NOTES for Th1 2:9-13

Addressing the Thessalonian Christians, Paul says that they received the witness of him and his companions as the word of God, and not simply as the ordinary preaching of ordinary preachers. Of course, any religious preacher speaks of his preaching as the word of God. Sometimes this means the preaching of true teaching, coming from God and established by God; at other times the preacher lays claim to direct revelation, which, according to his own words, he receives from God immediately. Among religious preachers both one and the other do in fact occur. But a Christian's witness to Christ and to the Kingdom is not religious preaching.

First of all, it is a witness to that new life, the life with Christ in His Kingdom, which has opened itself to the witness. In some ways, of course, such witness resembles that form of religious preaching in which the preacher receives some revelation directly from God and tells others about it, as, for example, the prophets of Israel did when they testified to what God revealed to them.

Such preaching can also move beyond properly religious boundaries, beyond the framework of religious teaching: living revelation often does not fit into any religious framework. But even such witness presupposes only the need to tell the hearers about something, to convey to them something important that can change their spiritual life if they take what is said into account and draw the appropriate conclusions from it. Yet the conclusions themselves and the change of life are wholly and completely the responsibility of the one who heard.

As God said to one of Israel's great prophets, Ezekiel: testify to everyone, because if you do not testify to a sinner that he is sinning before God, I will require from you the sin he has committed; but if you do testify, then I will require it from him himself. Witness is absolutely important, but each person decides for himself how to respond to it. With Christ and the Kingdom it is not like that. Here "knowledge about," theoretical knowledge, knowledge "in principle" and "in general," gives nothing. Witness to Christ and to the Kingdom has meaning only when a person treats what is said precisely as God's revelation, requiring an immediate answer here and now.

This is understandable: true Christian witness always places a person before God, opening God's presence to him. A presence to which one can either open oneself or which one can reject. The prophet tells what God wants to communicate through him to others; Christ's witness merely brings a person to Christ, as though introducing him to Him, and then leaves the person who has been introduced face to face with the One to whom he has been introduced.

Then the main thing begins: a person's direct communion with Christ, without mediators and without interpreters. The experience of such communion is the experience of Christian life itself, opening the Kingdom to a person and giving him the possibility, in turn, of becoming a witness for others. A witness who will bring someone else to Christ and then step aside in the same way, giving that person the possibility of the same personal meeting with Christ that was given to him.

The main theme of today's reading is the essence of apostolic tradition. First the Word of God is proclaimed and must be heard. Once heard, it enters the heart and is accepted by the believer. The process of accepting and “digesting” the Word allows each person to realize that it was not someone capable of speaking beautifully and convincingly, but God Himself, who acted through His messenger, through the one He chose to preach. Once again, the apostle draws attention to the fact that the Savior was given to everyone without exception. The Gospel must be preached to every person, whether Jew or Gentile. And if believers try to hinder the preaching, they become accomplices of Satan rather than of the crucified and risen Jesus.

Recalling his ministry in Thessalonica, Paul especially emphasizes the fact that he never used his position as an apostle in order to get something from those to whom he preached. And this is not only about some personal advantages: Paul, as is clear, did not try in general, as people say, to "throw his authority around." Here a very important principle of Christian witness was revealed, one the apostle always followed: witness must be unobtrusive.

The issue is not only that any forcing of Christianity can turn into formalism in the religious life of the community that results from such preaching. The issue lies in the very essence of spiritual life in general and Christian life in particular. Indeed, spiritual life comes down entirely to relationships - a person's relationships with God and with other people. And relationships cannot be transferred; one can only speak about them and introduce another person to the One whom one knows oneself. But the one who seeks relationships will have to establish and maintain them; no one else will do this for him.

Here the process is deep and internal, and no one has access to it except God and the person establishing the relationship. Pressure is useless here: another person's authority will not help the matter in this case. But it can easily "help" with something else: imposing an ideology on a person, for example, a religious one. Christianity, if one wants, is not so hard to turn into a religion, although such a transformation will mean its spiritual degeneration.

But when the issue is another person's authority, leadership in the usual sense of the word, in which the leader shows the way and defines what to believe and how to live, the spiritual degeneration of Christianity (and of any spiritual life in general) is practically inevitable. A true spiritual teacher is therefore always unobtrusive; he only helps a person see and hear God when that person is already ready to see and hear Him. Such was Paul's witness to Christ: he helped those who were ready for the meeting and wanted it to meet Him, but he was not going to lead anyone anywhere, and he was not going to tell anyone how to live with Christ. Each person had to establish his own relationship with Him and find his own path into the Kingdom.