B. Benediction (5:23-24)
B. BENEDICTION (5:23-24)
23 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.
With this twofold benedictory prayer699 Paul concludes his letter by emphasizing his two major concerns in writing: that the Thessalonian believers continue on a course of holy living; and that they do so until the Parousia it-self. 700 Then, in typical fashion, he affirms for them that the God of peace to whom he directs his prayer, the One who “called” them to himself in the first place, will do as Paul has prayed. And while the content of the prayer seems at first glance to be quite manageable, it is a passage in Paul’s letters that has received an extraordinary amount of attention because of the way Paul expresses his concerns.
The petition itself is in two clear parts, held together in somewhat chiastic fashion by the fact that the verb appears in the first position in the first request and the final position in the second one, and thus at the end of the entire sentence. His reason for this is most likely his collocation of the homophones homoteleis and holoklēron in the middle of his sentence (see the discussion below). By the very nature of what is said the two requests appear to be nearly synonymous, so that the first one offers the basic content of the prayer, while the second one elaborates on it by bringing together Paul’s own two primary concerns in writing — their living holy lives in the present so as to be blameless at the coming of the Lord.
The prayer itself has several noteworthy features that need to be mentioned. Perhaps the most striking are the facts that (1) in both language and concern this is very nearly a repetition of the final petition (v. 13) in the prayer report in 3:11-13, and (2) that this nearly identical prayer in its first occurrence was directed to Christ, whereas here it is directed to God the Father alone. It is of high interest, therefore, that when this same basic prayer appears at the end of his second letter to this church, it is there directed to “the Lord [= Christ Jesus] of peace” (2 Thess 3:16). But in many ways the most singular moment of all is one that most Western Christians would seldom ever notice — that the second petition here individualizes what began with a concern for the body of believers as a whole, a singular moment because Paul so rarely does this.
23 In directing his prayer to “the God of peace,” Paul seems to have taken over one of the more characteristic moments of his Jewish heritage (where shalom was the commonplace greeting by all) and transformed it into the language of prayer. That is, rather than concluding with a standard “peace be with you,” he prays that the God who alone establishes true peace may be at work among them to bring about their “wholeness.” Most likely Paul had such a concern in mind as he began the dictation of the prayer. So whereas the prayer assumes the reality of the individual believers in Thessalonica, that concern will not be explicitly picked up until the second petition. The first concern, as throughout, is with the church as a body of believers. After all, “peace” in Paul rarely refers to the “well-arranged heart,” as it were, but to the life of the community, that believers live together without conflict. This understanding appears to be behind the TNIV’s shift from “wholly”701 in the first clause, to “each of you in entirety” in the second.
It therefore seems especially fitting as a way of “signing off” on this letter. Although Paul does not put any of the issues raised in this letter in the context of internal conflict, they are in fact issues that are full of potential conflict, especially the matters of “working with one’s own hands” and of “sexual immorality.”
But even though Paul’s concern throughout the letter has been with the community as a whole, the concern in his second, elaborating clause seems pointedly directed toward the individual, since at issue is that each of them be “blameless” at the Parousia. Thus, with a play on the sound of the two Greek words holoteleis and holoklēron,702 Paul shifts from a prayer for the community as a whole to a unique moment of individualizing his concern for each of them. To make this clear he expresses that “wholeness” by referring to some ways of understanding the individual “parts” that make up the human person: “spirit, soul, and body.” Unfortunately, what Paul most likely intended simply as a way of throwing the net wide in terms of being human has generated an enormous amount of energy and literature, not to mention theological groupings.703 But this was most likely a somewhat off-handed moment in Paul. Indeed, it is highly doubtful whether he was trying to be precise, or even whether he himself could easily distinguish between “spirit” and “soul.”704 His concern is with the adjective-turned-adverb “in entirety”; and to make that point he includes the terms that he uses elsewhere to speak of the human person.705
It has sometimes been suggested that Paul’s reference to “spirit” in this case is an oblique, or in some cases a rather direct, reference to the Holy Spirit, picking up the language regarding “the Spirit” from verse 19.706 But this suggestion will simply not hold up. Indeed, the way the three terms are used together here makes it especially difficult to imagine that the Thessalonians could possibly have perceived the first term in this way. The emphasis, after all, lies on their being sanctified (not on the presence of the Spirit in their lives) and on the entirety of the human person that needs this sanctifying work of God (although “through his Spirit” would be implied).
