Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians offer hope of the Day of the Lord.
November is, for Christians, the last month of the year, since with December comes Advent and the liturgical year begins again. Thus our minds turn once again to the end of all things, as well as our own individual ends, brought to our attention by the Commemoration of All Souls at the start of the month.
Our Gospel readings at Mass reflect this eschatological turn, but I want to focus on the second readings, in which we will hear excerpts from St Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians. This is probably the first of Paul’s letters, at least of those that have been preserved, and therefore the oldest surviving Christian literature, probably written from Corinth after Paul had travelled there from Thessalonica, where his initial preaching seems to have been cut short by some sort of persecution.
Conscious that this persecution is still going on, Paul writes to encourage his beloved converts to stand firm by reminding them of the content of his message. Strikingly, he writes of the Kingdom of God, a phrase we find rarely elsewhere in Paul’s letters but one that was, of course, central to Christ’s own teaching. We may well suppose that Paul’s oral teaching revolved around Jesus’s claim that in him the reign of God was at last being definitively established, that Jesus himself is proven to be the Lord of Creation by his resurrection from the dead, and that the final, undeniable manifestation of this, the “Day of the Lord” (1 Thess 5:2) is just around the corner.
In fact, regarding this Day, Paul also echoes the teaching of Christ, reminding the Thessalonians in the same verse that it is coming “like a thief in the night” (cf Mt 23:43f). Paul describes this Day in very vivid and apocalyptic terms: “The Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thess 4:16f). The Apostle has taken the language and expectations of the Jewish people about the Day of the Lord – such as we find in the later prophets like Joel and Zechariah – and placed Jesus Christ at the centre of them, to assert that the Lordship of God over creation is to be exercised by and in Jesus, the Messiah.
Some time – possibly only a few months – later, Paul wrote again to the Thessalonians, seemingly to correct a misunderstanding of his teaching that he feared had gained traction, to the effect that the Day of the Lord had already come, that there was nothing left to wait for. He reminds them again of his teaching (and that of Jesus, as we find in Mark 13 and Matthew 24) that certain events must take place first. Christians would recognise these events as signs of the end, but those who “live in the dark” would fail to recognise them and thus be overtaken by the end of the world.
Indeed, those of the darkness would find their own leader, “the lawless one … the one destined for destruction” (2 Thess 2:3). Here, Paul speaks of an Antichrist (though unlike St John he doesn’t use the word), one who would set himself up, as pagan kings and emperors had been doing for centuries, as the Lord of the World. I have taken this phrase from the title of a novel by Robert Hugh Benson: a remarkably prescient story, written in 1907, which imagines the rule of just such an Antichrist. Mgr Benson, like Paul, would remind us that the Rebellious One need not be obviously an evil and satanic figure, might indeed appear highly attractive and plausible, but will be recognisable to true Christians by his opposition to the reign of Christ and to the Church.
Moreover, John tells us that “many antichrists have already come” (1 John 2:18). This continues to be the Christian experience, that political and social systems and leaders explicitly or implicitly oppose themselves to the Kingdom of God. But we should remember that Paul wrote to the Thessalonians to give them hope and encouragement, not a reason to fear. God in Christ is indeed Lord of the World, and there is no need to be afraid or discouraged from holding to the truth.
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