Word of the Week

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Guard: Phulaso (Gk.): meaning, “to guard by keeping watch”, or “to guard by observance and care”.

In one of its opening paragraphs, the Catechism states that “those who with God’s help have welcomed Christ’s call and freely responded to it are urged on by love of Christ to proclaim the Good News everywhere in the world. This treasure, received from the apostles, has been faithfully guarded by their successors. All Christ’s faithful are called to hand it on from generation to generation, by professing the faith, by living it in fraternal sharing, and by celebrating it in liturgy and prayer” (CCC, 3). In this call to guard the treasure of faith, Holy Mother Church “teaches us the language of the faith in order to introduce us to the understanding and life of the faith” (171). One can conclude that the Catechism of the Catholic Church, by its systematic arrangement to the structure of faith, is that pedagogy by which the Church ‘introduces us to the understanding and life of the faith.’

The term phulaso can be found thirty times in the New Testament. While there are a good number of passages in which you find this Greek term, there are only a handful of texts that are direct to the idea of guarding a deposit that has been entrusted for purposes of security. We find these passages in Paul’s pastoral epistles to Timothy. Exhorting Timothy to avoid the rapid abuse of Christian doctrine, Paul instructs Timothy to hold on to the deposit of faith which has been entrusted to him for safekeeping (cf. 1 Tim.6:20; 2 Tim. 1:14, 2:2; Jude 3). This emerges as a major theme to Paul’s letters to Timothy because of the corruption that was taking place in the areas of his priestly ministry, in towns such as Ephesus (Hahn and Minch, 393). Furthermore, Timothy was close to the first apostles, and his call to protect the structure of faith from corruption would be the beginning of a long line of successors that the Holy Spirit would raise up to this present day in the task of guarding the deposit from ingenuity and heresy (Hahn and Minch, 398) (cf. Rom.16:17-26). 

In our contemporary culture, the idea of safekeeping today has the connotation of locking something away not to be touched. While this certainly can protect something from being stolen, the deeper truth concerning Christian doctrine could not be farther from the idea of storing something away not to be shared. In fact, the only way in which we do successfully guard and protect the faith is by first living it, and second handing it on. Essentially, it is because the treasure is a Someone, and not a something, that its brilliance is to be carried with us wherever we go. Amen!

"We guard with care the faith that we have received from the Church, for without ceasing, under the action of God's Spirit, this deposit of great price, as if in an excellent vessel, is constantly being renewed and causes the very vessel that contains it to be renewed."

--St. Irenaeus

Primary Texts Consulted

•  Catholic Bible. Suggested trans. Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition.
•  Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Edition, 1997.
• Hahn, Scott and Minch, Curtis. Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: New Testament, RSV, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010.

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