When Paul says, “we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord,” it sounds as if he expects to be alive when Jesus returns. He had apparently also given the Thessalonians the impression that they would live to see that day as well—otherwise it is hard to imagine why they would have found the death of some of their number so unsettling. Porphyry, a third-century opponent of Christianity, thought that this proved Paul to be a fraud: “Paul’s lie becomes quite clear when he says: ‘We who are alive.’ For it is three hundred years since he said this and no one anywhere has been snatched away from their bodies—either Paul or anyone else. May the confused rambling of Paul remain silent for it agitates in confusion.”19 Some retort that the “we” of verse 15 refers generically to all Christians who happen to be alive at that time. As Chrysostom puts it, “When he said ‘we,’ he did not speak of himself, for he was not to remain until the resurrection. Rather, he speaks of the faithful.”20 Much has been written about this question and about the question of whether Paul’s †eschatological expectation developed from this early letter to later letters where he expects to be with Christ after he dies (2 Cor 5:6–10; Phil 1:20–24). Yet, Paul himself tells us what he thought about the timing of the parousia in the next section of this letter: it will come unexpectedly. By his own admission, then, Paul did not know when it was to occur. When he wrote 1 Thessalonians, he seems to have assumed that he would live to see it, but even then he emphasized his conviction that the Lord would return at an unknown time.
[4:16–18]
Paul continues the explanation of the fate of the dead by citing the word of the Lord. These verses are filled with evocative imagery drawn from Jewish tradition. In modern times some have attempted to use these verses to construct a detailed map of end-time events, but, as Beverly Gaventa has noted, “this passage has more in common with poetry than with blueprints.”21 Paul felt free to use vivid †apocalyptic images drawn from the prophet Daniel and elsewhere, but in comparison to some ancient Jewish thinkers he was uninterested in defining exactly how these events would occur. He also varies his descriptions of the last things, emphasizing different things depending on what the audience needs to hear, like a good teacher who knows better than to try to squeeze every important point into an introductory lecture. For instance, this passage omits any mention of Christ’s defeat of evil (see 1 Cor 15:24–25), as well as details mentioned elsewhere in this very letter, such as Christ’s evaluation of people’s deeds (1 Thess 2:19; 3:13). In these lines he focuses on only one thing: when the Lord returns, the dead in Christ will rise from the dead first, and then the living will join them, and all will be with Christ forever.
The return of the Lord from heaven is heralded by a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God. Jewish and Christian texts frequently describe angels as heralds of the last judgment. Archangels or “chief” angels do not appear in the Old Testament, but the book of Daniel describes the angel Michael as the “great prince,” and the Judaism of Paul’s day showed increasing interest in angelic hierarchies. Jude 1:9 and Rev 12:7, for instance, name Michael as the chief angel. In the Old Testament, trumpet blasts mark God’s presence (Exod 19:19; Ps 47:6; Hosea 5:8). They also call troops to battle (Judg 6:34) and mark the beginning of feasts (Num 10:10). Prophets such as Hosea and Zechariah use trumpet imagery to describe the time when God will come to put things right. Joel 2:1 is similar to our passage: “Blow the horn in Zion, / sound the alarm on my holy mountain! / Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, / for the day of the LORD is coming!” In texts closer in time to Paul, trumpets often presage the resurrection or judgment.22 Matthew 24 says that, when the Son of Man returns on the clouds of heaven, “he will send out his angels with a trumpet blast, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other” (v. 31). For a Jew like Paul, the combination of the voice of the archangel and the trumpet of God would indicate the return of the Lord and the last judgment.
