"For the unholy and profane ..."

THREE KINDS OF IMPIETY: 1 Timothy 1:9 (part 4)

... understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers ...

Paul continues his roll call of those for whom the Law is divinely tailor-made with a delineation of three kinds of impiety.

Contempt for the things of God. To be "unholy" is to think, speak, and act in a way which deliberately repudiates or denigrates what God has made holy. It is a form of blasphemy, slandering God through the misuse of His good gifts for evil ends. "Profane" means to treat the holy as common, failing to make a distinction between what is sacred and what is common and disreputable.

Still, it is not necessary to say the Lord's Prayer backwards or hang a cross upside down to act in an unholy way; nor is Belshazzar's use of the sacred temple vessels for a drunken party (Daniel 5) the one and only paradigm for treating the sacred as vulgar and common. There is a certain casualness which can creep into our spirituality, to which those who handle holy things routinely may be most vulnerable, which by its levity can not only passively dishonor God's majesty, but rob others of the sense of the mystery of the beauty of holiness.

Failure of filial piety. The law of Moses decreed death for those who strike their parents (Exodus 21:15). Most people would say, "I would never do that; I would not in a hundred years hit Mom or Dad." But again, this law says more than it at first seems. Too often I have had occasion to witness the abandonment or rejection of family members by parents, children, siblings ... those whose homes and lives should have been ever open. We live in a culture which glorifies youth at the expense of age, and in ways too many and complex to delve into here, sets the interests of generations at odds with each other.

Disdain for human life. "All life is sacred," intones our society with its facile credo, but actions say otherwise. In fact, we tend to hold sacred the life that we value in some way, and dismiss other life -- whether it is the unborn child, the prisoner, the victim of poverty or warfare in the third world, the unseen worker or victim of human trafficking. Nor is "murder" limited in its scope to the actual ending of biological life, for the casual disruption of someone's livelihood and willful character assassination can be just as destructive, as is the robbing another of a future which might have been his or hers. A worker's years of devoted service to a company fail to receive their due reward in old age because a corporate raider breaks it up to sell off its assets; a young person's place in a college or training school is stolen due to corrupt practices; a home is destroyed or a dream shattered by another's selfishness.

The law calls for respect in fact where there is a tendency to offer only lip service and platitudes. The Gospel ethic of course is higher still: active love.

Lord, when I first read this list I think these things cannot apply to me. I don't take Your name on my lips in vain; I don't hurt my parents; I don't commit murder. Yet the deeper impieties of heart and contemptuous ways of mind and spirit convict me to the core. Forgive me, O holy Lord, and let me be conformed inwardly as well as outwardly to the holiness without which "no one shall see God". For the sake of Christ: Amen.


Prince Frederick, Maryland (Providence)