Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
12^th of November 2023

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13

Oh, thank God! Last week I talked about the difficulty of the Revised Common Lectionary presenting us with Bible passages that have been used to promote hate. This week the Lectionary has given us a gift. Not the gospel reading, of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, which three years’ ago I described as ‘challenging’, but the extract from Paul’s first letter to the church in Thessalonica in what is now Greece. The reading we hear today is one that has comforted me whenever I have been bereaved, and I hope that it comforts this congregation after the deaths of seven of our members in less than two months.

Scholars think that Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians is the earliest writing we have in the New Testament, written no later than the year 50 CE. This is the first Christian document to which we have access, and it is obvious in it how much Paul loves the community at Thessalonica. His letter is full of rejoicing and reassurance. While he cannot visit them again, he had sent Timothy to see how they are because he had been afraid that they might have rejected their faith due to persecution. The news has been good:

But Timothy has just now come to us from you, and has brought us the good news of your faith and love. He has told us also that you always remember us kindly and long to see us—just as we long to see you. For this reason, brothers and sisters, during all our distress and persecution we have been encouraged about you through your faith. For we now live, if you continue to stand firm in the Lord. How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you? Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith. (1 Thessalonians 3:6-10)

The Thessalonians, though, have had a question for Paul. When this letter was written Paul and Jesus’ other followers were expecting Jesus to return in their lifetime when he would fully inaugurate God’s kingdom of love and peace. In that case, what was to happen to those who had died before Jesus’ return? Would they remain dead, while only the living would enjoy the new creation?

Life after death was not a given in the world in which the Thessalonians lived. There are Latin inscriptions on tombs throughout the Roman Empire that testify to a belief that there was no life beyond this life: ‘If you want to know who I am, the answer is ash and embers,’ and ‘We are nothing. See, reader, how quickly we mortals return from nothing to nothing,’ and, my favourite, ‘Friends who read this, listen to my advice: mix wine, tie garlands around your head, drink deep. And do not deny pretty girls the sweets of love. When death comes, earth and fire consume everything.’[1] We can see why Jesus’ followers might worry that those who have died would not be able to share the joy of Jesus’ return.

Paul reassures them. Jesus’ resurrection was not a unique event. It was a sign of what would happen to everyone: ‘For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.’ Everyone who has died will be raised, as God raised Jesus. In fact, when Jesus comes again the living will not take precedence over the dead. All will be raised together, caught up into the clouds to meet with Jesus in the air and be with him forever.

Reading biblical commentaries this week I discovered that there are some countries and churches in which preaching this passage is difficult because it is this passage that is the basis for the idea of ‘the Rapture’. I have never visited the USA, apparently in some parts of it cars have bumper stickers saying, ‘In the event of the Rapture this car will be driverless,’ and not in an ironic way. There is a whole genre of evangelical horror that imagines what will happen to those still on earth after ‘the Rapture’, which has apparently so traumatised some American children that on coming home to empty houses they worry that their parents have been raptured and they have been ‘Left Behind’.

Obviously, that is not what Paul is talking about here (and such ideas only date from the 1830s). Paul is using metaphors. His description of Jesus returning ‘with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet’ are meant to put us in mind of the arrival of a king or an emperor. The word ‘Parousia,’ used to describe Jesus’ coming, is the Greek word for the coming of a king to be greeted with honour and acclaim. In the same way, the idea that the living and dead are gathered up together to meet Jesus in the air strikes me as an obvious metaphor, although theologians have pondered how people ‘will be with the Lord for ever’ – ascending with him to heaven; descending with him to earth; living with him on the clouds?[2] What Paul is doing is offering comfort to those who mourn loved ones that those they love have not been lost forever. They are still part of the community.

‘We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.’ Paul does not mean that we should not grieve. There is nothing I dislike more than the suggestion that Christians should not mourn someone’s death because they are now ‘with the Lord’. But Paul is saying we should not mourn as though we had no hope. When my stepfather died I was in Switzerland and I could not attend his funeral, and seventeen years ago funerals were not live-streamed. I spent hours walking by the shores of Lake Geneva saying to myself over and over again, ‘We do not mourn as those who have no hope’. We do still mourn; the other Biblical phrase that kept repeating in my head as I walked was, ‘Jesus began to weep,’ which comes from the story of the death and raising of Jesus’ friend Lazarus. But I was reminding myself that amid sadness there is hope, that I do not believe that grief has the final word. You know, because you have heard me say it every single time I conduct a funeral and will hear it again if you come to Hans Groenewegen’s funeral on Wednesday, that one of the things the church offers mourners at funerals is the sure and certain hope of the resurrection, the faith that death is not the end. This is the hope that Paul is offering the Thessalonians, that in the resurrection of Jesus we have seen that life will not end in meaninglessness and oblivion. One day, we will all be with the Lord.

What is most interesting, perhaps, about this letter that has launched a thousand pieces of bad fiction about raptures, is how little it focuses on death. Paul is much more interested in how we live. The Thessalonians are to serve the true and living God while they wait for God’s Son to come from heaven (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10) and Paul spends most of the letter telling them how they are to do that. They are to ‘increase and abound in love for one another and for all’. (1 Thessalonians 3:12) They are to ‘strengthen [their] hearts in holiness’. (1 Thessalonians 3:13) They are to ‘rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances’. (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18) But Paul does not need to tell them to love each another, for as he writes:

Now concerning love of the brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anyone write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another; and indeed you do love all the brothers and sisters throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, beloved, to do so more and more, to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly towards outsiders and be dependent on no one. (1 Thessalonians 4:9-12)

Having the comfort of knowing that their dead are not lost to them, nor will they themselves be lost in death, the Thessalonians are able ‘to live and to please God’. (1 Thessalonians 4:1) And so can we.

I do not know about you, but I have found it hard to hold onto hope over recent weeks. When I do watch the news on television, I often do so through tears. And the crises that Australian journalists report on are only a few of the crises throughout the world. We may hear about Gaza, and Ukraine, and Pakistan expelling Afghan refugees. But we no longer see stories of Syria, or about earthquake victims in Turkey, or about the Rohingya refugees expelled from Myanmar or the Sudanese refugees who have fled to Chad. I have wondered whether it makes sense to preach hope and a God of love in such a world. But then I remember that the world has always been like this, and that the church not merely can but must preach hope and a God of love through every crisis. We do not grieve as others do who have no hope, so we can continue to offer hope to others. As the Thessalonians increased and abounded ‘in love for one another and for all’ (1 Thessalonians 3:12) through times of persecution, so Christians are still called to continue to abound in love for one another and for all. Later in the service Lynn will describe one way we do that, through our support for the UNHCR. Like the Thessalonians, we too can use the comfort of knowing that our dead are not lost to us, nor will we ourselves be lost in death, to ‘live and to please God’.

As I said three years’ ago, it is through such actions that we keep our lamps lit. We have been called to be a light to the world. Let our lights shine. Amen.

[1] All these are quoted in Richard S Ascough, ‘A Question of Death: Paul’s Community-Building Language in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18’ in Journal of Biblical Literature 123/3 (2004) pp. 509-530.

[2] Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden, ‘1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 in Rabbinic Perspective,’ in New Testament Studies, 58 (2012), pp. 199-212.