1 Thessalonians 3:2-10
I recently moved to a new state. I departed from a congregation I served as a pastor, and within it, a close colleague, a God-friend.
Maybe you too have a God-friend, which I define as a specific sort of confidant: a friend whose tether you find yourself in, a bit inexplicably. Not because you grew up going to the same schools or because you have similar personalities, but because you share the same sense of connection to God.
Emily began working in her position around the same time as I did. Early on, we began showing up in the frame of each other’s office doors on Sunday mornings. We would cast a line for each other into the day’s joys and stressors, as if praying the Examen prayer as a conversation.
During long meetings, we could bring each other’s attention back to the task at hand – or away from the task at hand, for a needed laugh – by locking eyes. We developed a shared brain for noticing the ways God was afoot in our community.
Slowly but surely, Emily’s oldest child became a beloved friend of my 3-year-old daughter. For two years, we meshed “our very lives,” which Paul tells us is part of caring for each other, in the light of God’s good news (1 Thessalonians 2:8).
Even though I now live a couple of states away from Emily, I take comfort in these words of Paul, about his own God-friends in Thessalonica: despite being separated in person, they are not separated in heart (1 Thessalonians 2:17).
It would be easy to boil down Paul’s connection to the Thessalonians to that of a patriarch, with Paul describing them as “[his and the other apostles’] glory and joy.” As if Paul is a parent, writing a wistful letter to his children who are away at summer camp. But this relationship is nuanced.
Though the Thessalonians are young in their faith, Paul assures us that the mentorship taking place is a two-way street. He is astounded at the converts’ receptivity to the good news (1 Thessalonians 2:13). To be sure, this openness to accepting the Word of God is a difficult skill to learn, even now in the year 2024. Rather than taking it as a sign of spiritual immaturity, Paul seems to applaud the Thessalonians for their child-like willingness to absorb the good news.
Paul himself also yearns to visit with this burgeoning Christian community. Like “a nurse tenderly caring for her own children” (1 Thessalonians 2:7), Paul makes it clear that he misses the Thessalonians, and that his spirit is worse off for it. He even sends an emissary to be present with them. As the CEB translation puts it, “When we couldn’t stand it any longer … we sent you Timothy” (1 Thessalonians 2:17).
We receive from Paul an example of how reassurance and encouragement among Christians is a ministry unto itself. The Thessalonians’ challenges, including being derided by their own people, are weaved into the broader story of suffering that is central to Christ’s death and resurrection. This is the focal point of Paul’s comparison of them to “the Jews” (1 Thessalonians 2:14), which often gets painted in broad strokes of anti-Semitism. Here Paul is not saying that Jewish people are unpleasing to God. He is referring specifically to Jewish people who behaved uncharitably toward other Jews who followed Christ, as Paul himself once did.
In this way, Paul connects himself to the new Christians in their mutual experience of trials and tribulations. He assures them that God sees the ill intentions of people who have been a stumbling block to their faith (1 Thessalonians 2:16). And so the relationship of mutual care, between Paul and the Thessalonians, is also one of mutual transformation. Perhaps this is the ultimate definition of God-friendship.
For reflection
- Paul makes it clear that part of holy witness is encouragement, thanksgiving, and the naming of others’ strengths, in our Christian communities. How does our society help and hinder us in this practice?
- What does it take to form a friendship like that between the Thessalonians and Paul & co.? Do you have God-friends, or people you think could become God-friends?
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