Readings
- Exodus 32:21–34
- 1 Thessalonians 1:1–10
- Matthew 5:11–16
- Psalms: 45; 47, 48
1 Thessalonians 1:1–10
Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy,
To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
Grace to you and peace.
We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. For we know, brothers and sisters beloved by God, that he has chosen you, because our message of the gospel came to you not in word only but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction; just as you know what kind of persons we proved to be among you for your sake. And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for in spite of persecution you received the word with joy from the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. For the word of the Lord has sounded forth from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia but in every place your faith in God has become known, so that we have no need to speak about it. For they report about us what kind of welcome we had among you and how you turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead — Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.
Notes
A new letter today, and one of the oldest documents in the New Testament. Most scholars date 1 Thessalonians to around 50 CE — earlier than any of the gospels, earlier than most of the rest of Paul. Paul writes it from Corinth not long after he and his companions had to leave Thessalonica in a hurry under threat of mob violence (the story is in Acts 17). It's an undisputed Pauline letter, meaning even the most skeptical scholars don't doubt that Paul actually wrote it.
What's striking about this letter, especially compared to the ones we've just spent a couple of weeks in, is that Paul is not angry. No takedown of legalists, no tussle over circumcision, no rebuke of false teachers. The Thessalonians are a young church doing well under hard conditions, and Paul mostly wants to encourage them. The one acute pastoral problem in the letter is that some of their members have died before Jesus came back, and the community is shaken. Paul will get to that later. For today, he's writing the warm opening of a friendly letter.
Verse 1. Three names: Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy. Paul does not write alone. The voice of the letter is plural, and the people listed here are the ones who planted the church in Thessalonica together. The greeting is short — grace to you and peace — Paul's signature blend of the standard Greek hello (charis, grace) and the standard Hebrew hello (shalom, peace). Two cultural worlds in three words.
Verses 2–3. Paul opens, as he so often does, with thanksgiving. And then he stacks a triad I love: your work of faith, your labor of love, your steadfastness of hope. Faith produces work. Love produces labor. Hope produces endurance. Notice the direction of the arrows. Paul is not describing internal states. Aww, don't they have nice feelings about Jesus. He is describing the visible, embodied output of those internal states. Faith, hope, and love are not warm fuzzies; they are the engine. Work, labor, and endurance are what the engine produces. If those outputs aren't there, the engine is not running, no matter what the dashboard says.
Verse 6. "You became imitators of us and of the Lord." Discipleship as imitation, mimēsis, is a deeply Pauline note. We learn to follow Jesus by watching people who are following Jesus. And crucially they imitated Paul in receiving the word with joy under persecution. The thing being imitated is not Paul's competence; it's his joy under pressure.
Verses 7–8. "The word of the Lord has sounded forth from you." The verb is exēcheō — the same root we get echo from. Their faith has reverberated outward through Macedonia, Achaia, and beyond.
Verse 9. "How you turned to God from idols." The verb here is epistrephō. In Second Temple Judaism, epistrephō was the standard verb for a Gentile turning to the God of Israel. The early Christian movement, which from a first-century perspective is a particular flavor of Judaism, picked up the same verb. So when Paul describes the Thessalonians as having turned, he is using the formal, recognizable language of Gentile conversion. This also tells us something about the audience: most of them weren't Jewish, because Jews would not need to turn from idols.
Verse 10. "And to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath." Two things here.
First, the verb. "Rescues" (rhyomenon) is a present participle. Not will rescue, someday, when this is over. Jesus is, right now, in the act of rescuing. The rescue is ongoing. This is not escapist eschatology. Hold on, Jesus will pull us out eventually. The rescue is already underway.
Second, the wrath. The instinct of a lot of modern readers is to slot "the coming wrath" automatically into a divine-anger framework — God is mad, and Jesus stands between us and God. That instinct deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. By the first century, "the wrath" (hē orgē) had become something of a free-floating term in Jewish apocalyptic discourse. The Wisdom of Solomon, retelling the Numbers 16 plague (the Korah rebellion), describes how Aaron's incense "withstood the wrath" and "put an end to the disaster." "The Wrath" is depicted as an almost autonomous force, a cosmic momentum that has to be withstood, not a personal anger that needs placating.
I am not denying that the Bible talks about God's wrath. It does. But by the time of Paul, "the wrath" can also mean something more like the natural consequences of sin: the violence of empire that rebounds back on the empire, the rot that idolatry produces in the people who serve idols, the disaster that systems of injustice eventually call down on themselves. Various streams of Second Temple Judaism had also developed accounts of evil that did not collapse everything back onto God: Satan figures, fallen powers, spirits of impurity. "The Wrath," in that environment, is not necessarily God's personal anger.
So the careful read of verse 10 is: Jesus is presently rescuing us from a coming disaster. Whose disaster, exactly, Paul leaves a little open. We should not automatically assume the answer is God's.
Questions for reflection
Paul names faith, love, and hope not as internal states but as engines that produce work, labor, and endurance. Where in your life is the dashboard light on but the engine is not actually running?
Paul says Jesus is presently rescuing us from a coming wrath — and that "wrath" might not mean what we've been taught it means. What changes for you if the disaster you are being rescued from is the rot of sin and empire rather than the anger of God?
