It’s great to have a celebration. Yesterday Sir Alex Ferguson marked 25 years in charge at Old Trafford, and the crowd sang “every one of us loves Alex Ferguson”. That is how we feel whenever we say the Creed. “He is seated at the right had of the Father, he will come to judge the living and the dead.” “I believe ... in the resurrection of the body.” The “coming of the Lord” is meant to encourage us.
“13 Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.” There is always sadness at a death, and at a funeral. We might very well grieve, and it is right that we do so, but we are not without hope. It is always easier when we believe that the one that we have lost shares our hope in the resurrection.
Paul is addressing a pastoral problem. The first generation of Christians have staked all on Jesus Christ, who has died and risen again for them, gone into heaven where is praying for us, and from whence he will come to meet his faithful ones, his saints. But what will be the fate of those who die before Jesus comes? Will they be left out? Certainly not, and they will not be shunted into second place by we who are still alive when Jesus comes. Jesus said in John 14 that in his Father’s house there are many rooms, literally inns or temporary resting places; those who have gone before us are said to be sleeping, and they will awake on that special day. Interestingly, after a betrothal ceremony, the bridegroom would say to his betrothed: “I am going to prepare a place for you, and when I have done that, I will return to take you to my Father’s house to be with me.” There would then be a delay before the bridegroom returned, but you had to be ready.
In giving his answer, Paul also spells out the Christian hope that we all share. It is the summit and completion of the Christmas and Easter story. Without the coming of Jesus, it would all be in vain, as if you cook a splendid meal but do not get it to the table, or carefully select a special outfit but never go to the wedding to wear it. The Christian faith sees all of human history heading to this climax, where Jesus gathers in all of his own, to be with him for ever.
What will it look like?
The word translated here as “coming” is parousia, which also means presence. Tom Wright argues that we should see this as a political comment that Jesus is lord of all, taking the top spot from Caesar. When royalty comes to a province, it is a mighty occasion as the one they only ever hear about at a distance is now visible and exercises his/her power in person. So a citizen of Thessalonica or Philippi would look forward to this royal visitation. I wonder if there would have been a special loo? When Jesus comes we will meet him, and be transformed to be like him; we will be given our resurrection bodies. This is such a remarkable prospect that it is described at the very edge of language. We will “meet him in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:17), “we will all be changed— 52 in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet” (1 Corinthians 15:51), he “will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). This is the glorious prospect for all those who have been chosen, clothed and conjoined. This is what it means to be included in the number of the saints – those who belong to God. This is what we included ourselves in, when were baptised and confirmed; this is what we affirm whenever we take communion: Jesus died, is risen, and will come again – for us, each of us.
Many are troubled at the thought of the end of the age, and the possibility of wrath and judgement. The good news is that God has sent Jesus to provide for us a certain way through to eternal life with him. To trust him is not just an intellectual puzzle or a choice to be made between competing possibilities. It is an unconditional offer by Jesus of all that he is; it is a proposal of undying love. But for some, there seem be other priorities that get in the way.
In a slightly different context, Jesus tells the story of the ten bridesmaids. There role seems to have been different to a bridesmaid’s role today, and involved lighting the procession with a flaming torch. No-one knew when the bridegroom would reappear, and they all fell asleep. Interestingly, like those who sleep in Christ, when the shout goes up, they wake and are caught up in the festivities.
Only then does it become apparent that there is a difference. Some have taken the proceedings seriously, and invested time and money in preparations – they have bought a reserve supply of oil. Others have been more cavalier. Perhaps they wondered if the groom would ever appear? Perhaps they meant to get around to making preparations, but there was always something else that seemed more important (does this remind us of seed sown in weed infested ground?)? Perhaps secretly they were not keen on the whole enterprise anyway (although they seem to be genuinely upset to be left outside)?
As in most parables told by Jesus, there is one main point and we are not well advised to labour each detail to have a special meaning. Jesus himself tells us to keep watch, to be ready.
