For you yourselves
know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the
night. When they say, “There is peace
and security… [I Thess 5:2-3]
The two letters from Paul to the church at Thessalonica are
among the earliest writings to have made it into the Christian scriptures, and
they are generally dated at only 20-25 years after the crucifixion of
Jesus. Those 1st-generation
Christians lived in expectation of the Lord’s return, the Day of the Lord. But already
there is a note of caution. Jesus
doesn’t return in the way they expect, and so here Paul is writing also about
the discipline of waiting. How do we
cope with delay, uncertainty, unpredictability?
Last week we were reinterpreting[1]…
now in the writings of Paul we have to reinterpret some more, find what we
might mean in 2017, by the Day of the
Lord. This Day of the Lord is what the Greek language, including in this very passage,
calls a kairos (καιρος),
a moment, an event in life, when something crucial happens. So it is a time of change, a time for
decisions, a discovery that things are not going to be the same again… For the Thessalonians, the Day of the Lord if it happened would
certainly be a kairos. Being bereaved is a kairos, obviously… so is having a baby. Conversion, Baptism… Falling in love… but also in human
experience, parting, separating… A bad
diagnosis… A loss of trust in someone…
In Paul we find two teachings about this, and they go oddly
together. The first is that, as he says,
the Day of the Lord, whatever it may
be, may be sudden and unexpected. This
is the Thief in the Night. Mature faith has learned to live therefore in
an unfair and unpredictable world, to expect the unexpected and undeserved. Moreover, for mature faith the Day of the Lord, whatever event it is,
is not seen as something God does to us.
The God Jesus called Father does not unaccountably afflict anyone with
disease or punish or strike anyone down, or take our side against others. Paul writes: You are not in darkness, for
that Day to surprise you like a thief… we are children of light, he writes, we
are awake and sober. I would add, if
Paul permits… and we do not live in fear and superstition.
Paul’s second point is that in mature faith we learn how to
wait, patiently if necessary, when necessary – not grinding our teeth or
raising our blood pressure, but acquiring the strange gift of being still and
letting the river run of its own accord. For some of us this is a rather hard lesson,
and sometimes, I agree, it may be necessary to be impatient. The
Psalmist however knows how to wait.[2] Contemplative prayer is very much a matter of
waiting in silence and stillness. And
for the true contemplative, in whom fear is being dispelled and the need to
control is being tamed, waiting in silence holds many good secrets.
[1] Bridegrooms
arriving, and foolishness…
[2]
eg. Psalm 62:1, 5; 33:20; 69:3; 27:14; 37:7 etc… Also eg. Isaiah 8:17; Romans
8:25; Galatians 5:5… cf T S Eliot: East Coker III – I said to my soul, be
still, and wait…etc
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