The Epistle for the Fifth and Sixth Days of Christmass, December 29 & 30: Titus 3:4-7

“When the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us…”

Faith, saving faith, still desires to see that “thing which has come to pass.”  Faith never tires of the Mystery of the Holy Incarnation.  So it is that St. Paul writes his true son in the common faith, Titus, regarding the Nativity of our Lord and its meaning.  St. Titus receives from his father in the faith a description of the birth of the Christ.

St. Paul wasn’t there.  He repeats to St. Titus by Divine Revelation what he himself received.  St. Paul describes the Birth of the Christ Child with these inspired Words: “…when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared…”  That is what filled Mary’s womb.  To that Mary gave birth.  That is what Mary and Joseph beheld in the manger.  That is what Mary swaddled and held and fed and nurtured:  the Kindness and Love of God. 

Love took on Flesh.  Kindness became Incarnate.  God became Man and was born.  The Seed of the woman was conceived and born miraculously, as Promised in Eden, as Promised through the Prophets.  But more than a Davidic king of the house of Judah, in the newborn Babe is found the love of God for all men.  In the infant Savior not a king of an ethnic nation, but rather His kindness is born.  Not the wrath of God coming in judgment, but rather His Mercy is born.

(Excerpted from a homily of Fr. Mark P. Braden, to be preached at Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church of Detroit, Michigan, on Wednesday, December 30, the Year of our Lord 2020, the Sixth Day of Christmass Octave)

Image: “The Nativity” by Zanobi Strozzi, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.