E. The Thanksgiving Renewed (2:13)
E. THE THANKSGIVING RENEWED (2:13)
13 And270 we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word, but as it actually is, the word of God, which indeed is at work in you who believe.
These words of renewed thanksgiving offer further evidence to support the analysis of the letter advocated in this commentary.271 To be sure, at first reading one may rightly wonder whether Paul has lost his way and is finally returning to the thanksgiving from 1:2-3, which had tailed off into the long report of the Thessalonians’ conversion (1:5-10) and of Paul’s own conduct among them (2:1-12). The first thanksgiving report, however, put all of the emphasis on the continuing faithfulness of the Thessalonian believers themselves. This renewed thanksgiving puts the emphasis on their original reception of the gospel, a concern that flows directly out of the immediately preceding narrative. Thus Paul now focuses altogether on their conversion as such, with singular emphasis on their reception of the apostles’ message as God’s own word for them. At the same time, of course, the apostles’ ministry among them is being confirmed.
When Paul returns to the narrative in verse 14,272 he begins by reminding them that the kind of persecution they have had to endure in the past many months already had a long history in the believing community, starting with the “killing” of Jesus himself and his prophets (vv. 15-16). With that reminder of the universal nature of Christian suffering, Paul then (v. 17) picks up the dropped thread of the narrative. But now the focus is no longer on the Thessalonians as such, but on how the apostles had been faring in the meantime — especially regarding their anxiety about the continuing faithfulness of the Thessalonian believers.
13 In the preceding paragraph Paul had reminded the Thessalonians of the true nature of the apostles’ ministry while among them. In so doing, he repeatedly returned to his “telling them the gospel” (vv. 2, 4, 8, 9). This is the theme that is now picked up and elaborated in this second thanksgiving. The opening words of the thanksgiving, however, have a degree of both awkwardness and ambiguity that need unpacking, all of which makes good sense when one recognizes the passage for what it appears to be: a renewal of the thanksgiving that began in 1:2-3, which “literally” says: “And for this reason273 also we continually give thanks, namely that . . . ,”274 where the “and . . . also”275 connect what follows to what precedes and, along with “for this reason,” at the same time anticipate the content of the present thanksgiving. While this is a somewhat unusual use of the phrase “for this reason,” it has also proven to be especially difficult for scholars to find the “reason” for giving thanks in what has preceded,276 and especially to tie that to the actual content of the thanksgiving that follows.
Two matters are noteworthy at the outset. First, the eschatological outlook with which the preceding narrative concluded at the same time echoed a similar eschatological “conclusion” to the first thanksgiving and first part of the narrative (1:3 and 10). But here the focus has changed altogether — from their ongoing “faith-fulness” to a reminder of their conversion itself, and its relationship to Paul’s ministry which he has just recalled for them. Thus, even though the sentence takes the form of a renewed thanksgiving, it is also Paul’s way of shifting the narrative from his own ministry to a focus on what had happened to the Thessalonians as a result of that ministry. It is the renewed aspect of the thanksgiving that explains the double “and/also” with which Paul’s sentence begins — the “and” serving as the link to verses 9-12; the “also” pointing forward to what he is about to say regarding their reception of the apostolic message.
Second, while the earlier thanksgiving anticipated the matters that need a measure of correction in the body of the letter (chs. 4-5), Paul now gives thanks for what came first chronologically — their becoming believers. Again, the reason for this seems discernible. Paul has just defended himself against his antagonists, who were hassling the Thessalonian believers in part by denigrating their (literal) “fly-by-night” apostle and teacher. So what he does now — by way of thanksgiving — is to remind them of their origins as believers, appealing not so much to the work of the Spirit (as, e.g., in Galatians), as to their own reception of Paul’s proclamation of Christ, emphasizing twice that what they received was in fact God’s own message.
