Monday • 12/20/2021

Monday of the Fourth Week of Advent, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 61; Psalm 62; Zephaniah 3:14–20; Titus 1:1–16; Luke 1:1–25

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (“The First Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 12:2–6, BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)

Paul has given Titus, one of his most senior proteges, a daunting task: to make the wonder of the Incarnation make sense to a people who already have their own upside-down ideas about how God could be born among humans. In ancient times, the island of Crete claimed to be home to Zeus, a human who became divine. Cretans claimed to be able to show both where Zeus was born and where he was buried. They claimed the good deeds he had performed for others had won him his deity.*

Titus’s job is to persuade Cretans that, by contrast, the Jesus whom Paul had preached among them was not a mere man who ascended to deity, but is “our great God and Savior” who has come down to us. In Titus 2 and 3, Paul will describe Jesus as the very embodiment of God’s “grace” (Titus 2:11) and God’s “goodness and loving kindness” (Titus 3:4).

In Titus 1, however, as prelude to commending the incarnation, Paul exposes what’s wrong with the Cretan view. He enlists the aid of an ancient Cretan prophet, a self-critical voice from within Cretan culture. With no small irony, the Cretan prophet whom Paul quotes (usually identified by scholars as the 6th-century B.C. seer and poet Epimenides) says “Cretans are always liars!” (Setting up a famous logical problem: if a Cretan tells you Cretans always lie, is his statement true or false? Think about it.)

The full quote that Paul derives from the Cretan prophet is: “Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons” (Titus 1:2). The essence of the Cretan prophet’s self-critique is that bad religion (“Cretans are always liars”) has created among the Cretans a vicious social climate (“vicious brutes”) and a populace with a self-indulgent personal ethic (“lazy gluttons”). 

There is plenty for each of us to ponder right here: How do our bad ideas about God make us uncivil towards others and indulgent towards ourselves? Especially to the extent that we entertain the Cretan idea that we are born as gods-in-the-making, each of us the center of the universe. Narcissism is as narcissism does! 

For his part, Paul argues that his opponents in the church offer no help. Merely teaching morality from Jewish heroes of the past does not curb anti-social behavior. Nor does performing fleshly, external rites of passage, like circumcision, curb uncontrolled cravings, for, “To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure” (Titus 1:15a). No, something deeper needs to happen within us. And that takes place not because we make ourselves into little gods, but because God himself has truly come down to us. 

Each in their own way, Zephaniah and Luke wondrously point us in the right direction. 

Zephaniah is a fourth-generation prophet who ministers in Judah in the years before the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests. Deeply immersed in the logic of God’s covenant, in Zephaniah 1, he blasts God’s people with the bad news of the judgment that is coming: “The day of the LORD … will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom” (Zephaniah 1:14–18). His words inspired the Dies Irae musical motif, one of the most easily recognized musical themes in the history of Western music, frequently showing up in movie scores—always a harbinger of judgment. 

What is so lovely about today’s passage from Zephaniah is how it is revealed to the prophet that God’s own mercy and love will at last win out. The people will not make themselves better. They will not merit their rescue. But God himself will come among them to reclaim them. He will champion them once again with his love, and he will sing over them a song not of judgment, not of Dies Irae, but a song of joy and gladness, and of love renewed and celebrated: “[Yahweh] will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival” (Zephaniah 3:17). Rightly did one of my seminary professors refer to Zephaniah 3:17 as the John 3:16 of the Old Testament!

And the opening verses of Luke’s gospel are a perfect start to the week leading up to Christmas Day. Here Luke announces his intention to provide a well-researched and orderly account of the events of Jesus’s life and work. He says that he does so in order that his readers, “most excellent Theophilus” (Greek = “Friend of God”)—and, by extension, you and I (also friends of God)—may have full assurance of the things in which we have already been instructed (Greek = katēchthēs, “in which you have been catechized”—Luke 1:4). This week’s readings in Luke include the Song of Zechariah and Mary’s Magnificat—answers to Zephaniah’s promise of God’s song among his people. May we find here renewal of our wonder at the goodness of God’s good news. 

May today’s rich texts prove for us what Anselm said, that faith seeks (and finds) understanding. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

*See Reggie M. Kidd, “Titus as Apologia: Grace for Liars, Beasts and Bellies,” Horizons in Biblical Theology, 21.2, Dec. 1999, pp. 185–209; and the excellent treatment of Titus overall in Philip Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (New International Commentary on the New Testament), Eerdmans, 2006.