By Fr. George Dorbarakis
Saint Timothy was from the city of Lystra. His father was a pagan, and his mother was a Jewess named Eunice. He became a disciple of the Apostle Paul and became his co-worker and a preacher of the divine gospel. He also went with Saint John, the especially beloved disciple of the Lord, and was appointed by the Apostle Paul himself as Bishop of Ephesus.
When Saint John was cast ashore by the sea (as Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, also recounts in his writings) and returned to Ephesus, and later was led by Emperor Domitian into exile on the island of Patmos, the blessed Timothy took his place in the episcopacy of the Ephesians.
Now at one time, when the pagans, during a certain ancestral festival of theirs called the “Katagogion,” in the city of the Ephesians, were holding idols in their hands, placing some of them upon themselves as masks, singing with them, and attacking men and women in a robber-like manner and committing murders, the blessed Timothy could not bear to witness the impropriety of their actions. Instead, he rebuked their vain delusion and exhorted them to abandon their shameful deeds. As a result, they killed him, attacking him with clubs. Afterward, his holy relic was transferred to Constantinople and placed in the Church of the Holy Apostles, where his Synaxis was celebrated.
Saint Timothy the Apostle is regarded as the beloved disciple of the Apostle Paul, whom he often accompanied on his missionary journeys and from whom he received the two well-known epistles of the New Testament that bear his name, the First and Second Epistles to Timothy. And as a disciple of Paul, his point of reference was Christ. For this is the mark of true discipleship of the apostles: to follow in the footsteps of the Lord. That is to say, the apostles, as is well known, did not surround themselves with followers in the sense of partisans, nor did they create a kind of spiritual “ghetto.” Rather, those who followed them were immediately directed to the one and only Savior of mankind, Jesus Christ. It was Him whom the apostles themselves revealed, and therefore it was Him whom their disciples “saw.”
The hymnography of the feast of Saint Timothy makes this clear from the very beginning, already in the first stichera of Vespers:
“Divinely-wise Timothy, you drank from the torrent of delight, and with divine understanding you watered with the knowledge of God those who fervently desire it, imitating Christ.”
Although he was a disciple of Paul, he was “drinking” God; it was God whom he taught; Christ whom he imitated. The Apostle Paul was relentless toward those who sought to distort this truth in Corinth. When some attempted to form groups centered on certain apostles rather than on Christ, he immediately reacted sharply: “What then is Peter, or Paul, or Apollos? Were they crucified for you? We all belong to Christ, and to Him we belong.”
His calling to become a Christian, and even his being numbered among the choir of the Apostles, was not the work of Paul or of any other apostle. Though the Apostle Paul may have been the means of his calling, it was God Himself who captivated his heart and drew it to Himself — the God who, as the One who foreknows and knows all things, seeing the beauty of his mind, deemed him worthy to serve together with the Divine Apostles, He who in His wise providence cares for us. As the Holy Hymnographer Theophanes writes:
“Seeing beforehand, O Timothy, the beauty of your mind, the all-knowing God deemed you worthy, O glorious one, to serve together with the divine Apostles, providing for us all by His wise providence.”
This insight of the Holy Hymnographer Theophanes concerning Saint Timothy is, in essence, a revelation of Christ Himself for all people. “No one can come to Me,” said the Lord, “unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” In other words, no one comes to Christ without being drawn by God the Father. No one, therefore, becomes a Christian on his own initiative; consequently, no person — no matter how great the evangelical work he accomplishes — can boast of it, whether of the power of his preaching or of his methodical organization. These are simply means; they may constitute the framework, but they are not the essence. The grace of God is the substance. That is why the Apostle Paul elsewhere goes so far as to say, regarding those who preached Christ out of rivalry toward him, that whether they do so with good will or out of opposition, what matters to him is that “Christ is proclaimed.”
The truth that God ultimately moves the threads of a person’s calling, with human beings merely cooperating, must not lead us to diminish the human factor. The balance is delicate. If the Lord Himself repeated the Scriptural saying that “because of you My name is blasphemed among the nations” — that is, that the name of God is blasphemed by unbelievers because of those who are regarded as His unworthy representatives — this means that the human factor is not negligible in either winning or losing one’s fellow human being. For this reason, it is of immense importance that right faith be expressed in right practice.
The Holy Hymnographer, in the third ode of the Canon for Saint Timothy, also emphasizes this dimension:
“By mortifying the members of your flesh [that is, your sinful mindset], you subjected what is worse to the divinely-illumined word, O blessed Timothy, giving leadership to what is better. Thus you mastered the passions and made your soul radiant and bright, being guided by the teachings of Paul.”
The Apostle Paul was Timothy’s Elder, to use a later ecclesiastical term. He guided and directed him so that Timothy might overcome his passions, purify his heart, be illumined by God, and find God. And he did this in a twofold way: first, through his sanctified life — “The steadfast disciple of the divine Paul follows in the footsteps of his teacher”; and second, through his teaching, whether oral or written through his epistles.
Indeed, the epistles he sent to him were not of a formal or merely emotional character, but were literally a “ministering of the gospel.” The Apostle everywhere and always stood “before God,” “doing all things for the glory of God.” As the hymn says:
“Ministering the gospel of Christ from the height of the virtues, the most divine Paul joyfully sent you, O Timothy, divinely-written epistles, as to his disciple.”
It would be a great blessing if we were to study — or to study again — these epistles of the Apostle Paul. They would once more be a proclamation of the gospel to our souls.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
