Tuesday • 12/21/2021
Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Advent, Year Two

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 66; Psalm 67; 1 Samuel 2:1b–10; Titus 2:1–10; Luke 1:26–38

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 13 (“A Song of Praise,” BCP, p. 90); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)

Titus: living counter-culturally

The me-centered religious spirit of Crete (“Cretans always lie,” which, in context, translates: “I can be a god!”)* creates a culture of cruelty and self-indulgence (“vicious beasts and lazy gluttons”).

Paul’s antidote is twofold: he wants Titus to counter with what we translate as “sound doctrine,” but which might better be rendered “healthy teaching” (Titus 2:1). The word translated as either “sound” or “healthy” is hugiēs. It’s a medical term, from which we get “hygiene.” Teachers in the Greek world of Paul’s day saw themselves more as physicians of the soul, and less as experts about ultimate reality. At the end of Titus 2 and the middle of Titus 3, Paul will describe the basic elements of “sound doctrine” or “healthy teaching”—theology that revivifies people who were dead to God, and that brings heart-health and soul-satisfaction.**

Those truths will counter the lies of a culture that says: “We can make ourselves into gods!” Before getting to those truths, though, Paul addresses the lifestyle that accompanies and supports those health-producing truths. There is a way of “being” and “behaving” that corroborates “right believing.”

Here’s the way Paul begins and ends today’s paragraph to Titus: “But as for you, teach what is consistent with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1). “…show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior” (Titus 2:10). In the face of the cruelty and self-indulgence rampant in their social world, Cretan Christians have the amazing opportunity to show “what is consistent with” and what is “an ornament to” the profound truths of the gospel. They become their own proofs of the truths they present.

Paul instructs older men, for instance, to conduct their lives with (among other things) temperance and love (Titus 2:2), the opposite of being lazy gluttons and vicious beasts. He calls older women, younger women, and younger men to refuse to neglect others’ needs for the sake of their own: “…not to be slanderers or slaves to drink … love their children, to be self-controlled” (Titus 2:3,4).

There’s something for us to think about even in Paul’s instruction for slaves, despite the chasm between the first century world and ours. It would have been interesting to see how Paul would address wicked “Christian” slaveholders like those Frederick Douglass describes in his autobiography who viciously beat their slaves when they try to learn to read so they can understand the Bible. We don’t know exactly how household slavery worked in the Crete of Paul’s day. Regardless, Paul saw an opportunity for slaves to show an extraordinary dignity by refusing to lower themselves to backtalk and pilfering, and instead to show themselves worthy of any trust accorded to them. In this way, in a world in which everybody is in it for themselves, these slaves “adorn the doctrine of God our Savior” (Titus 2:10 RSV). The Greek word “ornament” (NRSV) or “adorn” (RSV) is kosmein, from which we get “cosmetics” and “cosmetology.” These servants of Christ beautify God by their way of being.

Twice Paul says “…so that the word of God may not be discredited” (Titus 2:5) and “…having nothing evil to say of us” (Titus 2:8). The French Catholic commentator Ceslas Spicq suggests these are elegant litotes (negative statements that make a positive point): they display the logic by which the gospel would eventually win the Roman Empire through the lives of the saints. Artfully, Paul crowns the paragraph by giving the greatest dignity to the least of Christ’s servants: their fidelity and truthfulness in a world of selfishness and dissembling make God’s truth beautiful.

Wherever you are today, I pray God gives you wisdom to discern how to make the character of God our Savior both visible and believable—and gives you the grace to pull it off!

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

*See yesterday’s DDD.

**See tomorrow’s DDD.