Paul explains to Philemon that he is praying that their koinōnia will have its full, powerful effect, bringing them all together “into the king,” into the Messiah. From Paul’s other uses of this idea we see what he means: “the Messiah” is not only Jesus, but all those who are “in the Messiah.” It is an incorporative term, as it was in Galatians (“You are all one in the Messiah, Jesus”) and 1 Corinthians (“as the body is one, and has many members, . . . so also is the Messiah”).21 “We must,” he says in Ephesians, “speak the truth in love, and so grow up in everything into him”—that is, into the
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