Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Timothy 5:11

"But younger widows refuse: for when they have waxed wanton against Christ, they desire to marry;" — 1 Timothy 5:11 (ASV)

But the younger widows refuse.—The younger women (with "younger" used in a general sense) must positively be excluded from, and held ineligible for, this presbyteral order.

This direction by no means shuts them out from participation in the alms of the Church if they were in need and destitute. However, it wisely excluded the younger women from a position and from duties that they might covet in their first days of grief and desolation, but of which, as time passed on—as experience had shown St. Paul—they often grew weary. He proceeds to tell us that those who had put their hands to the plough and afterwards looked back would be a hindrance to the Church’s work and, in some cases, might prove a subject of scandal and reproach.

For when they have begun to wax wanton against Christ.—The Apostle was foreseeing the time when, after the first fervour excited by grief and sorrow had passed, these younger sisters would in many instances begin again to long for their old pursuits and pleasures. The Greek word translated as “wax wanton” especially suggests the idea of restiveness. They will lose—to use Jerome’s well-known expression—their love for their own proper Bridegroom—Christ.

They will marry.—The sight of domestic happiness enjoyed by other women will affect them. They, too, will long in their poor hearts for home joys; they will yearn for the prattle of their own little children.

How much untold misery would have been avoided—how many wasted lives would have been saved for good and useful service—if church leaders in later times had only obeyed the words and carried out the thoughts of Paul, and had persistently refused, as Paul and Timothy did, to accept the offered services of women still too young for such devoted work, women who, through a temporary pressure of sorrow, dreamed for a moment they could carry out their purpose of a lifelong renunciation of the world, its excitement, and its joys.

St. Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, saw how too often such renunciation—made under particular pressure of circumstances and undertaken with the passionate fervour of youth—would in later days become tiresome and distasteful.