Members:
A few years ago, while on a flight to Israel, I noticed a large land mass in the ocean below. The pilot announced that it was the island of Crete. Looking down from 35,000 feet, I thought of the letter to Titus. “I left you behind in Crete for this reason,” the author says to Titus (1:5). One of the New Testament’s letters was addressed to that island, I mused, somewhat in awe of what I was seeing.
Quite often, the book of Titus is associated with 1 and 2 Timothy, as if all three books constitute one package. So it’s difficult to talk about Titus without some mention of the other two books. Perhaps it is because the three books make up a unit of literature we have come to know as the pastoral epistles. They (along with Philemon) are addressed to individuals, meant to be private rather than public letters addressed to churches.
The people of the island of Crete, according to Paul in his letter to Titus, were “always liars, evil brutes, and lazy gluttons” (1:12). In fact, the inhabitants of that mountainous, 160-mile-long island south of Greece and Turkey had a rowdy reputation for 500 years before Paul. The Athenian Callimachus charged that Cretans were such liars that they claimed to possess the tomb of Zeus … when the chief of the gods couldn’t possibly be dead.
Robin Hoover brakes from 75 mph, his preferred speed on the desert roads outside of Tucson, Arizona. He makes a U-turn as he growls into the radio to the truck behind him, “We got walkers.”
Within seconds, he greets the group of migrants who waved him down, “Como estan?”
They have been walking in the desert for at least two and a half days — the distance from the Mexican border we just covered in 40 minutes. Dirty, limping, their water jugs empty, the migrants seem disoriented.
