Chapter 9
1. Aquila and Priscilla (in Paul’s letters he abbreviates her name as Prisca) were a Jewish couple who came from Pontus, on the Black Sea shore of ancient Turkey. They had, however, been living in Rome until Claudius banished the Jews for rioting. It is hard to pin down exactly what had gone on, or indeed when. Suetonius gives no date for the incident, but the convergence of other evidence makes it likely that it happened around AD 49, and that Aquila and Priscilla arrived in Corinth—adding to the many Roman businesspeople already there—not long before Paul did himself. Like him, they were tentmakers. They seem not only to have struck up an instant friendship, but to have become sufficiently close for Paul to lodge in their house, share in their business, and also travel with them to Ephesus. By the time Paul wrote Romans, they were back in Rome again. The way Luke tells the story of their first meeting and going into business together makes the moment seem full of hope and fresh possibility.
- Think back to when you began worshiping at St. Mark. Who do you recall took the initiative to welcome you and to extend friendship?
2. As for the non-Jewish world—well, the suggestion that a Jew might be the new “Lord” over all other Lords was bad enough, but a crucifiedman? Everybody knew that was the most shameful and horrible death imaginable. How could such a person then be hailed as Kyrios? And if the answer was (as it would be for Paul) that God had raised this man from the dead, that would merely convince his hearers that he was indeed out of his mind. Everybody knew resurrection didn’t happen. A nice dream, perhaps—though many would have said they’d prefer to leave the body behind for good, thank you very much. Anyway, there’s no point living in fantasy land.
- Where does this mindset exist today? How do we address it?
3. This reminds us, as Paul is writing from Corinth, just what a challenge he faced in city after city. It is hard for any Christian worker today in all but the newest mission fields to imagine this. After two thousand years, most people in most cultures have at least a sketchy idea of what a Christian way of life might be, at least in theory and allowing for cynicism about actual Christian practice. But when Paul arrived in a new town, there was no expectation. Nobody had the slightest idea that there was a new way of life suddenly available, let alone what it might look like. Paul had to model it from scratch. He had done so, and he was naturally overjoyed that it had worked; they were copying him, not least in facing up to suffering. He was overflowing with joy and clearly regarded the Thessalonian church as a pinnacle of his life’s work so far.
- What are the challenges of modeling the Christian life today?
4. There are three matters about which Paul is eager to say more. Each of these will be important—and more than important—in Corinth, and here we get an early taste of them. It looks as though these are issues that were bound to come up precisely because the early Christian worldview was so radically different from anything people had imagined before. If we make a list of three topics beginning with “sex” and “money,” we might expect the third to be “power,” but in this case it is the parousia, the “appearing” of Jesus.
- How does Paul characterize each of these for Christians?
5. So—back to the Thessalonians’ question—what should one think about believers who had died before the Lord’s return? It is significant that Paul is writing about this while in Corinth, because it is in the two letters to Corinth later on that he gives the fullest account of these important matters. But here in 1 Thessalonians he makes a start. Speaking pastorally, Paul distinguishes between two different types of grief. He tells the Thessalonians that they do not have the hopeless kind of grief, the bleak, dark horror of loss with no mitigating circumstances or beliefs, but rather a hopeful grief, which, although there is still the tearing, wrenching sense of loss, has within it the strong and clear hope of reunion. Paul doesn’t say exactly when the reunion will occur, because that’s not where he wants the focus to be. The point is that all will in the end be together “with the Lord.”
- How do you distinguish between these two types of grief personally?
6. Followers of Jesus, then, must get used to living with a form of theological jet lag. The world all around is still in darkness, but they have set their clocks for a different time zone. It is already daytime on their worldview clock, and they must live as daytime people. This is one of the greatest challenges Paul faced: how to teach people who had never thought eschatologically that time is going somewhere and they must learn how to reset their watches; how to teach Jews who had thought the ultimate kingdom was going to come all at once that the kingdom had already broken in to world history with Jesus, but that it was not yet consummated and wouldn’t be until his return and the renewal of all things. This is a more familiar challenge to us in the modern West, though it isn’t always thought of in this way.
- What opportunities await for our light to shine in the darkness?
7. He had one more message for them, again reminding us that the church was from the first a community of mutual support. Here, within twenty years of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, was a “family” already running into the problem of people taking advantage of generosity, of agapē! Paul’s instruction here is brisk: those who won’t work shouldn’t eat. This no doubt made the point at the time, but for us the important thing is perhaps what Paul and the Thessalonians were all taking for granted: that the followers of Jesus were to live as “family,” with all that this entailed in mutual support. Paul stressed the responsibilities of the individual: “Do your own work in peace” (as Paul himself had done, deliberately setting the example), “and eat your own bread.” The modern Western church has taken individualism to an extreme, and there are great strengths in focusing on the challenge to every single church member, both to believe and to work. But for Paul this did not undermine, but rather gave appropriate balance to, the more foundational reality, that those who belonged to the Messiah were “brothers and sisters.”
- How do we find appropriate balance regarding these issues today?
8. While he was traveling—on the sea, on the roads—he prayed. When he tells people that they should “never stop praying,” this can hardly be something that applies to everybody else but not to himself. But how do you go on praying all the time? Is it simply ceaseless chatter, a stream-of-consciousness monologue (or indeed dialogue) with the God who through the spirit was as present as breath itself? This may have been part of it, but reading back from the letters Paul wrote over the next three or four years I think we can be much more precise and focused. At several points in his letters he seems to be adapting Jewish prayers and liturgies to include Jesus in recognition of the new life that had erupted into the ancient tradition.
- How has our Lutheran liturgy provided you with prayer material?
9. It is easy as we follow the outward course of Paul’s life to forget that the inward course was just as important. But unless we step to one side from his relentless journeyings and imagine him praying like this, praying as he and his friends break bread in Jesus’s name; praying as he waits for the next ship, for the turn of the tide, for the right weather to sail; praying for sick friends and for newly founded little churches; praying as he makes his way toward what may be a wonderful reunion with old friends or an awkward confrontation with old enemies—unless we build this into the very heart of our picture of this extraordinary, energetic, bold, and yet vulnerable man, we will not understand him at all. In particular, we will not understand what happened next.
- To what extent does your prayer life mimic Paul’s?
- How is your prayer life different?
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