Daily Liturgy and Scripture

John's handoff of ministry to Jesus is a prelude to the way of Jesus. In this way of thinking, you do not hoard for yourself. You make the way to Jesus, and he is the one who leads.

Only God knows fully the reason that John was so closely tied to the work of Jesus, but the work he did as an itinerant preacher gives us a pretty good idea: the Law was passing away as the main method God used to form his people, and John was the first messenger of the new way. He had his own set of disciples, but the ultimate goal was still Jesus. (Even John's disciples were recorded as being baptized again into the Spirit after Pentecost.)

The team you have around you is important in accomplishing your mission, and the church is no exception. Paul is in a struggle, and he needs to know who he can depend on, and who has abandoned his work.

The hard work over retraining to become followers of Jesus instead of followers of our own instincts is called discipleship. Paul outlines some pretty clear differences between those two paths, and also shows that he has been teaching by living it himself. For a young pastor like Timothy, this would be critical.

Working with people can be one of the most challenging jobs of a young church, especially for a young pastor like Timothy. To this challenge, Paul offers guidance. The church is still God's, the people are God's, and God is doing the work. The pastor stands with his people before God to lead in discipleship.

"Join me in suffering" isn't exactly the best marketing slogan. Can you imagine any church putting that on their sign? Yet that was the thing with which Paul was familiar because of his contention with the powers, and it would remain part of the picture as the young church grew.

"Devote yourselves to do good." That instruction is important enough to be repeated twice in this short passage. For Cretans, who have been more self-absorbed, this may have been a tough discipline. In the Kingdom of Jesus, we follow Jesus and care for each other.

Undermining the Cretan culture and trying to help Titus learn to bring order, Paul turns to the family and interpersonal structures. There's not a lot of deep theology here, but it's immensely practical: to grow a community of Christ, you need a basic agreement to act like a Jesus follower, and this was a foreign concept to the Cretans.

Working in Crete must have been a real challenge. To have the reputation of being liars, brutes, and gluttons works against the ways of Christ, even the ways of the Jewish Law. Paul recommends strong measures, and hopefully Titus is up to the task.

This closing passage of the book gives an idea of the kind of issues the early church might have faced, and how a pastor would have addressed them. Slaves and masters, rich and poor, false teachers and Christ followers. This is the landscape that Timothy was working in, and it was his charge as a young pastor to bring order to the chaos.