Holy Apostle Philemon and those with him.
Post-feast of the Entrance of the Mother of God. Nativity Fast. Abstention from meat and foods that contain meat.
2 Timothy 1:1-2, 8-18. Luke 19:12-28.
Read 2 Timothy 1:1-2, 8-18
Do not be ashamed then of testifying to our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but take your share of suffering for the gospel in the power of God.
John Chrysostom understands this passage in light of earlier heretics who preached the wrong Gospel. Marcion, for example, taught that the wrathful God of the Old Testament was absolutely different Than the loving God in the New. Valentinus, a propagator of Gnosticism, pick and chose his Christianity from the gospels and mixed it with a smattering of middle Platonism. The unfortunate admixture was apparently attractive, leading Irenaeus to compose a full throated denunciation of Gnosticism in his work Against the Heresies, incidentally one of the first works of systematic Christian theology written.
For our own day, these observations of Chrysostom on Timothy are helpful to remind us that our acceptance of Christianity must go beyond the comfortable. The troubling things, especially the troubling things, are not inconsistencies to explain away, but occasions for meditation on the paradox of God. New atheists, like Richard Dawkins, rehearse the Marcionite argument poorly and use that to “disprove” the truth of Christianity. Joel Osteen, mixes his diet Christianity with self-help rules on prosperity, often to deleterious effects in his hearers. There are plenty of false teachers or denouncers of Christianity whose positions ultimately stem from their unwillingness to not partake of the sufferings of the Gospel. They prefer being clever or relevant, but that hardly helps them apprehend the true, the good, and the beautiful.