Three events follow the trumpet’s blast: (1) Jesus will descend from heaven; (2) the dead in Christ will rise; and (3) the living and the newly resurrected dead will be snatched up together in the air, where they will greet Jesus. The sequence of these events is important because it shows that the dead will not miss out in any way. Contrary to what the Thessalonians seem to have thought, their friends who have died will experience the return of the Lord in all its splendor. Paul concludes by emphasizing this central point one more time: we shall always be with the Lord. The return of Christ and the resurrection of the dead are familiar to modern Christians from the Nicene Creed, but the third event listed—the snatching up of the living and the newly resurrected in the air—is more difficult to understand. The verb translated caught up (harpazō) usually describes the violent, sudden snatching away of something, and sometimes it is used to describe miraculous changes of location, such as God’s sudden taking of Philip (Acts 8:39) and Paul’s own experience of being caught up into “Paradise” (2 Cor 12:1–5). In the next passage (1 Thess 5:1–11) Paul compares the Lord’s return to a thief suddenly appearing at night, so the sense of something sudden and swift is entirely appropriate.
In his concern to emphasize that believers will always be with Christ, Paul doesn’t say what happens after those who are in Christ go to meet him in the air, other than to affirm that “we shall always be with the Lord.” Do they remain in the air, ascend to heaven, or return to earth? Many scholars say that Paul implies a return to earth, noting that people sometimes went out from a city to meet (apantēsis) a visiting dignitary before accompanying him back into the city. Josephus describes one such event and explains that the purpose of the meeting (apantēsis) was to honor the dignitary and show him that he was welcome.23 St. John Chrysostom explains this verse similarly, though he thinks that such meetings are designed to show honor to those who are permitted to go forth to meet the dignitary as he arrives:
When a king processes into a city, the honorable people go forth to meet [apantēsis] him, while the condemned stay within the city awaiting the judge. Or when an affectionate father arrives, his children—and those worthy to be his children—are taken out in a chariot to greet and kiss him, but members of the household who have offended wait within. We are carried on the chariot of the Father. For the Father received Jesus in the clouds (Acts 1:9), and “we will be caught up in the clouds” (1 Thess 4:17). You see how great the honor is? We greet him as he descends and—most fortunate of all—in this way we will be with him.24
Chrysostom assumes that Christ will descend to earth and interprets the meeting in the air as the first step in the last judgment: Christians join their Lord while the condemned await judgment. This may very well be what Paul had in mind, but he doesn’t say one way or the other, because he was instructing the church on a different matter—namely, that the dead are at no disadvantage on the last day.
The Vulgate translates harpazō with rapio, which is why the “snatching up” of Christians has come to be known as a “rapture.” In the last two hundred years some people—especially American evangelicals—have interpreted this “rapture” to mean that all Christians will suddenly be taken to heaven while the rest of the world is left behind, wondering at the disappearance of their Christian friends. This scenario belongs to a larger †eschatological framework known as premillennial dispensationalism, a theological innovation usually traced to a nineteenth-century Irish Protestant, John Nelson Darby. Perhaps it would have remained one among many discarded eschatological speculations, but Darby’s theology found its way into a series of enormously popular books, from the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909 to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind series. As a result, premillennial dispensationalism has become the default eschatology of many American Christians. The problems with this theology are many, including a tendency to weave bits from different passages across the Bible into a larger framework that has nothing to do with the concerns of the biblical authors. Unfortunately, however, biblica
l scholars and theologians tend to ignore rapture theology as fundamentalist tripe beneath their notice, and in their silence confusion flourishes. The principal error in the treatment of 1 Thessalonians is in failing to recognize that this passage is about the final return and decisive victory of God, an event that early Christians called “the coming of the Lord” (4:15). Paul’s description of the living being “raptured” refers to the moment on the last day when the living will join the dead to be with Christ forever. Instead of describing the disappearance of Christians from the world, this passage looks forward to the day when Jesus will “come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” as the Nicene Creed puts it.