Thus a primary feature of the thanksgiving is the redundancy about their response to God’s message, first by way of a deliberate twin emphasis on both the divine and human source of their hearing that message, and then by way of contrast as to its being God’s own word to them and not a merely human message. The first emphasis comes by way of the unusual “enclosed” word order of his introductory clause (“having received the message of hearing from us of God”), whose ordinary word order would be, “having received God’s message which you heard from us.” By this word order Paul emphasizes the two realities simultaneously.
First, the message they heard and received277 was a word that came from the eternal God, not from a merely human being. But, second, that message was something that they had in fact “heard from the apostles,” where the emphasis lies on the verbal noun “hearing” (akoē), having to do with both the act of hearing as such and its content.278 Despite the unexpected grammar, Paul’s double emphasis seems clear enough: the message of the gospel that they received, conveyed to them through the agency of the apostles, came ultimately from God.
In the main clause Paul simply reinforces both dimensions of the introductory clause. He does this, first, by qualifying the “heard from us” dimension of his phrase. Thus he picks up the first verb (“you received”) by elaborating it with the main verb, “you accepted”279 the word. But in so doing, he begins by qualifying the phrase “which you heard from us.” As true and important as that was, the preceding context now calls for an emphasis on the divine origin of his proclamation of Christ. Thus he begins by noting that the word you received from us (mere men that we are) was not in fact a word that had merely human origins, despite whatever your detractors are now saying. Rather, he goes on, and now with an emphatic parenthetical “just as it truly is,” what you “received” was none other than a message that has its origins in the living God.280 The adjective “living,” of course, is not in the text itself, but is implied by the final qualifying phrase in the present thanksgiving: “which is also [currently]281 at work in/among you who believe.” Subtle as it might seem to the modern reader, this latter phrase (“which also is at work”) is where the shift takes place in the narrative itself, from their past relationship to where things are in the present.
From our distance this kind of confidence — that words spoken by a human being function as a message from God — may seem bold indeed. For Paul such boldness is best explained on the basis of his own encounter with the risen Christ. The divine origin of the gospel is thus for Paul not something that he had thought through, as it were, but something that flowed out of his own being “set apart . . . and called by [God’s] grace, . . . so that I might preach [his Son] among the Gentiles” (Gal 1:15-16), a call to apostleship that resulted from his own encounter with “Jesus our Lord” (1 Cor 9:1).
Two matters need further notice. First, at one level Paul’s final “who” is ambiguous in Greek, as to whether its antecedent in the preceding phrase is “word” or “God,” since grammatically either of them could be. Although some have argued for “God” here,282 that seems to be contradicted by the grammar itself, since, as BDAG points out, the “middle voice” of this verb occurs elsewhere in the New Testament only with an impersonal subject. Hence the entire range of English translations correctly recognize that it is “the word” that is active in/among them.
Second, and much more difficult to decide, is whether the prepositional phrase rendered “in you” in the TNIV means to be individualized like that, or whether it means “among you” as a body of believers,283 which would then also infer “in you” individually as it is at work “among you” as a people.284 While it is a decidedly minority opinion, both Pauline usage elsewhere and the present context seem to be much more concerned about the power of the gospel that is at work in their midst as a believing community than with the life of the individual believers, assuming that the latter is automatically included in the former. In any case, the corporate dimension of their life as believers is what is emphasized in what follows, even though it is being experienced by them as individuals. They have become “imitators” of the churches in Judea, not the believers in Judea.
In sum, Paul’s concern in this second thanksgiving is to remind them that their response to his preaching was in fact a response to a message about Christ, which had been proclaimed by Paul and his colleagues when they were present in Thessalonica; indeed, it had rightfully been received by them as God’s message, a message that is still actively at work among them.
This is a passage that is as easily brought into the contemporary world as the next one is not. But in so doing, one should show caution about Paul’s referent, “the word of God.” Here is a place where the English phrase “word of God” needs to be “translated” so as not to be confused with Scripture as such. Paul’s gratitude has to do with the Thessalonians’ hearing his preaching for what it was intended to be: God’s own message of redemption and hope to a people who had been without God and hope in the world.