Ordo Praedicatorum

Saturday, January 26 was the feast of Saints Timothy and Titus. At the community Mass at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC, one of our newly ordained deacons, Br. Anthony Giambrone, O.P. preached the homily.

I.

Timothy and Titus appear in the calendar as the direct and immediate fruit of St. Paul’s conversion. In a sense, one might say, today’s feast continues on the momentum of yesterday, which (you’ll notice) celebrated not merely the life of a saint, but an event in salvation history. In other words, it isn’t Paul’s private, hagiographical history that makes his conversion liturgically notable; the stunning conversion of St. Augustine, for instance, gets no special day. It is, rather, that Paul’s conversion is an event of ecclesial magnitude, a watershed happening in the history of the New Covenant—on scale with the Baptism of Christ or even the very day of Pentecost. The Lord’s appearance en route to Damascus initiates a colossal new revelation in his plan of salvation; through this vas electionis, this chosen vessel and vessel of election, Christ the Lord inaugurates the massive mission that would graft all nations onto the election of Israel.

So, if Paul’s conversion sets the Gentile mission in motion and thus becomes the channel by which—the vessel from which God pours out his elective grace indiscriminately upon the world, Timothy and Titus are living expressions of that grace. Each man was a beneficiary of the mission, and each man in his own turn became a coworker with Paul in that mission, an apostolic delegate, free-ranging and bearing the full power of the Gospel: evangelizing and preaching, organizing and ordaining.

Timothy, whom Paul first met at Lystra in Acts 16 while on his first missionary journey, became, on account of the youth’s high reputation among the believers in that city, an immediate companion of the Apostle. As Paul’s own trust in him grew, Timothy became the Apostle’s favorite, on-site troubleshooter—deployed to pacify the factions in Corinth and to quiet the errant heretics in Ephesus with the pure teaching of sound doctrine.

Titus—the non-circumcised, Gentile Christian—was (as we know from Galatians) at the Council of Jerusalem a veritable poster boy for Paul’s Gospel. He, too, was a go-between in the Corinthian turmoil—a reconciler, we can imagine, of considerable skill. Later, in Crete, it was his charge to organize and civilize an unstable and endangered, neophyte Church, to refute opponents, and to insist upon faithful word.

II.

Now, in view of this heavy—or rather, total involvement in the Greek mission, it is no surprise that the three New Testament documents which bear the names of Timothy and Titus are deeply stamped by the thought and language of the Hellenistic world. And although exegetes have their own explanations for this intensely Greek tone of the letters, it is not ridiculous to believe that what we see in evidence here is a very basic strategy of these missionaries; as Paul formulated it elsewhere: “we take every thought captive in obedience to Christ.”

The so-called “epiphany Christology” of the Pastoral letters offers a nice example. The notion of a divine epiphany is lifted straight from the language of the Hellenistic cults. In our reading from the salutation to Titus, however, (which is incidentally the most elaborate Pauline greeting apart from Romans), Paul co-opts this epiphany idea and puts it at the service of an eschatological event: at the proper time he (that is, God) revealed (or better, manifested) his word by proclamation.

The proclamation mentioned here is, of course, Paul’s own preaching: the proclamation, he says, with which I was entrusted. This in itself is interesting. Normally, for Paul, the language of manifestation or epiphany is connected, in some manner, with the Christ event—as is also this idea of God’s “proper time,” which means the time when the promises are fulfilled. Here, though, the mission bearing the message is itself the apparition.

There is a certain Old Testament precedent for this. Isaiah in several places forecasts the scene: the eschatological announcement of good tidings: most famously, How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who bring the good news! Israel was in exile; but at the proper time God would send messengers, preachers to proclaim that he, the Lord reigns. Their appearance would itself be a manifestation of the liberation they came to announce.

This is a beautiful thought—and it did not escape Paul, who in Romans applied the Isaiah text to his own mission. At the turning of the age, a team of preachers appears among the nations, bearing a message of hope and manifesting, by their mere advent, God’s urgent generosity and his expansive desire to gather all people to himself.

III.

These few laborers—Paul, Timothy, Titus, a handful of others—are sent out into the Lord’s field to bring him the harvest at its proper time. So few spread thin across a world so large. In the Gospel, Christ himself reveals how embarrassingly abundant the ripe harvest is. To Timothy, Paul would moan how few they were: “Demas, enamored of the present world, deserted me and went to Thessalonica, Crescens to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia. Luke is the only one with me…I have sent Tychichus to Ephesus.”

With perfect resistance to every dismal, diocesan, vocational video, the harvest is—perpetually—completely out of proportion to the work force. It is a deficit and excess as certain and enduring as the very words of the Gospel. This suggests, I think, that the labor to be undertaken is, in fact, more than human industry can ever provide. The harvest of God’s designs will always be greater; and this means one of two things. Either, the laborers will be ever consigned to a life of hopelessly over-burdened frustration; or the Lord will expand the value of their service, and provide results completely out of proportion to the work force, ever exceeding the paltry power of their own stamina, wit, or will.

IV.

This, of course, is where we, finally, fit into the picture. Like Timothy and Titus we are coworkers in this great mission of preaching, a mission which stretches down through the ages and covers every time and place—yet, a mission never finished until the Son of Man will at last send his angel harvesters to gather in all that is his. Until then, it is now still the “proper time”; and God continues to manifest his word by the same perennial proclamation.

As the Church’s own preachers, we are made bearers of the Gospel and must continually reveal the saving will of God by our preaching. Our charism is, like Timothy and Titus, to be specialists in the mission. The grace given to St. Dominic, which we share and cooperate in, is in the service of the same “sound doctrine” which these saints so nobly defended. “Hold fast to the true message; exhort with sound doctrine; refute opponents.”

The truth of this doctrine is—as our first reading calls it—the “truth that accords with godliness.” As ill as our world is in its appetite for such truth—all truth has become unpalatable—the odds against us are simply a measure of God’s power to save. For our very call to preach reveals that the Lord reigns. If he sends his laborers out as lambs among wolves, he also lays down his life for his sheep.

And so, we never fatigue to hear those magnificent words of Paul’s final testament to Timothy, words inscribed as an emblem and title over our Order :

“Proclaim the word; be persistent, whether it is convenient or inconvenient; convince, reprimand, encourage through all patience and teaching. For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teachers and will stop listening to the truth. But you, be self-possessed in all circumstances; put up with hardship; perform the work of an evangelist; fulfill your ministry.”

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