Go Deeper

Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Pastoral Letters: 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 160–161.

Paul returns to the point he has made once or twice before in this letter. With Jesus, and the gospel message concerning Him, something has been unveiled before the world. That something is nothing other than God’s own kindness and loving goodness, which is so lavish that He has specifically not invited to His party people who were already the obvious guests, well qualified by their holiness of life to celebrate in His presence.

Paul would insist, actually, that no such people existed; he himself was as well qualified as any (see Philippians 3:2–6), but when he describes himself and his fellow Christians in verse 3, it’s not a pretty sight. Under the calm surface of pious religious behaviour and observance, there was a seething, crawling mass of lusts and desires, distorting his mind and heart and leading him into angry, hateful behaviour. Not the sort of person, after all, you’d expect God to invite to His party.

But that’s the point, as so often in the New Testament. God’s action in Jesus Christ is not a reward for good work already done. It’s an act of free kindness and loving goodness (verse 4). And it results, not in a pat on the back because we’re already the sort of people God wanted on His side, but in washing and renewal.

Paul speaks here of ‘new birth’, which is familiar from John 3 but is rarely found in other early Christian writings. The main thing he says about it here is that it’s God’s free gift, and that it involves being made clean from everything which had previously polluted us.

The reference to ‘washing’ is almost certainly intended, and most early Christians would have understood it as a reference to baptism itself. From Romans 6 and Colossians 3, Paul saw baptism as the moment when someone was brought into the community marked by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Up to this point, Paul had spoken of the ‘appearing’ of God’s salvation in terms of the future arriving in the present and creating a new world for us to live in. Now, however, he highlights the effect on us of the ‘appearing’ of God’s kindness and goodness. If we are baptized and believing members of Jesus’ extended family, we are invited to take stock of the radical change that God has accomplished in us.