1 Thessalonians 5:12–24

Thomas W. Currie
Union-PSCE at Charlotte, North Carolina

In Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:

If we do not give thanks daily for Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ. (1956, 19)

So much of the Christian life has to do with small things. Mercifully, we are rarely given the opportunity to march triumphantly at the head of a victory parade, receiving adulation from the gathered throngs for this or that courageous stand. More often, we struggle and fail. We struggle with ourselves and our disordered loves; we struggle to bear with the person in the next pew or in bed beside us; we struggle to forgive those who have wronged us in some inconsequential way. These dramas are, for all their storm and stress, mostly little ones, not acted out on the silver screen or large stage, but within the precincts of our own hearts. There all sorts of “little murders” are committed, all sorts of betrayals and resentful “gotchas” voiced. So small are these venues that we are tempted to hold them in contempt, to think that the real ethical and theological issues are to be found elsewhere, in larger settings and more dramatic places. How deflating to think that the Christian life may come down to things like controlling one’s temper or being grateful for those who feed us word and sacrament or simply living at peace with oneself.

Yet Paul’s letters are full of such minutiae, if that is the word, revealing how well-acquainted he is with the nature of the story that gets itself told only by bringing a community of faith into being. The great theologian of the New Testament church, the one who most powerfully articulated the scandal of God’s justifying grace in Jesus Christ, is also the one who thinks that this justifying grace is most regularly encountered in the small ties that bind our ecclesial life together. Much to the embarrassment of ancient and modern Gnostics, Paul thinks that the grace of God weds us to the Body of Christ and not in the form of some glorious abstraction but rather in the much less impressive, if all too visible congregation down the street. That Jesus married beneath himself is, as Will Willimon has noted (The Pastor’s Guide to Personal Spiritual Formation, 25), one of the great scandals of the gospel, but just so it is one that makes it impossible to confuse that gospel with a private and more glamorous religious virtuosity.

First Thessalonians 5:12–24 is a passage that is full of advice, instruction, and encouragement aimed at a rag-tag group of Christians trying to live out the gospel in an indifferent if not hostile culture. As such, it is one of those slices of Pauline instruction called “paraenetic” in that it contains a series of exhortations, both positive and negative, which speak to the life that is shared by those who worship Jesus as Lord. These admonitions and words of encouragement, though general in nature, are in fact deeply related in the gospel Paul is proclaiming, and it is only in light of that gospel that he dares to pass on this instruction to the Thessalonian church. Significantly, this passage ends in a benediction.
So what (or who) holds this strange collection of admonitions and exhortations together? And what are they exactly? And, not to put too fine a point on it, why should we care?
It is important to note that Paul’s appeal to the saints in Thessalonica to order their lives in a particular way is not the first thing he says to them. Indeed, these verses (5:12–24) come towards the end of the letter, and only after Paul has spoken words of gratitude for these saints, and particularly for what God has done to enable them to receive the gospel, even to imitate “the Lord” (and Paul!) in courageously facing persecution (1:2–7). Paul’s first words confess the faith by remembering in the tenderest of terms his own ministry among this flock. “But we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children” (2:7). Such tenderness is not that of one who has discovered some likeminded people whose virtues he has come to appreciate, but rather it is the tenderness of one who has lost his heart to a company of folk who have entered with him on this particular way. “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us” (2:8). This way does not begin with a “to do” list but with a miracle; indeed, with the miracle of One whose sharing of his very self with sinners made of them his unlikely good companions. It is that Easter reality that Paul cannot get over. That is why he begins this letter with the words “grace to you and peace,” and why he gives thanks for those, who in risking faith in Jesus Christ, are beginning to explore the “way” where labor and love, hope and work, even adversity and joy are strangely related. The eucharistic life is, evidently, as messy as it is mysterious.

