William Loader
Christmas Day 2: 25 December Titus 3:4-7
Christmas is
a time to celebrate those things which are central to faith. This snippet of
Titus appears to do just that, citing what may already be a well formed
tradition before it finds its place in the writer's discourse. What a wonderful
definition of Christmas: the appearance of the goodness and kindness (lit.
philanthropy) of God. Not previously unseen; otherwise it would not have been
recognised, but the splendid centrepiece of all that Jesus did and was.
"Goodness" can be a rather passive term, especially if we think of it
as not doing anything wrong, but the biblical understanding of goodness is far
from that. It is active generosity and compassion, a will to love. That is what
is "saving" or "liberating" about an encounter with God.
God's will to set us free is not despite God's goodness, as if God must abandon
goodness to be generous or as though there is a contradiction between what
justice demands and what generosity wants to achieve. Quite the contrary, God's
goodness consists precisely in the will to love, to set free, to set into a
right and fulfilling relationship what has been alienated and unfulfilled.
These neat
almost poetic lines capture a summary of the gospel which the writer,
traditionally identified as Paul, has incorporated in his letter using what
seems to be well used and well crafted formulations of the time. It is not the
usual language of the historical Paul, but it holds together many of his key
themes. The setting is a reminder of the hearers' former state, described in
terms which suggest depravity and ignorance. Notice that a central element is
lovelessness (3:3). It is explained as the consequence of being enslaved to the
norms which govern many people. The author might have spoken of other gods,
idolatry. The variants of idolatry are often more subtle than the real thing.
Conforming to the normal pursuits and passions of a society, wanting to be 'in'
or just wanting not to swim against the current, can often mean colluding in
evil. One of the most difficult tasks is to recognise where we are allowing
ourselves to be swept along by the embedded values of the wealthy and the
market. People in the developing world long for us to see - and to take a look
at ourselves.
The change to
all of this, then and now, comes from 'goodness' and 'philanthropy'. These are
characteristics of God as 'saviour', because deliverance is about releasing us
to become generous, to become people who love people. Note the revised version
of Paul's preaching: this salvation did not come about because we made a big
effort either to pay off a debt of sin or create the basis for a claim to be
loved (makes people very, very busy!). It came about from sheer generosity:
'mercy' or 'compassion' (3:4). The writer does not slip here into mechanisms
which might be turned literally into some kind of pay-off by Jesus to balance
the equation (which would leave God looking rather mean and ungenerous), but
simply speaks of the character of God, the saviour, the deliverer, the
liberator.
It is mercy
or compassion which grounds our faith, not our efforts to conjure up our own
worth. Of course we need to appreciate what we do well and that must impart a
sense of well being. Ultimately, however, we survive not because of the credit
we have built up within ourselves or with God on the basis of achievements, but
because we have come to own for ourselves what we affirm as God's attitude
towards us. That is an attitude of compassion and embrace - not a mindless or
uncritical acceptance, which wants to look away from our weaknesses or even our
sin, but a boots-and-all love which upholds us and asserts our worth and never
writes us off. That kind of love, which does not need to pretend we are
something we are not, but confronts us as we are with compassion, may be quite
uncomfortable, even threatening - especially if we are bent on sustaining a
phoney image of ourselves - to ourselves or others. But ultimately it is that
kind of love which counts when the chips are down, when we lose the capacity to
build ego capital for ourselves. That must come to us all. It is a very hard
truth for high achievers to learn.
The allusion
to washing and birth and the Spirit belongs firmly in the language found
elsewhere describing baptism. Conceptually the act of baptism, the response of
faith, appropriating God's compassion - all three aspects belonged together, so
that at times a writer could speak of being baptised into Christ, while at
other times could speak of faith alone. The notion was not of baptism as a
magical piece of manipulation nor of faith as something quite independent of it
nor of God's saving goodness through the Spirit as something purely abstract.
All these things belonged together (even when they did not come together in
time). They thought them together, whereas in many western cultures they have
been separated with very odd consequences resulting in distorted understandings
of each component - to the extent that for some the receiving of the Spirit can
become a kind of second baptism independent of the first or that being baptised
once or coming to faith once is all that matters.
The washing
evokes the experience of baptism, which, especially for adults, represented a
renewal. For all, young and old, the water represents the flowing life of God -
another image of God's love, which we need from the cradle to the grave. The
shorthand reference to water and the Spirit stands for a very expansive story
about coming to the community of faith, submersing oneself in divine love,
identifying with the living and dying and living again of Jesus in a way that
we are incorporated into the life of his Spirit in the world. There are many
other images which may come to mind. Central here is the image of water which
washes and makes fresh and new. It is more likely to speak to people today that
the cultic images of blood which washed away sins, which meant so much to many
former cultures.
The pouring
out of the Spirit is nothing other than the pouring out of God and God's life.
To be born of water and the Spirit, a phrase John 3:5 uses (doubtless dependent
on tradition), is another way of speaking of the regeneration being celebrated
here. The emphasis is ultimately on God's rich generosity - on God's person and
attitude. Renewal is about reconnecting to God's life. Baptism is about
celebrating the life giving being of God. For most in the early days it was
seen as celebration of the change of direction which occurred at conversion. In
Christian families it came to be a celebration of that renewing life already
from the first moments of life. For all, baptism embodies in an act a hope for
a continuing relationship of renewal and growth.
Water is an
image of life, God's life, renewing, refreshing, cleansing and making growth
possible. 3:6 brings us back to what Christmas celebrates. Jesus is the water
bringer, the rain man, who danced for us and we all got wet as we dared with
muddy feet to share the rhythm of the dance. As God is the saviour and
liberator, so this Jesus is the saviour and liberator. 3:7 draws on Paul's
heritage to say it all again with the language of justification. It means being
set into a right and fulfilling relationship with God, others and ourselves on
the basis of God's compassion.
Family
imagery lies behind the notion of inheritance. Crudely understood it could
reduce the good news to a promise of future acquisition or inheritance. How
might the author have understood eternal life here? Perhaps it had begun to
narrow to notions of everlasting life beyond the grave. We cannot help reading
it in dialogue with other passages which teach us to see eternal life as
nothing less than the life of God in which we participate now (and beyond).
That may be bliss, but it is much more likely to set us on paths which repeat
the old story: engagement with compassion even in the face of danger and
threat. It can never be a retreat from love for all people, never a turning
away from some in favour of others, never a trampling of the earth as though
only homo sapiens matters or only western men and their industries matter. The
inheritors of hope are as much future generations as ourselves, so that the
inward and outward renewal we celebrate in the Christmas story needs also to be
good news for earth and for people to come.
It is
helpful that here we find big concepts like justification and righteousness
connected so closely to goodness, 'philanthropy' (love!) and compassion. For
the hope of inheriting eternal life, God's life, has its genesis in sharing
that life in the here and now. The term 'saviour' belongs to both God (3:4) and
Jesus (3:6) and is set in the context of renewal and new birth. Undergirding
the whole statement is what lies at the heart of God's life: love and
compassion, so that to share God's life, to be 'saved', 'justified' or 'set right',
is to allow oneself to be incorporated into the expansiveness of God in
generosity and care as an ongoing state of affairs. This makes good sense
because the alternative - to be swayed by the gods of the time - is described
primarily in terms of lack of love and compassion. Christmas celebrates that
generosity. The world still desperately needs it. Caesar did not bring it.
Gospel: Christmas Day 1+2: 25 December Luke 2:(1-7), 8-20
Christmas Day 3:
25 December John 1:1-14