26th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sept. 26, 2004
1 Tim 6: 11-16
Ursulines, Willow
Drive, N.R.
Saturday nite I celebrated Mass for a group of Scouters taking the Woodbadge course at Camp Alpine in N.J., preaching on the parable of Dives and Lazarus from an outline. So, once again, I post an "oldie."
“But you, man of God,
pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness” (1 Tim
6: 11).
Paul’s 2 letters to
Timothy are, of course, directed to a specific individual, one of his disciples
to whom he has entrusted pastoral care.
Hence they, and the similar letter to Titus, are called the Pastoral
Epistles. But these letters merit the attention
of all of us, not only of bishops and presbyters, for their advice on
discipleship.
Paul
reminds Timothy of “the noble confession” he made publicly, “in the presence of
many witnesses” (6:12), and he compares Timothy’s public testimony to that of
“Christ Jesus, who gave testimony under Pontius Pilate” (6:13). Jesus testified to the truth and to the
priority of God’s rule before the Roman governor (Jn 18:36-37), as Timothy did
when he accepted Baptism and professed faith in Jesus Christ.
Paul
had just been speaking of various vices that Christ’s followers must avoid,
especially contentiousness and avarice.
In contrast to those, Timothy is to act as a man of God—a prophet, in
Old Testament usage of the term—and pursue virtue: righteousness, love, gentleness, and so
on. Paul charges him “to keep the
commandment without stain or reproach until the appearance of our Lord Jesus
Christ” (6:14). By “the commandment” he
means total commitment to God, fidelity to his profession of faith without
regard to personal cost in this world.
Instead
of concern for the goods of this world, Timothy and we are to “pursue
righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness.” By righteousness, devotion, and faith we
cement our relationship with God; by love, patience, and gentleness, with our
sisters and brothers. Obviously these
virtues are valid and necessary for all Christ’s disciples and not just for
presbyters and bishops. For all of us
they are our public testimony—before God, before the Church, before
society—that we belong to Christ.
We
believe that those virtues are the path to eternal life. We were called to eternal life when Christ
called us; and by living as he wishes us to live, we will “lay hold of eternal
life” (6:12). For Christ is “the way,
the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6).
Christ,
furthermore, will return. Crucifixion
was not the end of Jesus of Nazareth or of his message. The ascension of Jesus into heaven has not
separated him forever from us. “He will
come again in glory to judge the living and the dead” (Creed), to weigh all our
thoughts, words, and deeds in the balance of divine justice, to bring to life
all who belong to him and to send on their chosen path all who have rejected
him. What we do in this life, the
choices we make, our fidelity to God’s plan has eternal consequences, as the
rich man finds out in Jesus’ parable today (Luke 16:19-31). So Paul charges Timothy and all of us to
“keep the commandment without stain or reproach until the appearance of our
Lord Jesus Christ,” who will reveal to all man-kind “the King of kings and Lord
of lords” (6:15), the eternal God, “who alone has immortality” (6:16) but who
shares his immortal life with all who are in Christ.
Paul
has pointed toward our goal, and he has marked the way for us. The goal is eternal life, which is God’s
gift, and the way to it is our union with Christ Jesus—union of commitment thru
Baptism, sacramental union thru the Eucharist, union of testimony in lives that
imitate his, union as our everlasting destiny, until we can say with St. Paul,
“I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20).
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