For the remaining four days of this week, we will be reading from the Second Letter to Timothy, one of the so-called “Pastoral Letters”. There are questions about the letter’s real authorship, but it is presented as a letter from the Apostle Paul to one of his most faithful assistants and companions, Timothy, who came from the Roman province of Galatia in present day Turkey. In the opening of today’s reading (2 Timothy 1:1‑3, 6‑12) Paul refers to Timothy as “my beloved child”. Paul was old enough to be Timothy’s father.
Paul calls himself an ‘apostle’, one specially commissioned by Christ, putting himself on the same level as the Twelve who accompanied Jesus in his public life. As an apostle, he is being sent out to preach and explain that the Good News of unending life with God is available to all those who open themselves to it. There then follows a prayer of thanksgiving as Paul remembers and prays for his companion, Timothy.
The main part of the letter now begins, starting with exhortations to Timothy. Paul begins by urging Timothy to “rekindle the gift of the Holy Spirit” that had been given to him when Paul laid his hands on him. The gift of the Spirit can lie dormant in us unless we exercise it regularly and make it an active element in our lives. Failing to use the Spirit’s gifts is something we are all in constant danger of doing. Probably few of us effectively use the special gifts that God has given each one of us for service and benefit of others. As Paul states, “…God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”
The spirit of power is an inner strength and not the kind of power used to dominate others. The love is the desire to work for the well-being of others, especially to bring them to an awareness of and to respond to the love of God that comes to them through Jesus Christ. Self-discipline is not the suppression of desires, but rather a passion to do what is good and right.
Paul tells Timothy neither to be ashamed of the witness he is called to give, nor of his companion Paul, who is now languishing in prison for the sake of the Gospel. In fact, he is to expect some measure of hardship in preaching the Gospel. That is something we all need to be prepared for. The threat of death hangs over every Christian who proclaims the Gospel, but Jesus has brought us life and immortality which no one can take away.
Paul tells Timothy that we have a huge gift of having been called to a life of holiness. We have not merited this in any way; it is pure gift. It is part of God’s plan from the very beginning of time, but now made visible through the life of Jesus, the Word of God among us: “…he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.” (Ephesians 1:4)
It is in the service of this Gospel that Paul now suffers imprisonment. He is not ashamed of this and has no regrets. “…I am not ashamed, for I know the one in whom I have put my trust…” This is his total confidence in his Lord. It is a person-to-person friendship that nothing can shake. Paul is sure that his Lord will protect him to the very end.
Would that we had that confidence in Jesus that Paul had! Would that we were ready to suffer any hardship so that the Gospel might be heard and accepted by more of those around us! As the Christian apologist, G.K. Chesterton, said: “Christianity has not failed; it has not even been tried.”
In our Gospel reading today (Mark 12:18‑27), Jesus faces another confrontation, this time with Sadducees. The Sadducees were a group that did not accept many of the beliefs held by the Pharisees. They confined their beliefs to the Pentateuch, the books attributed to Moses, the first five books of our Bible. Moses never talked about an afterlife, so the Sadducees rejected that there was life after death. In today’s reading, they approach Jesus with a hypothetical case which they believed there was no way for Jesus to answer:
A woman married a man, but he died before they could have children. In order that her late husband, the eldest son in his family, would have heirs, she followed a law (known as the Levirate law) that said she had to marry her husband’s brother. She did so, but he also died, and in the end, she married seven brothers, each in turn, all of whom died before a child could be conceived. Today we might call her, a “black widow”.
The Sadducees’ question to Jesus was that, if there is life after death, which of the seven men would be her real husband in the next life? For them, of course, there was no problem but, for Jesus and all those who believed in an after-life, they thought it created an insoluble problem.
Jesus answers them on two fronts. First, he says that in the next life marriage will no longer exist. People will all be related equally in a common relationship with God. Second, he astutely quotes from the book of the Exodus, a book of the Bible that even the Sadducees acknowledged as divine revelation. Jesus reminds them that God spoke to Moses from out of the burning bush saying, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” (Exodus 3:6)
Jesus responded with a logical argument: God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. God did not tell Moses, “I WAS the God of Abraham,” or, “I USED TO BE the God of Abraham.” The text from Exodus uses the present tense: “I am (another I AM statement), here and now, the God of Abraham”.
Perhaps we might not be altogether swayed by this argument, but faced with a text from a part of the Bible they accepted as divine revelation, it was a statement the Sadducees could not question…and they had no comeback.
It is useful for us to be able to handle distortions of our faith that can sometimes be thrown at us. It is essential that we are familiar with our Bible to do so. But we cannot bring people to Christ simply by besting them in arguments. The real way to bring people to Christ is by the compelling example of our actions, our words, and our attitudes that reflect his love and tolerance.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!