Continuing the Imitation
by Fr. Roger Landry - June 26, 2009
We have come to the end of the Year of St. Paul, in which the whole Church, celebrating the 2000th anniversary of the great apostle's birth, has focused on learning to imitate him as he imitated Christ (1 Cor 11:1). As the year draws to a close, we would do well to emulate the goals and desires he had at the end of his time on earth, which provide a fitting summary of his entire apostolic life.
"I am already on the point of being sacrificed; the time of my departure has come," he wrote to his spiritual son St. Timothy. "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith" (2 Tim 4:6-7).
St. Paul was a fighter with incredible grit, a spiritual Rocky Balboa come alive. Not even being scourged five times with 39 lashes, three times beaten with rods, seven times imprisoned, three times shipwrecked on the high seas, stoned and left for dead, hunted down by assassins in Damascus and Jerusalem, afflicted by painful malaria, and beaten in so many other ways, could keep him down. Like Christ on the Way of the Cross, he just kept getting up and moving forward. He wasn't fighting for fighting's sake, a pugilist looking for an opponent. Rather, he had spent his life fighting the "good fight," fighting not so much against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness" (Eph 6:12). The fight, in short, was worth it. Like Christ, he triumphed in apparent defeat. Two-thousand years after his birth, this convicted criminal is one of the greatest and most famous heroes in the history of the world. His example reminds us, who live in an age marked by so much moral timidity, of the fact that Christ calls us vigorously to persevere in the fight Christ inaugurated and Paul valiantly continued.
The apostle says, secondly, that he has finished the race. His life was not a gingerly stroll through a tranquil garden, but a marathon run over an obstacle course at almost breakneck speed. He would say to the Thessalonians in another context, "the time is short," but that phrase aptly describes the urgency with which St. Paul indefatigably kept going. The only thing that could slow him down were the chains of prison cells, but even then he would continue to scurry with his pen. "The love of Christ urges us on," he would confess. He knew, as Christ taught, that the fruit is already ripe on the vine and he had no time to waste. He journeyed rapidly up and down the scorching sands of Palestine, through the malaria-infested swamps of southern Turkey, and over the steep precipices leading to Galatia, south and north through Greece, and, when he couldn't run on water, sailing to so many other places. C.S. Lewis once wrote that the most effective lie in the devil's arsenal is that there's always time — time to convert, time to reconcile with a family member, time to get to the important things later. St. Paul realized, rather, that there would soon be a time when there would be no time left — and he used all the time he had to do the most important things of all. His example is a forceful reminder to us to remember that when Christ said, "Come, follow me!," he was not inviting us for a lazy promenade, or even a leisurely jog, but an enduring sprint. There's no time to waste and the stakes are high; otherwise, as St. Paul recognized, people may not hear the Gospel and come to salvation. The same love that urged him on urges us on.
St. Paul finishes his short valedictory with a humble, joyful and triumphal admission of his greatest honor: "I have kept the faith." The words themselves, not to mention their context, imply that his keeping the faith was not a foregone conclusion. He was tempted repeatedly and often succumbed, confessing to the Romans that the good he wanted to do he often failed to do and the evil he wished to avoid often he did (Rom 7:19). But he kept getting up, battling and striving to be faithful. At the end of his life, he was able to say with holy pride that he had not lost the greatest treasure of his life. He kept the faith not by sealing it in a Tupperware container or locking it up in a safe, but by living it and spreading it undiluted. He lived, he said to the Galatians, by faith in the Son of God who loved him and handed himself over for him (Gal 2:19-20). Because of that trust in Jesus, he believed in what Christ taught as the key to unlock the mystery of every human life and open the doors to heaven. That's why he so lavishly sought to share that treasure with others. His example teaches us that as we, too, look ahead to the time when our dissolution will be at hand, we should seek to have our greatest hope be in being able to hear Christ say that we, too, in spite of our sufferings and failings, have kept the faith, that we've lived it faithfully without diluting it, that we've bequeathed it as our most precious inheritance to those who will come after us, not just those we know and love, but those who we will only know after we and they cross the eternal threshold.
It's routinely said that so much of our character is defined by our goals. If we have low goals, we will have little impact even if we achieve them. If our goals are high and good, then we will be able to make a major difference if with God's help we reach them. As we come to the end of the year-long world-wide celebration of the 2,000th birthday of a beheaded man from Tarsus, we should never forget that his goals — fighting the good fight, finishing the race and keeping the faith — motivated him to do with the help of the Lord what few have ever dreamed of. As we move on from the graces of the Pauline Year, a great resolution each of us can make is to imitate him in setting and seeking the same goals.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
