Between Two Appearings

Paul has been giving Titus the most ordinary instructions imaginable. What the older men should be like, how the younger women should order their homes, how servants should do their work without pilfering — the household management of a small church on a rough Mediterranean island. It reads like the back pages of a manual. And then, mid-paragraph, the prose lifts off the ground: "For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people" (Titus 2:11). The reason behind the dull Tuesday turns out to be the largest thing in the universe.

The word translated "appeared" is the language of a sunrise or a royal visit — not visible before, now out in the open. Not a mood or a kindness in the air: grace arrived with a face and a date. And it came "bringing salvation for all people" — which, after Paul's run through older men, younger women and household slaves, means every sort of person rather than every person without exception. Slaves included: Paul speaks to them inside an order he does not here abolish, and hands them a dignity the household could neither grant nor withdraw. A slave's Tuesday, he has just said, can adorn the doctrine of God our Savior (Titus 2:10) — and an institution resting on the premise that this person is a living tool, whose labor is merely extracted, cannot long survive people who believe that. A seed, not a harvest: the building still stands, but the foundation under it has quietly gone.

And this grace, having appeared, does not then stand back. We know two counterfeits well. One lets grace pardon us and leave us exactly as we are. The other is the tightly self-controlled life driven by fear, good behavior still auditioning for a verdict. What Paul says is neither: grace is "training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age" (Titus 2:12). The verb is paideuō, the schooling of a child, which meant correction as much as instruction. Grace teaches and grace disciplines, and "renounce" is no gentle word; something has to be put down and left. But it differs in kind from that audition: the pupil is already the schoolmaster's own, bought at his own cost, before the first lesson. And the lessons come in the present age, in the ordinary, unglamorous hours.

Behind us, then, grace has appeared; ahead of us, Paul says, we are "waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13). The same Christ who stepped quietly onto the stage of history the first time will step out in unmistakable glory the second. We live in the narrow country between the two, and the hope ahead is meant to shape the living now.

Paul names the price in the same breath. Christ "gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession, who are zealous for good works" (Titus 2:14). To redeem is the exodus word — what God did at the Red Sea — and the word for the kinsman who buys back what his family has lost. Only this kinsman paid nothing out of his wealth. He paid with himself, which no Israelite redeemer was ever asked to do. The slave-market picture is true enough, but Egypt comes first. The phrase Israel's law kept for its "treasured possession" is now spoken over us. Not merely forgiven debtors: bought-back property.

So we live leaning slightly forward. Which appearing are we actually living for? Whose notice would make the work done without pilfering — the sacred ordinary, a small faithful Tuesday that nobody applauds — worth doing well?¹ Paul has already answered. The second appearing hands down no new verdict; it publishes the one given at the first. We do not work toward the applause but out of it. We are waiting in the light of one sunrise for another.