Dr. Dwight Zscheile—Year C Proper 27

Anthony: Alright, let’s transition to our next pericope of the month. It is 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 27 in Ordinary Time, which is November 9. Dwight, we’d be grateful if you read it for us, please.

Dwight: I’d be happy to.

As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you, brothers and sisters, 2 not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as though from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord is already here. 3 Let no one deceive you in any way, for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction. 4 He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God. 5 Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you?

13 But we must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the first fruits for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and through belief in the truth. 14 For this purpose he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. 15 So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter. 16 Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, 17 comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.

Anthony: Amen. I see a theme that constantly is present in Thessalonians, and that is the coming of Jesus Christ, being prepared for the second arrival, an awareness of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And I’m curious because sometimes I hear Christians talk about the kingdom to come in its fullness and it’s like we’re waiting around just trying to escape to that, as opposed to the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ is coming, having a Word to speak to us in the here and now. What say you, how do you speak of the second coming of Jesus?

Dwight: Yeah, so I think it’s really important to step back and think about how time is conceptualized in different cultures. And if you think about what’s so powerful about biblical faith is the sense of God acting in history, which is very revolutionary. I think we take it for granted, but compared to so many cultures in the world which see this sort of endless cycles of time repeating itself. But the idea that there is a beginning, middle, and end, if you will, to history, or there are these seasons, if you will, that are up to God is a really powerful biblical teaching. And so, this teaching on the Parousia is a way to stress that.

And I always want to approach it with fear and trembling and thinking about the depths of the mystery of all of this, because of course, very much one of the core messages of the Thessalonian correspondence is, okay don’t spend too much time trying to worry about exactly when this is coming, right? This is God’s thing. And so, we need to be living into a new reality in light of that future. But that future is in fact one of the healing and restoration of the whole world. It’s not simply the escape of certain people out of the world, which I think has been one of the ways in which this has been imagined.

And often we get a very diminished soteriology is a result of that. And so, I think the idea in our culture, which I think in the modern West, has a kind of narrative of progress that has been built in since the Enlightenment, which in some ways, again, would not have happened without Christianity, without a sense that time has a trajectory — that is really a Christian idea or at least a going back into the Jewish heritage as well — that we live in this culture that says things should be just getting better and better. Humans should be being perfected through technology, education, science, and all this stuff.

And of course, that is really over the last century since World War I, in many ways been deeply challenged and disrupted and broken down, and yet it still functions, I think, in many ways. And I think people get surprised when their vision of progress isn’t being realized and people feel like, oh, we’re going back. You hear this language a lot, right?

And so, the biblical teaching, which is not progress in that sense of self, human self-salvation or perfectibility through technology, science, or the sell, the state of the market, if you will, but rather that God is in control of history, that God is active in history, and we live in this in-between time where we have this tangible experience of a kind of down payment, if you will, on God’s future, on the kingdom that we experience.

We know it. It’s real. It lives in us and among us and around us in different ways. And yet we yearn for, we look for its completion. It’s bringing all of creation to rights and the restoring of relationships that are broken and the healing of all that’s been that’s been wounded and destroyed and all of that. We have that hope that is a proper hope that we can look forward to and we hold it with just incredible humble mystery, a posture of not trying to manage and fix when that future comes, but trusting that it is the ultimate story.

Anthony: Looking at verses 13 through 17, how would you herald the God that’s revealed in Jesus Christ here?

Dwight: Yeah. So again, I love this language of first fruits for salvation and this, again, this stress and this text around God acting to sanctify us through the Holy Spirit, to make us holy, to restore us to holiness, to right relationship with God and each other and the world. And to do that through truth, through a different way of understanding reality that is present in Jesus, right? Jesus as the locus of God’s Word, as the locus of that truth that we know tangibly through his ministry and his presence.

And so, again, the idea here that comes through in this of gratitude and God’s action to choose and claim us being primary, I think is really important to stress. And then, this message about glory is also really interesting, too.

So, what is the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ? You think about Paul’s cultural context. Glory had certain associations in a Roman imperial context, and it was all about military conquest. Military heroes were glorious. Glory of Caesar and all that.

The glory of our Lord Jesus Christ, right? Even using that word, kurios, Lord, which would normally apply to Caesar. Here’s the guy who was crucified shamefully by the Roman Empire. He’s actually the glorious one. How revolutionary this is!

So, if our ideas of glory are shaped by human cultures and empires, we will miss the profoundly subversive message here of glory being found in a God who is willing to join us, suffer with us, and for us. And claim us in the very worst of human circumstances. That’s the kind of glory we know that is a love that shows up, that is present and reaches through even the hate that we send and bring to that very person, right? If we’re the ones crucifying Christ and Christ is saying, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

Anthony: It’s such good news. Such good news. Yes. Yes, it is. And I like to say to churches, the gospel is good news and so, this is what we need to speak to one another. We speak life. If there’s one place, we should show up each and every week and expect to hear good news, it should be the church of Jesus Christ proclaiming his word. Amen and amen.