164 The Onesimus in All of Us: When People Stop Being Pawns

An examination of Philemon 1

There’s a tension in how we see people. We know, intuitively, that reducing someone to a function, a means to our end, feels wrong. It feels slimy, as Jeff Morgan puts it (see link at the end of this article). We sense the violation when we use someone “merely as a means.” Yet, our days are a web of transactions: the barista for our coffee, the colleague for the r…