The Good Fight

St. Agnes Catholic Church\
October 25/26, 2025
30th Sunday of Ordinary Time
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102625.cfm

 I want you to imagine that, before you die, you are able to speak a message to the world, a message that will be spread to everyone and will be preserved for history to be studied and remembered.  What would you say?  What would your legacy be?  

We have just such a message from St. Paul in his second letter to Timothy, which we have been hearing all this month.  In this, Paul’s so-called farewell discourse, we encounter these famous, beautiful words:     

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 wrote this letter from prison in Rome, where he was awaiting execution by the emperor Nero.  Paul was martyred in the year 64 or 65 AD where he was publicly beheaded by a sword.  He knew what awaited him when he wrote this letter, and there is irony in describing himself as a boxer and a runner.  

A boxer does not expect to finish the fight by getting knocked out in the next round.  This would not be a “good fight.” And the finish line for a runner does not usually result in death.  I think all of our cross-country team would run the other way if that was the reward for finishing the race. So, “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.   [If he were a boxer, we’d say he had a glass jaw.  Or a “back of the packer” for running.]

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 I was whipped with thirty-nine lashes.

Three times I was beaten with rods.

Once a crowd stoned me.

Three times I was shipwrecked and another time I spend a day and a 

night stranded at sea. 

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

That’s Paul’s resume.  He wrote, through it all I was anxious about other people—the new Christians that I was preaching to, serving, and helping to build up.  And about myself I will not boast, except about the things that show my weaknesses.  For St. Paul that is exactly what “winning the crown of victory” means.  

Now let’s come back to ourselves and to that question that I posed in the beginning.  What message would you leave for the world if you could have a farewell address like St. Paul’s?  

A few years ago, the author David Brooks wrote, that there are “two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?”

“We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to [become moral human beings]. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.” 

For St. Paul, the eulogy virtues were what he lived by.  He 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.  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.  So that we may also say, 

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

I have kept the faith.  The Lord will rescue me …and will bring me safe to his heavenly kingdom.  Amen.