BEMA 161: 1 Thessalonians — Parousia

Transcription Status

29 Feb 24 — Initial public release

27 Nov 23 — Transcript approved for release

1 Thessalonians — Parousia

Brent Billings: This is the BEMA podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host Brent Billings. Today we step into the context of the church in Thessalonica and examine the theme of Parousia.

Marty Solomon: Yes.

Brent: Do we get to know what that means right away or do we have to wait until later in the episode?

Marty: Yes, you have to wait.

Brent: Okay.

Marty: I will say, many people say ‘parOOsia.’ I have always said ‘parousIA.’ I feel like more people say parOOsia so I can be wrong. BEMA, “beemah,” “baymah.” ParOOsia, parousIA. I don’t know. Apparently I put all my syllables in all the wrong spots, especially when I’m not speaking English.

Brent: What language is this word in?

Marty: Greek.

Brent: Okay.

Marty: Which is what ruined my GPA. More on that later. Next episode, I’ll talk a little about how much I hate the Greek language. Well, here we go. Paul—he also pens two letters to the church in Thessalonica. There are plenty of commentaries that deal with the context of Thessalonica. I gotta be honest with you and all of our listeners, Brent—I haven’t had the opportunity to study the context of Thessalonica like I would like to.

I didn’t put this in your notes, Brent. Let’s add another book. I can’t remember how much Crossan dealt with Thessalonica, but In Search of Paul. I believe we’ve recommended it before maybe. I believe so. By John Dominic Crossan. Yes, Crossan, super liberal. Yes, member of the Jesus Seminar. No, not a horrible individual. Yes, a great scholar. No, you don’t have to believe everything he says. Yes, worth your time reading.

Wonderful little gymnastics we can always do there. Whenever you recommend Crossan, all of my fundamentalist listeners are going to come out of the woodwork there. Yes, it is exactly him and just a great first-century Roman contextual scholar. I just recommend that work. I know he dealt with Philippi quite a bit. I want to say he dealt with Thessalonica a little bit, but I haven’t done a whole bunch of work, so I’m not going to act like I’ve done all this contextual work on Thessalonica.

Done a little bit, maybe a little bit more even in the last couple years than I’ve done before, but not a ton. There are different explanations for what’s going on in Thessalonica. One thing that everybody seems to agree on is that the people of Thessalonica had some kind of clear misunderstanding. It’s clear that they had a misunderstanding, might be the better way to phrase that, of the proper response to what it means that Christ is coming back. The return of Christ. It appears that they had an issue with an emphasis on work and doing their jobs and engaging in their vocations and actually going to work.

Apparently people were quitting their vocations, quitting their work and not going because Jesus is going to come back so why would I do any of those things? Apparently there’s some conversation about that. I don’t know a whole lot about that. I’m not going to talk a lot about that today.

One thing that becomes abundantly clear—again, another book that we will recommend here, I think last episode we did, was N.T Wright’s book Surprised by Hope. Probably not even the best book by N.T Wright on this subject, but was just one that I have read more recently. I know he mentions a lot of the stuff we’re going to talk about today in that book, so we’ll recommend that one more time.

It seems to be abundantly clear that the early believers had a definite understanding that Christ’s return was very close. It was very imminent. Jesus’s return, like immediately imminent—in the near future. This may not be as far-fetched as it sounds to us from where we sit. We’ll talk about theology at some other point. At any rate, it’s safe to say that the early Christians in the Roman empire believed that they might see Christ return in their lifetime or the lifetime of their own children.

Apparently this had impacted the Thessalonian community in such a way that it led to their disengagement. If Christ was about to return and make the whole world right, why should we spend our time working? Paul addresses some of these misunderstandings by talking about the need for the believers in Thessalonica to work—for “a man who does not work, does not eat”—famous quote from Thessalonians.

It is also to this world that Paul speaks of parousia. There’s that word, Brent. Didn’t have to wait too long. Parousia is a Greek word we often translate as “second coming.” While this is a very accurate translation, the term is loaded with historical context that we usually miss. These details can be—you can find them by studying N.T. Wright, Ethelbert Stauffer, or early church commentaries by Roland Worth and some other people. Parousia referred to the second coming of an emperor in a Roman world that had experienced the havoc of multiple earthquakes.

