The Good Fight

St. Agnes Catholic Church 

October 25/26, 2025

30th Sunday of Ordinary Time

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102625.cfm

The “Merchant of Death is Dead.”  That was the newspaper headline in 1888 announcing the passing of the Swedish chemist and industrialist who invented dynamite and made a fortune in selling military arms.  There was only one problem, the man, Alfred Nobel from Stockholm, was not actually dead.  As you might imagine, Nobel was quite surprised to read his own obituary in the newspaper and he was absolutely appalled to be described as a “merchant of death.”  That was not how he wanted to be remembered after he died.   

This mistake provided a jolt to him, and he responded by founding and funding the now world-famous Nobel Prizes that recognize contributions in science, literature, and especially peace.  When we think about Nobel, it is worth asking ourselves, “if I died to today, what would my obituary say?”  Would it say, “merchant of death” or “contributor to world peace?”   

St. Paul is another man whose life can be divided into two halves.  In today’s second reading, we hear his famous, beautiful farewell message from the end of his life:     

I am already being poured out like a libation,

and the time of my departure is at hand.

I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race;

I have kept the faith.

[Now] The Lord will rescue me …and will bring me safe to his heavenly kingdom. To him be glory forever and ever. Amen.

Paul had, indeed, “fought the good fight,” spreading the Gospel as a missionary disciple, but the first part of his life, when he was called “Saul the Pharisee,” we might describe him as a Pharisee of Death.  He said of himself, “I persecuted [Christians], binding both men and women and delivering them to prison … and when they were to be put to death, I cast my vote against them” [Acts 22:13; 26:20]. We first see him in the Bible at the martyrdom of St. Stephen, holding the coat of a man stoning Stephen to death and nodding in approval.   

Saul the Pharisee of Death would not recognize St. Paul in Chains, author of the 2nd Letter to Timothy, would hardly understand how the grace of God transformed him from a zealous persecutor of Christians, a Roman citizen with a promising career as an educated elite.   Not only wouldn’t he recognize him, but he wouldn’t understand how he could see the second part of his life as a “good fight.”   Paul wrote this letter from prison in Rome, where he was awaiting execution by the emperor Nero.  Most of his friends and companions had abandoned him to his fate.   

“Fighting the good fight,” sure looks an awful lot like losing—losing badly and repeatedly.  From an outside perspective, Paul’s life looks like a total defeat.

But, of course, that is exactly how Jesus’ life looked on Good Friday.  Like Paul, his friends and companions abandoned him after his arrest by the Romans.  And at his death on the cross, Jesus appeared to be a failed messiah, not the savior of the world.  It was Easter Sunday that transformed defeat into victory—that redefined what it meant to fight the good fight.  This—his hope for the resurrection—is what St. Paul had in mind as he approached his own imminent death.  

And so Paul bragged about all of his losses, knowing that they were truly wins.  He lists his sufferings out as a kind of resume.  What a crazy kind of resume it is:

Five times he was whipped with thirty-nine lashes.

Three times he was beaten with rods.

He was stoned by a crowd.

Three times he was shipwrecked and another time he spent a day and a night stranded at sea. 

He was always in danger.  Often, he was imprisoned. He rarely slept, ate or drank enough.  He suffered frostbite in the winter and heat exhaustion in the summer.  His friends and companions left him when times got tough [2 Cor 11].  

Through it all Paul’s focus was on preaching, serving, and helping to build up the communities that he helped found.  Fighting the good fight meant fighting for them.  It meant getting into what Civil Rights hero John Lewis called “good trouble.” It means fighting for justice, speaking the truth to power, advocating for the poor and living in solidarity with them and being fearless in his Christian convictions.  The results of ‘good trouble’ and fighting the good fight are often like St. Paul’s repeated sufferings, but they are in the service of the highest cause. For St. Paul that is exactly what “winning the crown of victory” meant.  

Paul summarized his life with these words, “I have kept the faith.”  He kept the faith even when it looked like his work was useless and he had been defeated.  Still he trusted.  And we know that his name shines even brighter and higher in Alfred Nobel’s in world history and in the Kingdom of God. 

Let me leave you with some questions to ponder and to discuss this week.  To repeat the first one:

What do your eulogy to say? If you died today, is that what it what actually say?  Secondly: What would you fight for? And, are you willing to keep fighting and to finish the fight, even when you suffer or are unsure of the outcome?   

 In his farewell address, he included these words:

This saying is trustworthy:

If we have died with him / we shall also live with him; 

if we persevere/ we shall also reign with him.

2 Tim 2:11-13

Let us all continue to preserve in the faith, in the knowledge that if we do, we shall also reign with the Lord.