Philippians 2:25-30 — “Yet I considered it necessary to send to you Epaphroditus, my brother, fellow worker, and fellow soldier, but your messenger and the one who ministered to my need… because for the work of Christ he came close to death, not regarding his life, to supply what was lacking in your service toward me.”
His name was Epaphroditus.
It is one of the great inside jokes of the New Testament that a man named after the Greek goddess of love and beauty ended up as one of Paul’s closest brothers. Epaphroditos (Ἐπαφρόδιτος), Strong’s G1891, literally means “favored by Aphrodite.” It is a pagan name, a temple name, the kind of name you would have expected to see scratched into the wall of a brothel in Corinth, not stitched into a letter from the Apostle Paul.
But there it is.
Paul says it four times in his short letter to the Philippians, and every time he says it, he is paying respect.
You have probably read past this man for years. Most of us have. He is one of those names you skim over on your way to the next big idea, sandwiched between the great Christ-hymn of Philippians 2 and the famous “I count all things as loss” passage of Philippians 3. He gets six verses. He never speaks. He delivers a letter and goes home, and the New Testament does not bring him up again.
Paul wants you to slow down.
What the Philippians did
Some background. The church at Philippi loved Paul. He had planted that church on his second missionary journey, and the believers there had been faithful to him for years. They were poor. They were Gentile. They were generous beyond what made sense. When Paul ended up under house arrest in Rome, the Philippian church took up a collection to send him support, and they picked one of their own members, Epaphroditus, to carry the gift the seven hundred or so miles from Philippi to Rome.
That trip was not a vacation. Roman roads were not safe. Inns were robbed. Travelers got sick. A man carrying money on the road was a target for everything that wanted to kill him. Epaphroditus went anyway.
He got there. He delivered the gift. And then he stayed.
He stayed to take care of Paul. He cooked, he cleaned, he ran errands, he sat with the apostle through whatever the long Roman nights were like in a chained man’s rented house. He did the work that nobody writes books about. The quiet work. The dishes.
And somewhere in there, he got sick.
Almost dead
Paul says it twice. Verse 27 — “Indeed he was sick almost unto death, but God had mercy on him, and not only on him but on me also, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow.” Verse 30 — “for the work of Christ he came close to death, not regarding his life.”
That last phrase is the one to slow down on.
“Not regarding his life” translates a single Greek word, paraboleusamenos (παραβολευσάμενος), Strong’s G3851. It is a rare word. It is, in fact, a hapax legomenon, meaning it only appears one time in the entire New Testament. Right here. About this man.
The root of the word is paraboleuomai. The literal meaning is to throw down beside, to put down as a stake, to gamble. In the centuries after the New Testament, a particular group of early Christians in Egypt and North Africa took on the name Parabolani. Their work was to nurse plague victims in the cities where the plague was running hottest. To collect dead bodies for burial. To enter quarantined houses that everyone else was running from. They knew what would probably happen to them. They called themselves the gamblers, after this very word, after this very verse, after this very man.
Epaphroditus gambled.
He bet his life on Paul’s life. He bet it on the work of Christ. He laid himself down as the stake in a game whose outcome he could not see, and he almost lost.
The verbs Paul stacks on him
Watch what Paul does with his vocabulary in verse 25. He calls Epaphroditus four things in one breath.
Brother. Adelphos. Family.
Fellow worker. Sunergon. The same word Paul uses for Timothy and Luke and Titus. Coworker in the gospel.
Fellow soldier. Sustratiotes (συστρατιώτης), Strong’s G4961. The same word Paul will use for Archippus in Philemon. Not coworker now. Brother in arms. The man next to you in the foxhole.
Messenger. Apostolos (ἀπόστολος), Strong’s G652. “Sent one.” Yes, the same word that gets translated “apostle” everywhere else. Paul calls a quiet delivery man from Philippi an apostolos.
Minister to my need. Leitourgos (λειτουργός), Strong’s G3011. This is the priestly word. It is the word the Septuagint uses for the priests serving in the temple. The word from which we get liturgy. The man bringing Paul soup is called a priest.
Five titles in one verse. Paul is stacking them on purpose. He is writing this letter back to Philippi knowing that the Philippians may feel like Epaphroditus failed them, that he got sick on the trip, that he had to come home before the job was finished. Paul is telling them, with everything he has, this is the kind of man you sent us. Receive him with joy.
Verse 29 — “Receive him therefore in the Lord with all gladness, and hold such men in esteem.”
The Greek for “in esteem” is entimous (ἐντίμους), Strong’s G1784. Honored. Precious. Costly. The word you would use for valuable gems. Paul is saying, hold men like this as treasure. They are rare.
What he was worried about
The strangest detail in the whole passage is verse 26. “Since he was longing for you all, and was distressed because you had heard that he was sick.”
Read that twice.
Epaphroditus is on his deathbed in Rome. The illness has nearly killed him. And what is keeping him up at night, what has his soul distressed, is the thought that the people back home in Philippi have heard he is sick and might be worrying about him.
He is more concerned with their worry than with his own death.
That tells you everything about the kind of man he was.
What this means for you
I have known people like Epaphroditus. You probably have, too. They do not get the platform. They do not get the book deal. They do not get the chapter in the church history. They show up, week after week, at the house of a dying friend. They cook the meals that the family of the cancer patient eats. They drive the elderly church member to dialysis. They take in the foster child nobody else will. They stay up with the addicted son who keeps relapsing. They almost ruin their own lives doing it. They worry less about their own ruin than about whether the people they love are worried about them.
The world does not know their names.
Paul knew this one’s name. Paul knew it because Paul had needed him.
And the Holy Spirit, in the canon of Scripture, used a hapax legomenon to make sure we would never forget what he did. Paraboleusamenos. He gambled.
If you are one of these people, the New Testament has a verse with your name on it, even if your name has never been printed in a bulletin. Paul says it like this. Hold such men in honor. God already does.
If you have someone like Epaphroditus in your life, do what Paul said. Receive them in the Lord with all gladness. Tell them out loud what they are. Brother. Coworker. Soldier. Sent one. Priest. Tell them before the cancer takes them. Tell them before the funeral, where it will be too late for them to hear it.
The underdogs in this series have one thing in common.
God remembered them.
You can, too.
Going deeper
For the Greek word study, see paraboleusamenos (G3851), sustratiotes (G4961), apostolos (G652), and leitourgos (G3011) in any Strong’s-keyed concordance. Gordon Fee’s commentary on Philippians in the NICNT series is the gold standard on this letter, and his treatment of Epaphroditus is exceptional. For the history of the Parabolani and what early Christians did during plague seasons, Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity tells the story in unforgettable detail.
That is the underdog files.
One stick. One sentence. One last meal. One letter. One gamble.
Five names the world skipped past.
Five names God wrote down.
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