If so, secondly, the two adjectives, although grammatically predicate, function in a kind of adverbial sense, and respectively also emphasize the thoroughgoing nature of their sanctification.707 Seen in this way, the distinctions between them would mean something like “totally” (with emphasis on wholeness) and “in every possible expression of your humanity.” The final adverb, “blamelessly,” then adds the ethical/moral dimension to this thoroughgoing work of the Spirit. Just as in 3:13, Paul desires the final form of this activity to be expressed in their standing “blameless” before God at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.708 Thus, before giving more attention to Paul’s three anthropological terms, one needs only to note further that this is now the eighth reference to the Coming in this letter.709
Most of the discussion on the three anthropological terms has centered either in determining whether or not Paul intended some kind of distinction between the first two terms — and if so, what? — or in the related question whether Paul was a dichotomist or trichotomist. That discussion, however, while not insignificant, has missed Paul’s point altogether.710 His use of the term “spirit” may indeed have been occasioned by its proximity to verse 19; nonetheless, Paul’s concern is singular: that they be sanctified completely. 711 In the context of this letter, and especially in light of the sentence’s ties to 4:3-8, the present emphasis lies with his inclusion of the body. Very much as in 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, although without the express language of the body as the Spirit’s temple, Paul is concerned that this early, almost totally Gentile (cf. 1:9-10), congregation understand that salvation in Christ includes the sanctification of the body: it is now to be holy, and wholly for God’s own purposes. Thus he wants them to stand blameless in holiness before God at the coming of Christ, and he insists (now in prayer) that such holiness be thoroughgoing in their lives, including the purity of the body.
What, then, shall we say of the first two terms? First, it is very likely, given the way Paul here expresses himself, that he might think of the human spirit and soul as distinct entities in some way. But how he might think of them in this way is not at all clear from the rest of his letters. Since he tends to use such terms both broadly and somewhat interchangeably, one is hard pressed to come to final conclusions. Moreover, the emphasis on entirety suggests that he could easily have included “mind” without for a moment deviating from his concern. That is, whatever distinctions he may have understood are quite secondary to the greater concern of completeness.
Nonetheless, Paul probably did understand some distinction between “spirit” and “soul”; but it is not easy for us from this distance to discern what that might have been. In fact he does not often refer to the human spirit.712 Whatever else, it refers to the interior, nonmaterial component of the human personality (see esp. 1 Cor 2:11). Moreover, those who see this usage as denoting that part of human existence that serves as the place of intersection between the human and the divine by means of the Holy Spirit are most likely moving in the right direction.713 In any case, the stress here is that the body as well as the human spirit be kept blameless until the coming of Christ.714
Finally, one should not allow the foregoing discussion to minimize Paul’s own concern that this sanctification be something that is going on now, and especially that it shall be so at the Coming itself.
24 It is of high interest that Paul concludes his prayer for them with an affirmation regarding its being realized. It has to do not so much with their effort — although he surely expects them to do their part — as with God’s own faithfulness. The bottom line for Paul in all such matters is that God is completely trustworthy, not only “worthy” of our “trust,” but absolutely to be relied on to carry out what has been promised. And here, for the first time in his letters, we are brought face to face with God’s calling them to be his people and God’s own readiness to complete what was begun by the Spirit. For the Thessalonians this is the needed reminder that neither their “sanctification” nor their being “preserved blameless” for the Parousia is dependent on their own personal struggling for it, but on their trusting the God who has already called them to himself, and who will thus bring to pass in their lives what God has begun. In the end everything depends on the single reality that God is absolutely faithful.