Homily for 26th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
26th Sunday of Ordinary Time
To anyone who may have been looking for this 2 weeks ago--sorry! It's been a crazy time in the province with a relic of St. John Bosco passing thru on pilgrimage, including my duties with regard to that. Extensive coverage at http://www.donboscoamongus.org/ which does include a lot of photos taken by yours truly in Washington, the Marian Shrine, and St. Patrick's Cathedral, as well as video, photos, and news links from the other places of pilgrimage.

Sept. 26, 2010
1 Tim 6: 11-16
Christian Brothers, Iona College, N.R.

“But you, man of God, pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness” (1 Tim 6: 11).

On my 1st look at this Sunday’s readings, I noticed (obviously) their condemnation of the rich who ignore the collapse of their society and ignore the poor. Perhaps not the most fertile soil for developing a homily here.

2d, I noticed the lines in Amos about “lying upon beds of ivory, stretched comfortably on their couches,” eating “lambs taken from the flock and calves from the stall” (6:4), and found a justification for camping trips.

Finally, I noticed Paul’s exhortation to Timothy, his young disciple to whom pastoral care of the church at Ephesus has been given. Ironically, in the context of our 1st and 3d readings, this exhortation from 1 Timothy 6 is sandwiched between passages warning about the dangers of riches (“the love of money is the root of all evils”—6:10) and urging the wealthy to do good with their riches so as to accumulate “treasure for the future so as to win the life that is true life” (6:19).

Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus are called the “pastoral” letters of the NT because of their concern for how the Church’s leaders, her pastors, conduct themselves and how they govern their flocks. Today Paul advises Timothy not so much as a bishop as as a disciple, a professed believer in Christ Jesus. He addresses him as “man of God,” άνθρωπε Θεοϋ—a human being belonging to God (6:11). He reminds him that he has “been called to eternal life” by the fact of having “made the noble confession in the presence of many witnesses” (6:12). A few commentators take this to refer to an ordination rite, but most see in it a reference to Baptism.

In Baptism the follower of Christ makes a profession of faith, a “noble confession,” and starts on the road “to eternal life.” In Baptism the follower of Christ is sacramentally united with Christ and the “testimony he gave under Pontius Pilate for the noble confession” (6:13). Christ’s testimony is his μαρτυρία, his bearing witness, which many Christians in the 1st century were called upon to do in public trials and in firm refusal to honor any God except the one “King of Kings and Lord of Lords who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, and whom no human being has seen or can see” (6:15-16)—“to keep the commandment without stain or reproach” (6:14), the commandment that there is no God but the Lord, and we are to love him with our whole heart and soul (cf. Mark 12:28-33).

In the 1st century, these were no idle words. This is no idle exhortation. Nor is it in our century, as Pope Benedict reminded us forcefully during his recent trip to Great Britain, especially in his speech to the cultural and political leaders of the nation on the role of religion in public life—given in the very spot where Thomas More was convicted of treason and condemned to death for refusing to yield religious authority to the State, refusing, in 1st-century terminology, to burn incense before the emperor.

St. Thomas More: window of a church in Surrey, England

Today’s Christian, whether professed religious or ordained minister or “only” baptized anthropos Theou, still has to “lay hold of eternal life,” i.e., to determine that his objective in this life is to win eternal life thru his identification with Christ Jesus, and to pursue the objective relentlessly, despite any efforts by the Pontius Pilates of the world to turn him off the right road. For surely our Lord Jesus Christ is going to appear again in God’s good time (6:14-15) to separate the faithful from the unfaithful, those who’ve “kept the commandment without stain or reproach” from those who haven’t.

The 1st verse of this evening’s passage lists 6 virtues that Timothy, the man of God, should pursue (6:11). Being “righteous” and “devout” and “faithful” refers to our relationship with God. In Baptism God has made us “righteous” thru our association with Jesus Christ, and as the baptismal rite reminds us, we are charged to bring our baptismal garment with us unstained when we go to meet Christ. Certainly our devotion, our union with God in prayer, our imitation of the good works of Jesus, helps us to live lives without stain or reproach; and our sacramental life, which is the life of Christ himself, restores us to divine righteousness if we should fail.

“Love, patience, and gentleness” are virtues that we practice with others in our imitation of Jesus. They are the practical ways in which we “compete well for the faith” (6:12), engage in the daily combat of life against our own egos, against the allurements of the present world, against Satan and all his empty promises.

The Vietnamese martyrs: National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington
The passage concludes with a short doxology: “To him be honor and eternal power” (6:16). If we live as Paul exhorts us to, we honor God. If we live as he exhorts us to, we not only acknowledge the power of God but we also demonstrate it: for it takes a lot of power to be faithful to God in the face of all life’s temptations and discouragements, power that is not our own. It takes a lot of power to defeat sin and to raise the dead. But to this we have been called, to receive the gifts of forgiveness and eternal life.