It isn't long, like the letter to the Hebrews or to the Romans. It doesn't have a sequel, like the letters of Timothy or Corinthians. It isn't divisive and exciting like the letter of James, and it doesn't have all the strangeness of Revelation. It treads a lot of the same ground that the letters to Timothy do, so you may be forgiven for not knowing much about it, and for being overall not sure of its existence.
But Titus has an important part to play in the development of the Christian faith, that is, it is Titus who is used by St. Paul as a living example of what the church would eventually be. The thing is, that we live in the world we occupy at the present moment, and we forget very quickly indeed that things were not always this way. We forget that things used to be quite different indeed, and that for a long time, most of the time in fact, things were not the way they are now. The Christian church has undergone a few changes since its inception, and one of the first had to do with who could possibly be a Christian in the first place.
This seems obvious now, because of the way we currently interpret the great commission that Jesus gave at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, that 'All authority in Heaven and on Earth has been given to Me, therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you, and surely I will be with you always, to the very end of the age.' I added the emphasis there, and I did so because of the nature of the great commission - that we are to go to all nations. What does all nations mean?
Well, it means something different to us now than it did to the people hearing it from Jesus for the first time. These people had never heard of places like Japan or Australia, had never conceived of places like Mexico or New Zealand, so were unlikely to make the connection between the great commission and their role to those places. For them, "all nations" probably meant everything from Great Britain down to Pakistan inclusive. And that's it. The known world at the time wasn't that big.
But what did it mean for these nations to be fully, authentically Christian? Well, given the nature and character of the earliest church, and what you know about them, they were all Jews. And they had grown up hearing and understanding that salvation is from the Jews. No problem so far. But in learning that, and in seeing that Christ himself was born a Jew, the disciples were all Jews, Paul was a Jew, you can understand why the thoughts in the earliest church were all about understanding the Christian church as a Jewish offshoot. That is, the disciples for the most part believed that to be a Christian was to be a Jew first. You had to keep the sabbaths, keep kosher, and be circumcised in order to become a Christian. The early church split itself neatly into the party of the circumcision, and the party of the uncircumcision. It seems strange to us now to hear about how the party of the circumcision was for sure the bigger and louder one.
Peter was drawn before the rest of the disciples, and had to defend his position as someone who was evangelizing Gentiles, because the disciples were living in a situation in which such activity would have been impossible. They believed that a Christian life was an extension of a Jewish life, and to join the church would be to join the nation of Israel, physically and culturally. And the big break to that was the person of Titus.
The feast day of Titus is borderline exciting because it is so dull. If you remember the words of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, where he said that he was a feminist, and would continue to say that much until it was met with a shrug.
How did this party win so conclusively? Part of it, not all of it, but part of it falls to Titus, and how instrumental he was as a case study for the disciples to observe. Something you will notice about the letter to Titus is that it is not vastly different in what it says to Timothy in Paul's letter to him. But Timothy is a Jew, and Titus is a Greek. It's the lack of difference between the two that actually makes this interesting - Titus doesn't have a separate set of instructions, a different approach, he isn't a second class pastor and confessor, he is functionally the same as Timothy. This means, according to Paul, according to the way he treats these two men and the responsibilities he gives them, that there is no Jew nor Greek. Titus was brought about with Paul, sent by him, displayed by him in the world, and Titus was able to live and teach in such a manner that nobody could possibly speak against him.
Now, this wasn't a matter that was only settled by the presence of Titus, but it partially was. And what Titus helped to do was to take the Christian faith from being something relegated to being for the children of Abraham, and made it known to everyone. This was the means through which the great commission was lived out and realized, and the way that the church began to understand itself in the same way that Jesus Christ of Nazareth did, that it was for all people. When Paul discusses Titus in Galatians 2:1-3, he says that Titus was not compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek. Titus was the great test case that Paul was able to bring to the party of the circumcision, and that made the instructions that Paul had for Titus so important: "If anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of insubordination. For an overseer, as God's steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined...Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say against us."
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