Titus 3:3 Meaning For We Were Also Once Foolish

Avijjā: Ignorance The not-knowing that sits underneath everything else here. "Foolish" indicates no shortage of cleverness; these were people who ran households on Crete and won their arguments. Moving through a dark room, you bark your shin on your own furniture, and the lusts, the malice, the envy all come of groping.

Vipallāsa: Distorted perception The turn that makes the false look obvious. "Deceived" needs no deceiver standing outside: perception hands over a picture already flipped, so what passes looks like it will last and what stings looks like it will satisfy. A stick half in water looks bent, and the hand keeps reaching for the bend.

Taṇhā: Craving Thirst, the engine under "serving." Slavery is the right word for it, since the pleasures give the orders and each one enjoyed pays out in a fresh want, so the servant never gets an evening off. Anyone who has said one more episode and then watched three has heard the master's voice.

Byāpāda: Ill will Malice is ill will settled in and made comfortable, the wish that things go badly for someone. It runs on its own fuel, needing no injury today when yesterday's will do. Holding a hot coal to throw at someone, you are the one whose hand blisters.

Issā: Envy The sting felt at another's good fortune. It keeps company with malice because both require a neighbor: your own field is thin and theirs comes in green, and the ache is not for rain but for their crop to fail. That ache eats the one who carries it and leaves the green field standing.

Vera: Enmity "Hating one another" is the two-sided kind, the feud that keeps score. Both parties are answering, so every blow arrives feeling like the fair reply to the last, and the thing outlives whatever began it. Two families on the same street can carry it for generations with neither able to name the first injury. It slackens where one side stops answering, and a man who writes "we were also once" is reporting from the far side of that.

The speaker does not stand above this ugliness; he says it was once his own face. Envy is the sharpest illness in the crowd, the ache that another's good somehow robs from oneself, and it feeds on forgetting that every gift already flows from one open hand. The cure that truly moves the heart is to pray, and mean it, for the envied person to receive still more.

The mercy in this scene, a man recalling his old self without disgust, is God showing Himself, meeting the person he once was the way He would want him met.