Paul tells the Christians in Thessalonica to be encouraged, but also to spur each other on lives that bring honour to God. At the end of chapter three he writes “12 May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. 13May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.” And earlier in Chapter four he continues that we should live as sanctified ones – saints- given over to the service of God. “...make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, 12 so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.”
There is a clear distinction to be made between the saints, the sanctified ones, and those who are “outsiders”. There is also the clear implication that we are not happy that there are any “outsiders” – we are open for all to be included.
This leads directly to our present passage: “13 Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death...” No, we want to be fully informed about our birthright, that we have been born again into a new and living hope, that Jesus is coming for us and we are going to live with him forever, together with all those who have ever loved him. Is this not something that we should encourage each other with?
Discussion Starters
1. What, in your opinion, are the main reasons that Christians can live discouraged, unhappy lives?
2. How does Paul writing to the Thessalonians seek to raise their spirits?
3. What is the main thing that you take from this passage?
4. How can you use this passage to encourage others?
FURTHER STUDY
1 Corinthians 15:50-57 New International Version (NIV)
50 I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51 Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— 52 in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53 For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. 54 When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
55 “Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”
56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God! He gives us the
victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Philippians 3:19-21 New International Version (NIV)
19 Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things. 20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.
The problem of the delay of the parousia is a modern myth. The problem is caused by liberal Christianity’s no longer believing in the resurrection, which means that the weight of God’s activity is pushed forward in time. There’s not much evidence that the early church was anxious about this. First-century Christianity didn’t see itself so much as living in the last days, waiting for the parousia, as living in the first days of God’s new world. We are still awaiting the final outworking of what God accomplished in Jesus, but there are all kinds of signs to show that, though the situation is often bleak, we are in fact on the right road. Tom Wright
In N.T.Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope (p. 128), he notes that the Greek word parousia “is usually translated “coming,” but literally it means “presence”-that is, presence as opposed to absence.” He goes on to discuss two meanings of the word in non-Christian contexts which would have influenced the Christian understanding (page 129):
The first meaning was the mysterious presence of a god or divinity, particularly when the power of this god was revealed in healing. People would suddenly be aware of a supernatural and powerful presence, and the obvious word for this was parousia. Josephus sometimes uses this word when he is talking about YHWH coming to the rescue of Israel. God’s powerful, saving presence is revealed in action, for instance when Israel under King Hezekiah was miraculously defended against the Assyrians.
The second meaning emerges when a person of high rank makes a visit to a subject state, particularly when a king or emperor visits a colony or province. The word for such a visit is royal presence: in Greek, parousia. In neither setting, we note, obviously but importantly, is there the slightest suggestion of anybody flying around on a cloud. Nor is there any hint of the imminent collapse or destruction of the space-time universe.
Wright then applies this meaning to the Parousia of Christ, saying that the Early Christians believed that while Jesus was present in spirit, he was absent in body, and they waited for Christ to come in body and make his powerful presence known to the everyone. Secondly, the Early Christians were evidently proclaiming that Jesus was the true Emperor of the world, who would soon rule not in absence but in person, and that Caesar was a “sham”.
Farewell to the Rapture
(N.T. Wright, Bible Review, August 2001. Reproduced by permission of the author)
Little did Paul know how his colorful metaphors for Jesus’ second coming would be misunderstood two millennia later.
The American obsession with the second coming of Jesus — especially with distorted interpretations of it — continues unabated. Seen from my side of the Atlantic, the phenomenal success of the Left Behindbooks appears puzzling, even bizarre[1]. Few in the U.K. hold the belief on which the popular series of novels is based: that there will be a literal “rapture” in which believers will be snatched up to heaven, leaving empty cars crashing on freeways and kids coming home from school only to find that their parents have been taken to be with Jesus while they have been “left behind.” This pseudo-theological version of Home Alone has reportedly frightened many children into some kind of (distorted) faith.
