PHOEBE

’I commend unto you Phoebe our sister, who is a servant of the Church that is at Cenchrea:  2.  That ye receive her in the Lord, worthily of the Saints, and that ye assist her in whatsover matter she may have need of you:  for she herself hath been a succourer of many, and of mine own self.’—­ROMANS xvi. 1, 2 (R.V.).

This is an outline picture of an else wholly unknown person.  She, like most of the other names mentioned in the salutations in this chapter, has had a singular fate.  Every name, shadowy and unreal as it is to us, belonged to a human life filled with hopes and fears, plunged sometimes in the depths of sorrows, struggling with anxieties and difficulties; and all the agitations have sunk into forgetfulness and calm.  There is left to the world an immortal remembrance, and scarcely a single fact associated with the undying names.

Note the person here disclosed.

A little rent is made in the dark curtain through which we see as with an incandescent light concentrated for a moment upon her, one of the many good women who helped Paul, as their sisters had helped Paul’s Master, and who thereby have won, little as either Paul or she thought it, an eternal commemoration.  Her name is a purely idolatrous one, and stamps her as a Greek, and by birth probably a worshipper of Apollo.  Her Christian associations were with the Church at Cenchrea, the port of Corinth, of which little Christian community nothing further is known.  But if we take into account the hideous immoralities of Corinth, we shall deem it probable that the port, with its shifting maritime population, was, like most seaports, a soil in which goodness was hard put to it to grow, and a church had much against which to struggle.  To be a Christian at Cenchrea can have been no light task.  Travellers in Egypt are told that Port Said is the wickedest place on the face of the earth; and in Phoebe’s home there would be a like drift of disreputables of both sexes and of all nationalities.  It was fitting that one good woman should be recorded as redeeming womanhood there.  We learn of her that she was a ‘servant,’ or, as the margin preferably reads, a ’deaconess of the Church which is at Cenchrea’; and in that capacity, by gentle ministrations and the exhibition of purity and patient love, as well as by the gracious administration of material help, had been a ‘succourer of many.’  There is a whole world of unmentioned kindnesses and a life of self-devotion hidden away under these few words.  Possibly the succour which she administered was her own gift.  She may have been rich and influential, or perhaps she but distributed the Church’s bounty; but in any case the gift was sweetened by the giver’s hand, and the succour was the impartation of a woman’s sympathy more than the bestowment of a donor’s gift.  Sometime or other, and somehow or other, she had had the honour and joy of helping Paul, and no doubt that opportunity