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Letters Twenty-Eighth
Sunday in Ordinary Time |
The Catholic Telegraph
October 12, 2001This Sunday’s reading is parallel to last week’s. The senior apostle, suffering in prison for his faith, continues to call his younger colleague to courage and perseverance. In the earlier verses of chapter two, he has invited Timothy to look on himself as a good soldier, as an athlete contending for victory, as a hardworking farmer. Now the senior offers himself as a model for the younger man to follow.
He may be suffering like a criminal, but somehow what he is being asked to bear will contribute to the salvation of those to whom his preaching is addressed. He may be chained, but the gospel is not chained, the gospel whose basic message is that Jesus Christ was a man from the family of David who was raised from the dead. Therein lies strength and encouragement for Timothy. (Note that Jesus’ true humanity and His resurrection seem to be the fundamental constitutive elements of the gospel. That’s what the gospel is about!)
Now the author offers further encouragement by quoting what seems to be an early Christian hymn, perhaps used in the liturgy of baptism. It consists of four couplets. The first two couplets seem to apply to the situation at hand, but the author keeps right on quoting to the end. Dying with Christ guarantees our life with Him. Perseverance will bring triumph. That’s what Timothy needed to hear. The rest of the hymn gives us the flip side of this, but also a surprise. If we deny Christ, He will deny us. (This couplet seems to be an allusion to Jesus’ words recorded in Matthew 10.33.) But if we are unfaithful, He is not unfaithful in return. Christ cannot be unfaithful to us because His love for us is so much a part of Him that He wouldn’t be Himself if He stopped loving us.
These verses offer us an insight into the demands of the apostolate in the early times of the Church. But they are not just of historical interest. They also speak to us about our own situation.
For one thing, we are all called to preach the gospel of Christ as Timothy was. The gospel and the faith that comes from it are not "things" that we receive and that we are then responsible for keeping safe. They constitute a relationship with God which, if it is full and healthy in us, necessarily impels us to sharing. If we are serious about our participation in the life of the risen Christ, if we understand what it means to live God’s life, we will want others to be part of it, too.
This doesn’t mean that every Christian believer has to be a full time preacher or engage in public proclamation in the center of town. But it does mean that Christian faith has a social dimension, that believers are expected to let other people see what faith means, that practicing our faith should be a public part of our ordinary life, that living in Christ is something that we are supposed to be willing to talk about and invite others to share. Faith is not something that belongs in our safe-deposit box!
Another aspect of our life to which this reading speaks is that we are imprisoned even as the author of II Timothy was. We are not languishing in chains in a Roman jail somewhere. But our circumstances are such that our wanting to share with those around us the good news of Jesus and the offer of His life is hindered in many ways. Our chains are not physical, but they are real.
The hindrances arise not from judicial decisions that have been imposed on us but from the social and cultural atmosphere in which we find ourselves. Religious faith is not something that we are encouraged to talk about. Baseball scores are more socially acceptable. Living in and with Christ for all eternity is not something that most people are very interested in. Our world gives a lot more attention to sexual fulfillment and economic security. In our world, a good stereo system is generally much more eagerly sought after than eternal life. We live in a pagan atmosphere, and that atmosphere impedes us in carrying out our responsibilities as agents of Christ’s gospel.
That doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility, however. We have to bear with the difficulties in which we find ourselves just as the author of II Timothy had to bear with his, with the realization that our struggle to remain faithful to Christ’s calling is itself a source of fruitfulness.
The shackles that our culture imposes on us can also serve as a reminder that it is not we who are the primary agents of faith. Faith comes from Christ through the working of the Holy Spirit. We are merely the instruments, and it is important for us to remember that God doesn’t have to have perfect instruments in order to get the work done. Even if the instruments can’t work freely, God still wants to use them. And God will use them because God is faithful and wants us to be part of His work.
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Conversation Questions
How do I participate in the preaching of the gospel?
What are the greatest obstacles to my giving witness to Christ?
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