You sense in the early letters of St. Paul a sense of urgency. He supposes that the second coming of Jesus is imminent and proposes a lifestyle of eager expectation. The latter letters in the Pauline corpus possess a different tone. They suggest that Christians need to learn to live “in the meantime.” The epistle to Titus, for example, draws on the wisdom traditions of both Jewish and Greek sources and lays out the kind of behaviors that different members of a household should practice. Although the world we live has different social strata than the ancient one, the idea of living “in the meantime” is what we need to do. In our prayer, we should seek to live each day in a gospel manner.
