Thursday • 2/18/2021
Week of Last Epiphany

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 37:1–18; Deuteronomy 7:6–11; Titus 1:1–16; John 1:29–34

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)

“What do I have to do to get her to love me?” That was the soundtrack of my early- and mid-teen years. I never seemed to be good looking enough, cool enough, or … I don’t know … whatever. 

Finally, a minister friend wondered aloud if perhaps I had made a god (maybe a goddess?) out of finding someone to love me. He prompted me to consider that maybe, just maybe, I had been looking for perfect love where it couldn’t be found. And in the meantime, maybe, just maybe, I had been trying to manufacture from within myself worthiness of love, but was coming up with something that was just the opposite. Maybe, just maybe, I was becoming a taker rather than a giver. 

That conversation was a fork in the road that led me soon thereafter to finding the love of God in Jesus Christ. Here was a love that came as pure gift, unearned, unmerited. A love I didn’t have to charm my way into, be cool enough to attract, or good enough to merit. It was so freeing, and still is.  

Deuteronomy. Yahweh expresses his desire that his people understand he has this kind of freely given, unearned, unmerited love for them. He loves them not because they are so numerous (and, of course, he could have listed any number of possible attributes—Deuteronomy 7:7). Rather, he loves them because, well, because he loves them. There’s no deeper reason. There’s no hidden agenda. There’s simply his love. He responded to their cries in slavery because he loves them. He leads them because he loves them. He will give them an inheritance because he loves them. He commands them because he loves them, and because his commands bring their character in sync with his and make possible a reciprocal, intimate relationship…of love. 

Titus. People on the island of Crete, where Paul has sent Titus, were as confused about love as I was in my teens. They looked for love in a god who was a projection of themselves. When Paul quotes the Cretan prophet, “Cretans are always liars” (Titus 1:12), he has one particular lie in mind. Around the Mediterranean basin, Cretans were famous for claiming that the Greek god Zeus had originally been a man whose birthplace and tomb were on Crete. A famous (non-Cretan) prayer to Zeus says, “Cretans are always liars. For a tomb, O Lord, Cretans build for you; but you did not die, for you are forever” (Hymn to Zeus 8–9). 

This Cretan prophet admits that the Cretans have refashioned God in their own image, and in loving him are loving an image of themselves. The result is not just confusion about the true nature of God, but loveless cruelty among themselves (“vicious brutes”) and appetites that are out of control (“lazy gluttons”—Titus 1:12). They claim to know God, Paul says, but by their actions they deny him (Titus 1:16). 

In this first chapter, Paul begins his letter to help Titus communicate to the Cretans that religion based on a lie will not help them. They need leaders who can teach and model the truth (Titus 1:5–10). They need to stop listening to false teachers who are using even the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures to fabricate myths about great heroes (“Jewish myths”). Instead, as Paul will show in chapters 2 and 3, they need to hear about the promises God had made through Israel for a redeemer who would show God’s “grace,” and his “goodness and loving kindness” (Titus 2:11–14; 3:4–8). By knowing Christ, they will know “the hope of eternal life that God, who never lies, [had] promised before the ages began” (Titus 1:2). 

There is one very important practical takeaway from reading this first chapter of Titus during Lent. This chapter invites us all to reflect on whether we love the God who truly is, or a god of our own fashioning. This chapter is a call to reflect on and repent of an approach to God that smacks of self-adoration, of wish-fulfillment, of self-help, or of loving ourselves in an image of our own fantasy. 

John. Jesus is the perfect antidote for our attempts to make ourselves worthy of love or to pretend that God is merely us, only imagined as bigger.. He is that antidote because he is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). And because it is upon him that the Spirit of God descends and remains (John 1:32); for he then bestows that same gift—the living presence of the Living God—upon those who love and follow him (John 1:33). Here, in Jesus, is what it is to be loved and to love. Here, in Jesus, is what it is to live. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Image: “Church of Saint Titus, Pl. Agiou Titou, Heraklion, Crete” by Mølterland is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0