With Great Effect.

By the time I started school, my older siblings were in junior high. By the time I was in junior high, they were young adults. They were the only babysitters I ever had. When our parents were away from home, they didn’t need to leave a note to tell us how to behave in their absence. My older siblings took charge of the household—both the house and their younger brothers and sisters. Of course we questioned their authority at times: “You’re not the boss of me!” They reminded us otherwise, appealing to a higher authority to make their point: “Just wait until Mom and Dad come home!” In other words, just wait until the “bosses of the bosses” hear how you have been misbehaving in their absence. The threat was not without good effect. Mom and Dad would come home, most often to no visible signs of damage to the house or the bodies that dwelt therein.

St. Paul should have been so lucky. He had left the fledgling Christian community in Ephesus under the care of those he thought could be trusted with pastoral leadership. But when the Apostle was away, these leaders did stray. And so Paul sent Timothy, letter in hand, to “instruct certain people”—to reinstruct them—how to “love from a pure heart” (1 Tim 1:3, 5). Keep in mind Timothy was a lot younger than those he was teaching: You should know how to behave in the household of God. You can almost hear the indignant response: “You’re not the boss of me.” Timothy, having learned from Paul, would not have argued the point.

Good pastors know they are not the boss of anybody, much less everybody. Good pastors know you cannot boss mystery—the “undeniably great mystery” of God’s love for us in Christ. Christ, “the pillar and foundation” of this mystery we call Church, a household of God that is nothing if it is not a place of mercy and forgiveness. A place where we stoop to wash each other’s feet because that’s what Jesus taught us to do before he suffered, died, and was taken up in glory. As we wait for Christ to come again, he is ever in our midst. If we forget this central mystery of our faith, we risk doing great damage to the Church and to the members who dwell therein.

Of course we know how to behave in the household of God. In effect, we are charged with just one thing: to love.

Mary Stommes. Taken from Give Us This Day.

Mary Stommes is an oblate of St. Benedict and editor of Give Us This Day.