Paul presupposes a traditional biblical †cosmology in this passage. Christ descends from above, which suggests that heaven is “up” above us. The faithful are brought to meet him as he descends, joining him in the air, which was often thought to be the realm of spirits (see Eph 2:2). Apocalyptic texts sometimes describe clouds as heavenly modes of transport (Dan 7:13; Matt 26:64), and the phrase in the clouds probably functions similarly. The faithful are taken up by means of clouds, just as Acts describes a cloud taking Jesus in his ascension (1:9). Scholars disagree about the extent to which the ancients took these descriptions literally. Did Paul think that God was in the sky and people could ride on clouds? Today, N. T. Wright is perhaps the foremost defender of the view that Paul and other ancient Jews knew very well that this language was not strictly literal but rather was intended to describe what would otherwise be indescribable. Wright compares biblical descriptions of Christ’s return to the attempt to describe color to a person born blind. It would be necessary “to ‘translate’ your experience of colour into a different context: sound, for instance, or touch. You might describe bright red as a hard, loud colour.”25 According to Wright, Paul is doing something similar here. Paul didn’t think that Jesus is “physically above us at the moment” or that Christians would literally ascend vertically.26 He is attempting to describe the life of the world to come, and “the only possible language is that of pictures.”27 It should be frankly admitted, however, that the biblical authors did not share our scientific understanding of the cosmos. Paul himself is not particularly interested in cosmological details and is capable of describing them differently as the occasion demands. His concern is to comfort the Thessalonians with the certainty of the resurrection and their eternal presence with the Lord.
Reflection and Application (4:13–18)
People who have lost loved ones do not stop grieving simply because they learn new information. Why, then, does Paul address the Thessalonians’ grief by correcting their ignorance? Eugene Boring notes that modern readers would expect a more personal response: “I’m so sorry to hear about the death of so-and-so.”28 Indeed, in our cultural context a more personal expression of comfort would probably need to accompany the instruction for it to be accepted. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the pastoral wisdom of Paul’s response. For Paul, there is no division between “pastoral” and “dogmatic” theology, because he assumes that the truth is pastoral. This truth reorders the lives of Christians around the hope of their salvation. The truth of the resurrection is not to be said once and then tucked away as a piece of trivia; rather, it is to be ruminated on, repeated by Christians to one another (4:18). For this reason it is easy to see why Catholic tradition speaks not only of corporal works of mercy, such as feeding the hungry, but also of spiritual works of mercy, which include instructing the ignorant. Paul performed a work of mercy for the Thessalonians, sharing with them not mere information but rather a new way of understanding their lives in light of their final ends. The dead in Christ are not gone but remain Christ’s and will be raised from the dead.
1. It is also possible that Paul had touched on this issue while in Thessalonica, but that the Thessalonians had not understood it. See Abraham J. Malherbe, The Letters to the Thessalonians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 32B (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 284.
2. There is a variant here in the Greek manuscripts. What Paul wrote was probably the present-tense koimōmenōn (“those who sleep” [as printed in the text of Nestle-Aland28 and followed by NIV and ESV]), not the perfect kekoimēmenōn (“those who have fallen asleep” [the variant translated by NABRE and NRSV]). The manuscript evidence for the present tense is stronger. Ancient copyists would have been inclined to change this to the perfect tense because it was a more common expression.
3. Éric Rebillard, “Koimetérion et Coemeterium: Tombe, tombe sainte, nécropole,” in Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, Antiquité 105/2 (Rome: l’École française de Rome, 1993), 975–1001.
4. IG X,2 1 440 (my translation).
5. RIChrM 234 (my translation).
6. De coemeterio et de cruce (PG 49:393–94 [my translation]).
7. Plato, Phaedo 117.
8. Ad Marciam de consolatione 7.1–2.
9. M. Eugene Boring, I & II Thessalonians, NTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015), 160.
10. Ad Quirinum 3.58 (my translation). See also De mortalitate 21.
11. Epistulae 39.3 (my translation).
12. Homiliae (PG 62:431 [my translation]).
13. Iberian Fathers, vol. 2, Braulio of Saragossa, Fructuosus of Braga, trans. Claude W. Barlow, FC 63 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1969), 47.
