Today is All Souls’ Day. You can find a comment on the second reading here: https://biblestudystjosephsparis.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/all-souls-day-2nd-reading-romans-63-9/ and on the gospel here https://biblestudystjosephsparis.wordpress.com/2021/11/02/all-souls-day-2-november-gospel-commentary-john-637-40/
Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, To all God’s holy people in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons: 2 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Like all Greco-Roman letters, Paul begins with a greeting, in this case to the Church in Philippi. Once again, we should remember that Paul usually dictated his letters and that they would have been read aloud to the community. Note that he includes Timothy in the greeting, and a number of scholars have suggested that Timothy was a co-author of the letter. An argument against this is how much Paul praises him in this letter. Notice too how he describes the two of them, they are servants or, another translation would be, slaves. Often Paul introduces himself as an apostle but here he does not. He does not feel the need to assert his authority which is accepted in Philippi. Furthermore, Bonnie Thurston and Judith Ryan have also noted that a major theme of this letter is humility and so Paul begins by describing himself in humble terms.
Paul has a great feeling of friendship towards the Philippians, and this letter was written in friendship, although he will express some worries about them later. Note that he addresses them as “holy people”, in other words “saints”. All too often we think that saints are unique, rare and very special, but nothing could be further from the truth. For Paul, all Christians are saints, and everyone one of us is called to sainthood. As Marcus Maxwell explains, “Holiness primarily means ‘set apart for God’. The saints are those who, by responding to God’s call, have been set apart in several ways.” They are different from others because they recognize God’s power and see his laws as more important than human ones. They have become God’s children through their faith in Christ.
Notice that Paul singles out the deacons and overseers (which is the literal meaning of the Greek word that is usually translated as bishops). This is the only time the word appears in a letter that everyone agrees was written by Paul. It is unlikely that Paul’s bishops were anything like modern bishops, for one thing because there seems to have been several in Philippi. The word “elder” used elsewhere, appears to be the same thing. The word deacon appears more often and means servant or helper. It seems that in Paul’s time, local churches had a group of overseers who were helped by deacons. We know too that women were deacons and possibly overseers too. Of course, once again as Bonnie Thurston and Judith Ryan point out, since humility is so important in this letter, Paul might also be using these titles as a subtle criticism.
His greeting ends with him wishing grace and peace to his readers. The typical greeting in a Greek letter was chairete (greeting) but Paul replaces it with charis, grace. God freely gives his grace, his love to us. He seeks us before we seek him. Peace comes from accepting God’s grace and knowing him. But, of course, it is also the traditional Hebrew greeting “shalom”. Shalom means more than just freedom from conflict for it also signifies wholeness. As Marcus Maxwell put it: “Peace is not so much about quiet and calm as about knowing that under all the troubles and cares of life lies the certainty of God’s love and the hope of eternal life.”
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