36th Sunday after Pentecost; Our Venerable Father Xenophon and his wife Maria.
1 Timothy 1:15-17; Luke 18:35-43.
Read 1 Timothy 1:15-17
Can we make it to the completion of our journey? We are “those who were to believe in (Christ) for eternal life”, but the distance can be long between the beginning of our believing and eternity, and the most difficult obstacle on that road is ourselves.
Today’s epistle reading is part of our penultimate act in the Divine Liturgy – the prayer before communion. When we say together, “I believe, O Lord, and confess that You are truly Christ, the Son of the Living God, Who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am first,” we can’t all be “first”. Paul wrote of himself, “I am the foremost of sinners,” because he had persecuted the Church. But what about Judas? Or Pilate?
By the very nature of sin as an offense against God, what we are saying in this act of contrition is that we cannot consider ourselves better than anyone else when we come for forgiveness. What Paul is saying in addition to this is that he is an example of our ability to make it. That is beautifully and encouragingly highlighted for us by the words, “his perfect patience”.
Patience is a word about time. One exercising patience with another allows them time to reconcile, heal, grow, and persevere. And the one exercising that patience toward us is Jesus Christ. His patience is not our patience; his whole purpose in coming into the world was about love – “to save sinners.”
Paul has only just begun his letter to Timothy, and he breaks out in an exclamation of praise to God that would be a fitting climatic ending. What he has done is to fast-forward us to a vision of the completion of our journey. He is confident that if he can make it, so can we.