Asking After a Prisoner

Somewhere in Rome, a man named Onesiphorus went looking for a prisoner. Paul says he "searched for me earnestly and found me" (2 Timothy 1:17). Finding a man in custody meant asking after him — at a gate, of a soldier, of a neighbour — and every time he asked, Onesiphorus had to name the prisoner he wanted. He could not do it quietly. He had to be seen looking.

That is the air this letter is written in. Paul is in chains and does not expect release — "the time of my departure has come" (2 Timothy 4:6) — and he reports without bitterness that "all who are in Asia turned away from me" (2 Timothy 1:15). The letter goes to Timothy, a young and hesitant pastor away in Ephesus, who has not yet been asked to do what Onesiphorus has already done. So the request Paul makes of him is modest and costly at once: "Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner" (2 Timothy 1:8).

Paul is asking a timid man to stand in an expensive place, and he spends no time on the timidity. Shame is a verdict, and some court hands it down — the soldier at the gate, the neighbours who will hear whose name Timothy asked for. So Paul reaches behind Timothy's temperament to a decision made before Timothy existed: God "saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began" (2 Timothy 1:9). Our standing was settled in a room we were never in — a standing given, never achieved — and the lower court cannot reopen it.

None of which God asks of us from a safe distance. He has gone further down himself than we will ever be asked to go. Isaiah saw it coming: the Servant "poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors" (Isaiah 53:12) — and on his last night Jesus applied the line to himself: "this Scripture must be fulfilled in me" (Luke 22:37). By morning the counting was visible: a criminal crucified on either side of him (Luke 23:33). Jesus is himself the prisoner nobody wanted to be seen with. And the word Paul keeps reaching for in this chapter turns up once more in Hebrews, with Christ in the subject's place: "he is not ashamed to call them brothers" (Hebrews 2:11).¹

So the "therefore" of verse 8 runs downhill. People who have been found can afford to be seen looking for someone else. The courage is inherited, not manufactured — and it is guarded: Paul, who can keep nothing in chains, is sure that God "is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me" (2 Timothy 1:12).

Onesiphorus is what that looks like at ground level. He "often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains" (2 Timothy 1:16) — a man who kept turning up where turning up cost something. Most of us know our own version of the errand: the friend whose marriage has come apart in public; the colleague who asks, half-amused, why we still go to church, and the plain answer we could give. Nobody is asking us to fix anything. We are only asked to be seen, and to be heard, and the shame of it is one Christ has already carried.

Which brings us back to the streets of Rome, and a man saying out loud whose friend he was. Long before we had to decide whether to be seen with Christ, Christ let himself be counted among the guilty in order to come looking for us. So we can knock at a difficult door, say whose friend we are, and sit down.