The Fight, The Race, And The Faith

    In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.

    As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing.

[Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy, 4:1-8. Emphasis added, as Paul was hopeless at HTML.]

Few metaphors possess resonance to equal those of Saint Paul in the last of his letters that have passed down to us. We who so glibly speak of the importance of fighting the good fight have nothing before us to compare to the labors of Paul of Tarsus. His travels at a time when the fastest conveyances were powered by wind or the muscles of men or animals; his struggles to find and install prelates capable of continuing his work in the places he visited; his repeated clashes with the law, both Judaic and Roman; and his eventual execution throw any First World Christian’s troubles into the shade.

Yet he was a difficult man: mercurial, demanding, and impatient with others. He imported into Christian doctrine many elements from Exodus and Leviticus that Christ Himself had not mentioned even in passing. When he erred, as he often did in his haste to be off on his next self-chosen mission, he would not apologize, and the mess he made was left to others to repair. For some years after his death, the predominant reaction, even among the clerics he chose personally, was relief that they wouldn’t have to put up with him any longer. Decades would pass before his writings became an indispensable portion of the Christian canon.

Second Timothy is in large part Paul’s attempt to justify himself in anticipation of his death. His “fight,” his “race,” and his enduring faith are the pillars of his defense against the many who found fault in him. If that fails to be perfectly convincing, nevertheless it carries an important instruction to those of us who tend to whine about our difficulties and recoil from contests where victory is unlikely.

A more recent writer, Steven Brust, put it this way:

“Sire, only the fates know the final outcome of the battle, but surely there is glory in knowing one has not surrendered, and surely there is comfort in knowing one is not alone.”

Indeed.

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We mortals tend to seek glory in temporal accomplishments and the acclaim they garner. We who live under the veil of time naturally compare our achievements to those of the great that have gone before us, and strive to exceed them. It orients us in a fashion that must surely amuse God, for all things must pass, all achievements must be surpassed, and all prizes must eventually crumble unto dust, as we ourselves are fated to do.

Mortal man is denied all eternal prizes but one. That prize does not demand that we defeat any mortal adversary. It does not require that we surpass anyone’s prior record. It is not awarded according to the volume of other mortals’ cheers. All it takes to gain the eternal prize – the nearness of God in everlasting bliss – is that we not surrender.

Surrender is, of course, the consequence of despair. He who has despaired has forsaken hope. When hope departs, faith invariably accompanies it.

Yet mortal life is filled with surrenders. The journey from the cradle to the grave involves so many surrenders that life can seem to be nothing but a course in how to surrender gracefully and efficiently. The old are more aware of this than the young, being increasingly conscious of the inevitable final surrender, after which all accounts must be reckoned up and all balances paid in full.

But just as mortal contests and prizes are not eternal ones, our surrenders of mortal things – our youth; our strength and health; our physical attractiveness; our potency; our independence; and our mortal lives – are not the dark and terrible Surrender that would reave us irrevocably of the hope of nearness to God. Job was compelled to surrender all the tokens of mortal success, and all else in which he had taken pleasure, but denied the Adversary’s beckoning even so:

I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. [Job 19:25]

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It is inevitable that we focus, most of the time, upon temporal matters rather than eternal ones. God does not begrudge us this. He made us what we are, and would not have us another way. Only a few can devote themselves wholly to the eternal things. The rest must remain at the cranks that keep the world turning, growing ever wearier from the effort.

But He is just. He asks nothing of us beyond our strength. Indeed, all He has ever asked is summarized in two Commandments:

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ [Matthew 22:34-40]

There is the fight we must fight, the race we must finish: to love God, and to treat with our equals in His sight in the spirit of love, to the ends of our lives. Being fallible, we will sometimes fail, but as long as we acknowledge our failures and are appropriately contrite for them, we have not surrendered. In this inhere the entirety of the Christian faith and the engine that propels all true charity.

May God bless and keep you all.