Romans 16:1,2
I commend unto you Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea: That ye receive her in the Lord, as becometh saints, and that ye assist her in whatsoever business she hath need of you: for she hath been a succourer of many, and of myself also.
ALEXANDER MacLAREN (1826-1910): 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.
C. H. SPURGEON (1834-1892): But still, we find very little about her.
ALEXANDER MacLAREN: This is an outline picture of an else wholly unknown person. She, like most of the other names mentioned in the salutations in Romans chapter sixteen, 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.
JOHN GILL (1697-1771): She is recommended as a sister―“our sister”―not in a natural, but spiritual relation; one that was a member of the church at Cenchrea, and in full communion with it; for as it was usual to call the men brethren, it was common to call the women sisters. Elderly men were called fathers, younger men brethren; elderly women were styled mothers, and younger women sisters, who were partakers of the grace of God, and enjoyed the fellowship of the saints. As she dwelt at Cenchrea, it is probable she was a Grecian, as is her name. With the Heathen poets, Pheobus was the sun, and Phoebe the moon. Though it is not unlikely that she might be a Jewess, since there were many of them in those parts; and this was a name in use among them.
THOMAS GOODWIN (1600-1679): Where, do you think, stood this same Cenchrea?
JOHN GILL: This place was a seaport of the Corinthians, distant from Corinth about eight or nine miles.
ADAM CLARKE (1760-1832): Corinth was situated on the isthmus that connects Peloponnesus to Attica…It was most advantageously situated for trade; for, by its two ports, the Lecheum and Cenchreae, it commanded the commerce both of the Ionian and Aegean Sea—Cenchrea was a sea-port on the east side of the isthmus which joined the Morea to Greece, as the Lechaeum was the sea-port on the west side of the same isthmus. These were the only two havens and towns of any note, next to Corinth, that belonged to this territory. As the Lechaeum opened the road to the Ionian sea, so Cenchrea opened the road to the Aegean; and both were so advantageously situated for commerce that they were very rich.
ALEXANDER MacLAREN: But if we take into account the hideous immoralities of Corinth, we shall deem it probable that the port of Cenchrea, 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.
JOHN GILL: In the way to this place from the Isthmus was the temple of Diana, and a very ancient sculpture; and in Cenchrea itself was the temple of Venus, and a wooden image; and near the flow of the sea was a Neptune of brass. But now, in this place, there was a church of Jesus Christ.
ALEXANDER MacLAREN: She was a “servant”―or, as the margin preferably reads, a “deaconess of the Church which is at Cenchrea.”
THOMAS COKE (1747-1814): Deacons were officers employed in distributing the church’s stock among the necessitous. They were to be persons of an eminent character, 1 Timothy 3:8-11, and therefore their service in the church might not consist only in relieving the poor, but in visiting the sick, in exhorting, comforting, and teaching, as occasion required…According to the customs of that country, men could not well be allowed to perform those good offices to the women: for men to have visited and conversed with women, would have been counted a very great indecency, and must have brought a scandal upon the Christian profession.
JOHN GILL: Not that she was a teacher of the word, or preacher of the Gospel, for that was not allowed of by the apostle in the church at Corinth, that a woman should teach—see 1 Corinthians 14:34; and therefore would never be admitted at Cenchrea. Rather, as some think, she was a deaconess appointed by the church, to take care of the poor sisters of the church; though as they were usually poor, and ancient women; that were put into that service, and this woman, according to the account of her, being neither poor, nor very ancient; it seems rather, that being a rich and generous woman, she served or ministered to the church by relieving the poor; not out of the church’s stock, as deaconesses did, but out of her own substance.
ALEXANDER MacLAREN: 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.
JOHN GILL: And she received the ministers of the Gospel, and all strangers, into her house, which was open to all Christians; and so was exceeding serviceable to that church, and to all the saints that came thither.
ALEXANDER MacLAREN: Sometime or other, and somehow or other, she had had the honour and joy of helping Paul, and no doubt that opportunity would be to her a crown of service.
J. R. MILLER (1840-1912): We are apt to overlook the minor actors in Scripture stories in our absorbed interest in the prominent ones. Yet often these lesser people are just as important in their own place, and their service is just as essential to the final success of the whole as the greater ones.
ALEXANDER MacLAREN: Remember our Lord’s teaching? That the giver of “a cup of cold water in the name of a prophet” in some measure shares in the prophet’s work, and will surely share in the prophet’s reward, Matthew 10:41. She who helped Paul must have entered into the spirit of Paul’s labours―Paul and Phœbe were one in ministry and one in its recompense―Little did Phœbe dream that her name would have an eternal commemoration of her unnoticed deeds of kindness and aid, standing forth to later generations and peoples of whom she knew nothing, as worthy of eternal remembrance. For those of us who have to serve unnoticed and unknown, here is an instance which may stimulate and encourage: It matters little whether our work be noticed or recorded by men, so long as we know that it is written in the Lamb’s book of life and that He will one day proclaim it “before the Father in heaven and His angels.”
