Titus 2:13

Looking for is one word in the Greek, and it means to await with the head up — expectant, watching, the posture of someone who is going about their work but keeps checking the road.

That posture is the point, because of what surrounds it. This verse sits in a sentence about grace training us to renounce ungodliness and live sensibly, righteously and godly in this present age. The hope is not offered as an alternative to the present. It is the thing that makes the present bearable enough to be lived in properly.

And it is called the blessed hope. In Greek that word carries the sense of a settled, sufficient happiness — the same word behind the Beatitudes. The hope is described as already happy rather than merely promising to become so.

What is being waited for is named precisely: the appearing of the glory. Not the arrival of better circumstances. Paul, writing to a colleague on Crete organising churches, is quite specific — the object of the hope is a person becoming visible.

And the grammar of the final phrase is famously tight: our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. One article governs both titles, which is why this verse turns up in every discussion of what the earliest Christians thought they were dealing with.