eyes. The bedroom was spacious and well furnished, but she had only eyes for the one treasure about to be removed. The morning sun was sweetly shining through the window, as if regardless of the mother’s sorrow—or should we rather say as if desirous of scattering the gathering gloom?—but she scarcely noticed as she prayed, “O God, spare my darling child!” But, unlike too many, she prayed in submission to the divine will; and that will was that the beautiful boy shall be taken to reach a higher manhood in the vast hereafter. With bleeding heart she followed the child to his last earthly resting-place. He was another link in the chain lifting her up to the better world, but he was also the means of enlarging her nature. She lost her child, and yet the loss was to her and to those about her a gain. She lived for others more than she had ever done before. Her ears and her heart were open to the tale of sorrow. Every home where sorrow entered was visited by her who was quickened by sorrow into the large exercises of benevolence. She was lovingly active; she was wisely benevolent; and on her tomb was this epitaph placed by the survivors:—
ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF ONE WHO LIKE PHŒBE, WAS A SUCCOURER OF MANY.
Romans 16:2. Mutual help.—The cobbler could not paint the picture, but he could tell Apelles that the shoe-latchet was not quite right; and the painter thought it well to take his hint. Two neighbours, one blind and the other lame, were called to a place at a great distance. What was to be done? The blind man could not see, and the lame man could not walk. Why, the blind man carried the lame one: this former assisted by his legs, the other by his eyes. Say to no one then, “I can do without you,” but be ready to help those who ask your aid; and then, when it is needed, you may ask theirs.—Smith.