This dramatic end-time scenario is based (wrongly, as we shall see) on Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, where he writes: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout of command, with the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first; then we, who are left alive, will be snatched up with them on clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).
What on earth (or in heaven) did Paul mean?
It is Paul who should be credited with creating this scenario. Jesus himself, as I have argued in various books, never predicted such an event[2]. The gospel passages about “the Son of Man coming on the clouds” (Mark 13:26, 14:62, for example) are about Jesus’ vindication, his “coming” to heaven from earth. The parables about a returning king or master (for example, Luke 19:11-27) were originally about God returning to Jerusalem, not about Jesus returning to earth. This, Jesus seemed to believe, was an event within space-time history, not one that would end it forever.
The Ascension of Jesus and the Second Coming are nevertheless vital Christian doctrines[3], and I don’t deny that I believe some future event will result in the personal presence of Jesus within God’s new creation. This is taught throughout the New Testament outside the Gospels. But this event won’t in any way resemble the Left Behind account. Understanding what will happen requires a far more sophisticated cosmology than the one in which “heaven” is somewhere up there in our universe, rather than in a different dimension, a different space-time, altogether.
The New Testament, building on ancient biblical prophecy, envisages that the creator God will remake heaven and earth entirely, affirming the goodness of the old Creation but overcoming its mortality and corruptibility (e.g., Romans 8:18-27; Revelation 21:1; Isaiah 65:17, 66:22). When that happens, Jesus will appear within the resulting new world (e.g., Colossians 3:4; 1 John 3:2).
Paul’s description of Jesus’ reappearance in 1 Thessalonians 4 is a brightly colored version of what he says in two other passages, 1 Corinthians 15:51-54 and Philippians 3:20-21: At Jesus’ “coming” or “appearing,” those who are still alive will be “changed” or “transformed” so that their mortal bodies will become incorruptible, deathless. This is all that Paul intends to say in Thessalonians, but here he borrows imagery—from biblical and political sources—to enhance his message. Little did he know how his rich metaphors would be misunderstood two millennia later.
First, Paul echoes the story of Moses coming down the mountain with the Torah. The trumpet sounds, a loud voice is heard, and after a long wait Moses comes to see what’s been going on in his absence.
Second, he echoes Daniel 7, in which “the people of the saints of the Most High” (that is, the “one like a son of man”) are vindicated over their pagan enemy by being raised up to sit with God in glory. This metaphor, applied to Jesus in the Gospels, is now applied to Christians who are suffering persecution.
Third, Paul conjures up images of an emperor visiting a colony or province. The citizens go out to meet him in open country and then escort him into the city. Paul’s image of the people “meeting the Lord in the air” should be read with the assumption that the people will immediately turn around and lead the Lord back to the newly remade world.
Paul’s mixed metaphors of trumpets blowing and the living being snatched into heaven to meet the Lord are not to be understood as literal truth, as the Left Behind series suggests, but as a vivid and biblically allusive description of the great transformation of the present world of which he speaks elsewhere.
Paul’s misunderstood metaphors present a challenge for us: How can we reuse biblical imagery, including Paul’s, so as to clarify the truth, not distort it? And how can we do so, as he did, in such a way as to subvert the political imagery of the dominant and dehumanizing empires of our world? We might begin by asking, What view of the world is sustained, even legitimized, by the Left Behind ideology? How might it be confronted and subverted by genuinely biblical thinking? For a start, is not the Left Behind mentality in thrall to a dualistic view of reality that allows people to pollute God’s world on the grounds that it’s all going to be destroyed soon? Wouldn’t this be overturned if we recaptured Paul’s wholistic vision of God’s whole creation?
[1] Tim F. Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind (Cambridge, UK: Tyndale House Publishing, 1996). Eight other titles have followed, all runaway bestsellers.
[2] See my Jesus and the Victory of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1996); the discussions in Jesus and the Restoration of Israel: A Critical Assessment of N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God, ed. Carey C. Newman (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999); and Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), chapters 13 and 14.
[3] Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
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