Thursday • 12/23/2021
Thursday of the Fourth Week of Advent, Year Two

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 80; 2 Samuel 7:18–29; Galatians 3:1–14; Luke 1:57–66

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)

I think it’s a mark of Paul’s brilliant dexterity that he can use the concept of “law” in more than one way, depending upon his audience and his intention.

Titus: free from “lawlessness.” Yesterday in Titus 2, Paul informed us that (as God’s grace) Christ “gave himself to set us free from every kind of lawlessness (Greek = anomia)”—Titus 2:12,14). In the world of ancient Crete as far as Paul was concerned, “lawlessness” meant being out of sync with the nature of God’s being, violating relational reciprocity, and engaging in self-destructive lifestyles: “Cretans are always liars, vicious beasts, and lazy gluttons” (Titus 1:12). In the Cretan world that Paul addresses, to be subject to lawlessness (anomia) is to be imprisoned by bad religion, bestial behavior, and self-indulgent appetite. In doing so, Paul shows himself to be conversant with Greek ethical discourse, a discourse that prizes truth, justice, and self-control (Titus 2:12).

What Paul wants Cretan Christians to understand is that Grace (= Christ) has appeared on the human scene in a saving way, that is, to put us back in sync with the order of the universe (Titus 2:11–12). Christ rescues us from every wrong approach to God, from every expression of cruelty to others, and from every way in which we abase his image within ourselves. And Christ wins for us the regenerating and renewing work of the Holy Spirit, who begins to make us over into people who delight to do God’s will, or as Paul says, at Titus 2:14, who become “zealous for good/noble/beautiful deeds.”

And so, with a remarkable rebuke of “those of the circumcision” (Titus 1:10), but with a bow to the biblical story of exodus (“he rescued us” [Greek = hina lutrōsētai hēmas], Titus 2:14), Paul insulates these new Gentile believers from a wrong approach to the Old Testament story, and he draws them into that story the right way. For Grace (= Jesus) teaches us what the “law” of human flourishing is: to … live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives (Titus 2:12). Here Paul thinks of “law” as the way reality is ordered, and of Christ as the way we get our lives back in line with that reality.

That is one glorious aspect of the work of God that is set in motion at the Incarnation. Praise be.

Galatians: free from the curse of the law. In Galatians, Paul confronts a congregation of people who think that they understand Christ’s work for them, but believe they must augment it by adding circumcision to that work. To do so, Paul argues, would be to place them under the “curse of the law”: “For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse … Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us…” (Galatians 3:10a,13a).

In Galatians, Paul is talking about one particular aspect of the law of God as revealed to Israel through Moses. That aspect is the law’s articulation of curses that attend the violation of God’s covenant. Everybody who thinks they can attain and maintain a relationship with God through their own human effort is sadly mistaken. For, as Paul says elsewhere, “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

What Paul feels he must clarify to the Galatians is how we get redeemed or rescued from our breaking of God’s law. The journey that Jesus begins from the day of his birth leads to the Cross of Calvary. Eight days after Jesus’s birth, on the day of his circumcision, his mother hears, “a sword will pierce your own soul” (Luke 2:35b). Jesus’s ultimate circumcision will be when he is cut off from the land of the living on behalf of the whole human race. Cursed on a tree, he will bear the punishment of all covenant-breakers, all who slothfully and callously ignore God’s law (like the Cretans) and all who subtly violate it by pridefully thinking they can keep it (like the Galatians). The sheer and utter grace of Christmas is that Jesus comes among us to take it all into himself and onto the cross.

Collect for mission: Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+