Main news for 4 November 2022

Paul sets against the strict religious formalism on which some church "teachers" insisted something that can look like simple rules of morality. Yet in these simple rules lies the essence of the Torah, and above all of the external Torah. The issue is the most ordinary keeping of the commandments, without any special religiosity, without the many norms and rules of ritual purity that lose their relevance for a resident of the Kingdom: in the Kingdom even the traditional Yahwistic and Jewish division into clean and unclean turns out to be irrelevant - everything there is clean.

But if we go further, it turns out that keeping the commandments, even purely externally, presupposes a certain dynamic of relationships with very different people, and these relationships must be built consciously, not merely by following socially conditioned automatic patterns. It is no accident that the apostle goes on to mention not only the most problematic church communities, the "older men" and "older women," but also slaves in their relationship to their masters. What they have in common is a kind of "naturalness" in the status of both the church "older men" and "older women" and the slaves. Indeed, many of those "older men" and "older women" whom Paul mentions treated their position in the Church not as a consciously chosen service, but as a situation that had taken shape by itself.

Many of them became "older men" and "older women" not because they had recognized their calling to the corresponding ministries, but because in old age there was nowhere else to go, and their whole life had become bound up with the Church - so let it be; the direct path was into the ranks of the "older men" or "older women." Much as in the Middle Ages people, especially girls and women, went to a monastery not because they had recognized a monastic calling, but because life had not worked out and no other alternative was visible.

Such automatism spiritually destroys a person: the place where he has found himself presupposes precisely conscious service, and when awareness, and therefore full service, is absent, the inevitable spiritual degradation of such a "servant" begins. But in the same way, though more slowly, a person also degrades in society if he is not aware of himself and of his relationships with the people with whom he has to interact. Social automatism is no better than "spiritual" automatism, though at first glance it looks less dangerous. It is against such automatisms that Paul warns Titus, considering them a much greater problem than the absence of religiosity among church members.