The empire there in the biblical world sat right on a few major fault lines and major earthquakes were a definite issue in the ancient biblical world. We’ve mentioned that already before, and we’re going to talk about it a lot more in our study on Revelation and those kinds of things as well. The Roman empire had experienced the havoc of multiple earthquakes and the emperor, after an earthquake, would make a visit to the city.

You could think of how in a modern day setting, you might see our president visit a disaster zone. That kind of a thing. After surveying the extent of the damage, the emperor would leave behind a large sum of money that the people of the city would use to rebuild. In today’s language you may call it some kind of bailout. The city’s destroyed because of an earthquake.

The emperor comes in, surveys the damage and says, “I’m going to leave behind 30 million sesterces to help you rebuild.” Everyone knew that the emperor who left behind whatever sum of money, everyone knew that the emperor would return one day and you would have to give an account for what you did with his deposit. He left all that money. He was going to return. He was going to have a second coming. He came once to do what, Brent? What was he doing the first time?

Brent: To survey the scene. To make an assessment of things.

Marty: Absolutely. He’s come once to do that and now he leaves behind money, so you know he’s going to come back again for a second coming. Everyone knew the emperor would return and he would want to see what you had done with everything that he had left behind. This return was called a parousia. We know that Thessalonica experienced at least two of them in the first century, which is unique. A city may or may not have experienced one parousia.

I won’t say that Thessalonica was the most parousias at two, but having multiple parousias in your city is very unusual. Thessalonica had had at least two of them in the first century. According to historical records, there appear to be common themes experienced in any given Roman parousia. One of the first things that we know is that the emperor would arrive to the sound of a loud trumpet, as the stories are told.

As soon as the lookout of the city saw the emperor’s entourage, more like a small army arriving in the distance, the call would go out. The city would not want to be caught with Caesar banging on their front door. You would want to be ready for his arrival. You didn’t want him to knock on the gates of the city saying, “I’m here.” You would want to know he’s coming from miles away and so you let the city know that that was coming. Those city lookouts would sound the trumpet. When the emperor arrived at the city, he would pay the obligatory respects to the dead. Now you’ve been to some Roman cities, especially in Turkey, Brent.

One of the things that we’ve looked at is what sits inside oftentimes the main city gate, and if not the main city gate, one of the other main city gates, but what is it that often sits right inside the main city gate there to Roman cities?

Brent: Was it a cemetery?

Marty: Yes. They would often call it the necropolis, the city of the dead. The city of death. It’s a large cemetery. Why do you put that right inside your city gate? Because it pays respects to all those that have come before you, the same way that we honor and pay respect to places like Arlington. You would do that in your Roman cities to pay respects for those people that had built the life that you now enjoy in that city.

In the ruins of those ancient Greco-Roman cities, there’s often a graveyard just inside or sometimes just outside the main entrance of the city. After the emperor pays his respects there—and I kind of think of it, we always have the PR photo op on certain holidays where they’re laying the wreath at Arlington or those kinds of things. Same kind of idea in the Roman world. After the Emperor pays his respects upon arriving at your city, honoring those that have come before, the people of the city would go out to meet him.

This meeting has a very particular reference in the Greek language. It’s not just a phrase in the Greek, it’s actually used repeatedly throughout Roman history to talk about this unique meeting. The Greek is eis apantesien. This meeting was referred to as eis apantesien. To go out to meet. The goal is to go out from the city to meet with the emperor with joy, and to take him by the hand and show—not literally, you don’t take Caesar by the hand—you take the emperor figuratively by the hand and you show him the city and the great work that had been done in his name, in his honor, of course.

You wander him around the city and he left 30 million sesterces to rebuild your city. You want to take him around and you want to say, “Look at how we’ve rebuilt this university. This gymnasium was leveled to the ground in the earthquake and we’ve rebuilt it and actually into the apse—we’ve added an entire new floor into the apse of the gymnasium—and we’ve actually erected a huge statue to you, Emperor.” Emperor whoever. Emperor Nero. Emperor Trajan. Emperor whatever. “We’ve added a new way to honor you and in fact, we had a little bit of money left over, and so we built a brand new water source, a fountain in the middle of the City Square. This fountain, it bears your name. We honor you, Caesar.”

