Euodia and Syntyche – 29 April 201

We come at this morning’s talk by a circuitous route.  We are again in the Book of Acts, and we learn of St Paul’s missionary journey into Europe – a trail become very familiar, as we speak, to thousands of desperate refugees from tyranny and terror.  Paul winds up at the Roman colony of Philippi, in Macedonia, just to the north of Greece.  As Paul usually did, he sought out the local synagogue.  In Philippi the Jews met by the riverbank outside the city gate.  And here we meet Lydia.  Lydia is a Jewish businesswoman.  She deals in purple cloth – this is the much sought after Tyrian Purple, the colour dye made from a particular shellfish secretion.  It was very trendy, and Lydia was on to a good thing.  One interesting side-issue is that the makers of the purple dye acquired such a pervasive body stench that the Talmud, the Jewish law, eventually provided that a woman could divorce her husband if he entered this trade following marriage. 

Paul founded a Christian church in Philippi, and clearly Lydia was one of its leaders.  He mentions her in his later Epistle to the Philippians as exactly that.  We are only now starting to assemble with much more precision the evidence of what that infant church was like in its structure and life.  It is fascinating.  It was most certainly not the male-dominated, patriarchal arrangement reflected and carried into church law in subsequent centuries down to our own day.  Right at the start, women were totally present in the communal response to the risen Christ. 

Now, in the same letter Paul wrote to that church in Philippi, he makes this wonderful plea about two other women:  I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord.  Yes, and I ask you, loyal Synzygus, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life [Phil 4:2-3].  Euodia and Syntyche are at odds with each other.  There is damaging dissention in his beloved Philippian church, but Paul, uses sensitivity.  He repeats the verb for each of them equally -- I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche… He lists them in alphabetical order.  He praises them…  He asks Synzygus to help these women. 

We have no idea what this was about.  In my experience it might have been because Euodia didn’t want her children playing with Syntyche’s rotten kids...  Or it may have been a bustup in the church choir among the sopranos…  The point is not any of that.  The point is that strife anywhere, anytime, is a choice we have made.  Agreement to live in peace, on the other hand, agreement to understand and respect difference – these are also choices we are free to make.  

In contemplative life and prayer, in a sense, there is no choice about this.  In the company of Christ we are not at liberty to be in enmity with anyone.  Disagreement, certainly, but so far as it lies with us we do not have enemies.  There is silence and peace, shalom, in our relationships, especially in the difficult ones.  And it is all fuelled and renewed daily in the silence of our own hearts, our inmost lives, and our prayer.