NOTES for Th1 4:13-18

Once again we must speak about trust. How can Paul know what he writes about the resurrection of the dead? No one has seen it! And his argument may not seem entirely convincing (v. 14). Of course, it is not about arguments. The Holy Spirit reveals the truth to people, including the apostle Paul, but this truth is not imposed on us; it is offered, and trust is our exercise of freedom. We are free not to believe, just as Jesus' fellow townspeople did not believe Him, as we read today in the Gospel of Luke. We are free not to be Christians, but such an exercise of our freedom may prove worse than slavery. Is the apostle Paul worthy of trust? Is God worthy of trust? But are we worthy to pass judgment on His worthiness?

The question of the fate of those who had already completed their earthly journey was quite acute in the Thessalonian church, so that Paul considered it necessary to address this question separately. Its sharpness may have been connected with the fact that the first generation of Christians, or at least some of its representatives, began to leave this life without having awaited the Savior's return, and those who remained naturally asked: what, then, will happen to them next? The question was connected with traditional pre-Christian ideas about death and the afterlife that had not been outlived, ideas that amounted to this: after death a person, as people thought, goes to Sheol, to the world of shadows, and remains there as such a shadow until the day of Judgment and therefore of the general resurrection.

However, the day of Judgment and resurrection was also linked in the minds of believers with the day of the Messiah's coming. The Messiah, as Christians knew with complete certainty, had already come, and therefore death, at least for those who accepted the Messiah who had come, should no longer exist at all. Put simply, according to this logic Christians should not die at all: they should wait for the Messiah's imminent return and finally receive from Him that fullness of life which excludes death in principle. But reality appeared to contradict this logic: Christians died just like all other people. Paul, however, sees reality quite differently.

His vision differs from that of the recipients of his letter by greater fullness and, accordingly, greater scope. For the apostle, the life of a Christian is not reduced to the limits of its earthly stage. It continues after that stage ends, and the Christian's path as a whole will be completed only on the day of Christ's return and the triumph of the Kingdom. And then everyone will meet: the paths of all Christians, whenever in earthly time they began, converge at this point. There the question of first and last, of "earlier" or "later," will no longer have any meaning.

No one will have to wait for anyone: everyone comes to the meeting place when his own path brings him there, and when a person reaches the end of his path, it turns out that in some mysterious way he has arrived on time, just like everyone else. And then something new begins: the life of the Kingdom in all its fullness. With the participation of everyone who has arrived.