Because it’s all about honoring the emperor and how you’ve rebuilt. Of course you want to make sure that you’ve done more with his deposit than was there to begin with. Your city hopefully is better. It has to be better than it was before the earthquake, because Caesar has left behind his deposit and you need to make it better.

Now if we have that historical context in mind, consider the church in Thessalonica and how they hear the following words from 1 Thessalonians 4. Go ahead, Brent, and read us. Tell us what address we got here.

Brent: Chapter 4. 16–18. For the Lord Himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so, we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

Marty: We’ve heard that passage before, but probably, maybe not with the historical context. Now those words strike us totally differently than they did before. Paul describes the second coming of Jesus as the parousia of an emperor. To a church that is having a hard time understanding the need to engage in the work of the Kingdom, physical labor for that matter.

Paul describes the second coming as a parousia, communicating to the people of Thessalonica that they have work to do because God left them with a deposit and expected them to use it to restore and reconcile, heal and rebuild. In Paul’s picture, there is a trumpet sound, which is step number one of the parousia. The dead in Christ rise first, which feels like—it mirrors what, Brent?

Brent: I guess the respect for the dead.

Marty: Right. The emperor meeting the dead first before he comes into the city. Then it says we are caught up to eis apantesien—in the Greek. That’s the eis apantesien—a very particular meeting as people go out to meet the emperor that is arriving in their city. We go out to eis apantesien Jesus in the air. The irony runs thick here because the theology that loves to quote this verse as a backing for the idea of the rapture, is the same theology that commits the sin of the Thessalonians.

Far too much Christian theology espouses an idea that we are all going to leave this place someday, like some kind of escapism. If this is true, then our goal is to have as many people on our team as possible before some glad morning when this life is o’er. But this is the exact idea that Paul is teaching against.

Paul is not arguing for a disengaged theology. He is arguing for a theology of complete and urgent physical engagement. Jesus is going to come back. He left us with a deposit, Paul might say elsewhere, of the Holy Spirit, and we’re going to have to show him what we did with the place. We’re caught up to meet Jesus in the air as He’s coming down from heaven for His parousia. Which direction is Jesus going, Brent, when this happens?

Brent: Jesus is coming down.

Marty: Jesus is coming down. To quote one of my favorite teachers, he said, “I get worried that too many Christians are going to be on their way up and out of here as Jesus is coming down, and they’re going to pass in the air and Jesus is going to say, ‘Hey, where are you going?’” Because Jesus is coming down and everybody else is trying to get out.

This is not a theology of disembodied evacuation. It is a theology of physical participation. May God remind us that we have work to do here, today. May He remind us that Jesus taught us to pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” May we look forward to the day when the trumpet might sound and we might go out to eis apantesien, to meet Jesus on His way down, in order to joyfully take Him by the hand and to show Him all the things that we were able to accomplish with His help. When He shows up, I pray we might have something to show him. Parousia, Brent Billings.

Brent: I am so jealous of all the listeners who are hearing that word for the first time. I’m having a very hard time with that word because I’m so used to parousia.

Marty: I’m not even sure which one’s right.

Brent: We should probably get someone who speaks Greek.

Marty: Well, I’m going to give a shout-out to this guy next episode, but we do have a good old Greek professor out there who listens to our podcast. I think still, if we haven’t made him angry and sent him away. He’s professor Vance Russell and he teaches Greek; he is a Greek expert.

Brent: Well, and I don’t know if maybe the pronunciation of Greek has shifted over the years and centuries.

Marty: I don’t know.

Brent: English certainly has changed dramatically just in the last few hundred years.

Marty: I’m really bitter about Greek. One of my favorite stories is about this, though, and I share this on the trip and I think I’ll share it now. My teacher Ray Vander Laan, he was on a trip once with—I don’t know, should I share his story? Is it okay to share his story?

Brent: You’re telling it as his story, not taking it as your own story.

Marty: Alright. Ray had this trip that he took with a bunch of YoungLife leaders over in Turkey and they were at a village that I’ve actually been to. It was before I had been to that village. They walked into the village and the whole village just went crazy with hospitality. It’s that Middle-Eastern hospitality we talked about in Session 1. They just pulled out all the stops and they made them all stop and they made them dinner.