14. Funeral Orations by Saint Gregory Nazianzen and Saint Ambrose, trans. Leo P. McCauley et al., FC 22 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1953), 165.
15. See Rebekah Ann Eklund, Jesus Wept: The Significance of Jesus’ Laments in the New Testament, LNTS (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
16. See the related verb anagō (“lead, bring up”), which is used to describe resurrection in Rom 10:7; Heb 13:20. See also LXX 1 Sam 2:6; Ps 29:4 (ET 30:4).
17. Gordon D. Fee, The First and Second Letters to the Thessalonians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 171.
18. IG X,2 2 151 (my translation).
19. Robert M. Berchman, Porphyry against the Christians, SPNPT 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 211.
20. Homiliae (PG 62:436 [my translation]).
21. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, First and Second Thessalonians, IBC (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 66.
22. E.g., 1 Cor 15:52; Greek Apocalypse of Ezra 4.36; Testament of Abraham 12.10.
23. Jewish Antiquities 13.101.
24. Homiliae (PG 62:440 [my translation]).
25. N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 123.
26. Wright, Paul for Everyone, 125.
27. Wright, Paul for Everyone, 124.
28. Boring, I & II Thessalonians, 161.
The Day of the Lord
1 Thessalonians 5:1–11
After assuring the Thessalonians that the dead will not be at a disadvantage when Jesus returns (4:13–18), Paul goes on to address the question of how the living should prepare themselves for this event, admonishing them to continue in faith, love, and hope. Though he warns that the day of the Lord will come suddenly and without warning, he assures the new converts in Thessalonica that God has destined them for salvation.
The Suddenness of the Day of the Lord (5:1–3)
1Concerning times and seasons, brothers, you have no need for anything to be written to you. 2For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief at night. 3When people are saying, “Peace and security,” then sudden disaster comes upon them, like labor pains upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.
NT: Matt 24; Mark 13
Lectionary: 1 Thess 5:1–6, 9–11; Memorial of Saint Gregory the Great
[5:1–2]
The opening words of this chapter indicate a shift to a new topic: the times and seasons, a phrase that early Christians used to refer to the timing of the final consummation of God’s plan (see Acts 1:7). Paul had apparently already taught them that the day of the Lord will com
e when they do not expect it, and he denies that they need anything to be written about it. Nevertheless, he goes ahead and discusses the issue anyway in order to deepen and reinforce what they already know (see 1 Thess 4:9). The phrase “day of the Lord” refers to the same event as the “†parousia” of the preceding section. The varying descriptions are indicative of Paul’s varying emphases: there it was comfort, here it is judgment. The expression “day of the Lord” and related expressions such as “that day” occur often in the prophets to describe the time when God will come to punish people for their wickedness and deliver the people of God from their oppressors. As the prophet Obadiah warns, “Near is the day of the LORD / against all the nations! / As you have done, so will it be done to you, / your conduct will come back upon your own head” (v. 15).1 For Paul, the “Lord” is Jesus, and the “day of the Lord” is his return to judge the nations (2 Thess 1:7–8).
[5:3]
Paul compares the sudden coming of the day of the Lord to the nighttime invasion by a burglar and to the sudden onset of childbirth. The former image is intuitive; we are at our most vulnerable when asleep, oblivious to what is going on around us. The only way to prepare for such an event would be to stay awake and watch. Childbirth, however, no longer obviously evokes sudden disaster from which there is no escape. In our age of scheduled inductions and caesarean sections, childbirth frequently occurs right on schedule. But absent these interventions labor can begin at any point over a frustratingly wide span of time, and of course childbirth is painful and the rate of mortality is higher in the absence of modern medicine (see Isa 13:8; Jer 6:24). Paul’s point is that the calamitous day of the Lord cannot be predicted ahead of time. What we know very well about the times and seasons (1 Thess 5:1–2) is that we don’t know much at all! The day of the Lord will come at a time we do not expect.
First and Second Thessalonians Page 14