This is why Paul’s “appeal” in these verses embraces the messiness of life together “on the way.” Respecting those who have responsibility for the church in Thessalonica, esteeming them “in love because of their work” —striving for peace within the whole community, admonishing those, who either out of despair or over-heated piety idly await the end, encouraging the timid, helping the weak, being patient with all—these are the practices that bear witness to the life together made possible in the life of the risen Lord. At first reading, these virtues may seem merely “nice,” which is to say there is a great temptation here to file the sharpness of this text down to something more manageable in the way of moral exhortation, and thereby miss the miracle that Paul sees in the Easter reality, which is the constituting center of the Thessalonian church’s life.

The nature of that Easter reality is made even clearer in the next set of instructions: “See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all” (5:15). As a piece of moral instruction, this advice would seem to be of limited use, in part because it appears to be a formula either for masochistic self-restraint or angelic self-forgetfulness that is quite beyond us. Worse, were we to take these words simply as a human possibility, then our masochism or our forgetfulness would soon become lethal as we practiced our “good works” on others and ourselves. However, these words, as indeed all of the exhortations contained in this passage, describe the miracle of life together by speaking indirectly of Another, whose life (and death and resurrection) has given rise to a community characterized by practices that are not “natural” to the Thessalonians (or to us), yet are more graciously real than we can imagine. How else can one understand a command such as this: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

These verses, which are paralleled in Rom 12:9–13 and Phil 4:4–7, constitute the heart of this passage, insofar as the life Paul described is the life found in the crucified and risen Lord. Forgiveness ceases to become something merely “nice” when it is lavished upon us at the foot of the cross, revealing there our not very “nice” lives. Just so, forgiveness is something that can only then be extended to others when offered ungrudgingly out of the joyful supply that Easter itself makes possible “in Christ Jesus for you” (v. 18). Here “joy” (chara) and “grace” (charis) share more than just the same etymological root: they both describe a Christological reality that is scary in its goodness.

In truth, we are suspicious of both forgiveness and joy, finding little place for either in our efforts to turn the gospel into a project. Paul’s words, “Rejoice always” sound as impossible to us as not repaying evil for evil, and we are just as likely to turn the former into a happy face as we are to turn the latter into a slogan for self-improvement. What is difficult is to believe that “Rejoice always,” far from being an exhortation to be “up” all the time, is in fact a description of a gift that is already ours, whose largesse we find consistently embarrassing, just as we find forgiveness itself humiliatingly undignified. Forgiveness, as Ivan Karamazov knew, is always a moral outrage, just as joy is a harmony that can only upset the carefully calibrated balance of resentments we are so quick to call justice.

But Jesus, as a character says in Flannery O’Connor’s story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” is precisely the one who has “thrown everything off balance” (The Complete Stories, 132), and just so he has set us free to be grateful for gifts we do not deserve, to pray without ceasing with lives that have lost themselves in the joy of life together in Christ, refusing to quench the Spirit even when it blows in a quite undignified manner.

This passage ends with a benediction invoking the God of peace, who alone is able to “sanctify you entirely,” keeping spirit and soul and body sound and “blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” For us, the language of sanctification is redolent of moral rigor, yet I wonder if sanctification might not have more to do with laughter than we think and might be the way that God keeps us open to joy. In any case, the image Paul uses to describe the sanctified community is organic, not ideal or mechanistic or moral: it links spirit, soul, and body, as if he were talking about a life.

The final word is “[t]he one who calls you is faithful and he will do this.” An excellent commentary on this verse is the last question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism:

Q. “What is the meaning of the little word ‘Amen’”?

A. Amen means: this shall truly and certainly be. For my prayer is much more certainly heard by God than I am persuaded in my heart that I desire such things from him. (Book of Confessions, 50)

This most un-Cartesian answer assumes that reality begins with God’s grace, not my desires or virtues or critical thinking, the latter being quite uncertain things in comparison with the faithfulness of the One who hears our prayers and knows our needs. “The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.”

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