They tried to refuse it, but they just had to show them this hospitality. They had the group stop there and they ate dinner and the mayor came out. The mayor had this bright, white suit with this white hat on, which even in Turkey that would probably stick out. That’s going to stick out. He was the mayor. He was the mayor of the city and he was just so proud and he wanted to show them all around.

One of the things that he showed them is this school. It’s this one room. It’s not a big school. It’s a one-room schoolhouse. I’ve seen the school house. It reminds me of what you would see in a place like you see pictures of Africa and those things. It’s just a one-room. Apparently according to the story, it was just empty, hardly anything in it. No books, no desks, but it was their pride. It was a small backwater village in Turkey and they loved their kids and they wanted to educate their kids.

Well, the leaders, they were like, “Ray, we want to help this village out. We want to do something for them.” Typically you don’t want to leave behind gifts. You don’t want to try to pay for their hospitality. It’s horribly offensive. In this story, he said, “Sure. Why don’t we take up a love offering and whatever we can gather here right now on the spot, we’ll leave behind in an envelope and see what happens.”

Somehow he said this group of young campus ministers, YoungLife campus ministers—these are not rich people. [laughs] I can tell you as a campus minister, they’re not loaded with cash. Somehow they collected like $3,000. They leave this money behind, and this is huge. $3,000 in that world, in that village, this mayor, he could just pocket the cash. He could do all kinds of stuff. There’s a million things that could go wrong, but they just trusted that he would do the right thing. They just left the money and went on their way and didn’t think they would hear from him again.

Well, a few years later, Ray was walking in the same region of Turkey and there’s a small pickup truck, maybe a quarter-mile away on the other side of a field. All of a sudden the pickup truck screeches to a halt and out of the pickup truck jumps this guy, and he starts running across the field. He’s in a white suit with a white hat. His name was Ally Ultentop, the mayor.

Brent: That is fantastic.

Marty: It is. It actually means “Golden Dome,” if I remember—Golden Head or something like that in the Turkish language. He’s running across this field and he finds Ray and he says, “Ray, you have to come. You have to come to the village. You have to come.” Ray’s like, “I wasn’t planning on going to the village this time. It was out of my way, but okay, well, I’ll make it work. We’ll be there in two hours.” Ally says, “Excellent.” He jumps into the truck and he takes off, peels out.

Two hours later, they show up at the village, and the whole village—it’s like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. They’ve decorated. There’s music. They’ve got brass instruments out of nowhere. It’s this huge thing. There’s a huge banquet prepared. Ally is there and he takes Ray by the hand and he says, “Come, I want to show you the school.” He walks Ray into the school and Ray says they had bought books. If I remember correctly, they had bought things like sewing machines and just different things.

They were at that point in history, the number one ranked school district in the country of Turkey. We drove through this village, Brent. I don’t know if you remember me pointing it out when we drove through, half the bus was asleep. We drove through this village in the bus, and it is a small—it was right outside of Lystra. We are in the backwoods of Turkey at that point. If you can imagine that kind of a small village having the best-ranked school district in the country of Turkey? Wow, that is something.

My point with that whole story is they were so proud of what they had done with the deposit that had left them behind, and Ray, I remember, telling us, “That is my picture of the parousia. That is my picture of Jesus coming back. I want to be able to run across the field in my suit and grab Jesus by the hand and say, ‘Jesus, you have to come. You have to come see what we did with what you left behind.’”

To have that kind of joy, and have that kind of pride, and that kind of honor, and then to have something to show for it and to have done—that’s what we want to be doing here. Not over in a holy huddle, trying to stay untainted by the world, but out in the middle of the world, putting it together. The Jews would say tikkun olam, the repairing of the world. Putting the world back together in such a way that when Jesus comes back, we’re like, “Oh, you have got to see. We have physically participated in the work of the Kingdom. We are making it a more ordered, a more shalom-filled field. A more holy—it’s more than what you dreamed of, your Kingdom come on earth. We’ve been a part of that.”

That’s one of my favorite stories. So helpful.

Brent: Very inspiring way to end our episode, I think.

Marty: Yes.

Brent: Alright. Well, we’ll be back in a week with more of the Thessalonians. Thanks for joining us on the BEMA podcast. We’ll talk to you again soon.