February 17, 2019 – 2 Timothy 4:6

The time has come for my departure.
—2 Timothy 4:6

A familiar and striking figure is used when Paul speaks of the time of his “departure.”18 The thought is found in most tongues. Death is a going away, or, as Peter calls it, an exodus. But the well-worn image receives new depth and sharpness of outline in Christianity. To those who have learned the meaning of Christ’s resurrection and feed their souls on the hopes that it warrants, death is merely a change of place or state, an accident affecting locality and little more.
We have had plenty of changes before. Life has been one long series of departures. This is different from the others mainly in that it is the last and that to go away from this visible and fleeting show, where we wander aliens among things that have no true kindred with us, is to go home, where there will be no more pulling up the tent pegs and toiling across the deserts in monotonous change. How strong is the conviction, spoken in that name for death, that the essential life lasts on quite unaltered through it all! How slight the else formidable thing is made. We may change climates and for the stormy bleakness of life may have the long still days of heaven, but we do not change ourselves. We lose nothing worth keeping when we leave behind the body, as a dress not fitted for home, where we are going.
We only travel one more stage, though it is the last, and part of it is in pitchy darkness. Some pass over it as in a fiery chariot, like Paul and many a martyr. Some have to toil through it with slow steps and bleeding feet and fainting heart, but all may have a Brother with them and, holding his hand, may find that the journey is not so hard as they feared and the home, from which they shall remove no more, better than they hoped when they hoped the most.
—Alexander Maclaren