Ii. Occasion For Writing
II. OCCASION FOR WRITING
The “reasons” for the letter seem to be two, with perhaps a third one sitting in the wings, as it were. What is not easy to decide from our distance is whether one of these is more important than the other, or whether their order was dictated in this case simply by “new things first.” As for the “occasion” itself, most likely it had to do with the return of Timothy to Paul and Silas in Corinth with “mixed news” about the situation in Thessalonica. On the one hand, the issue of the disruptive-idle turned out to be a matter of much greater consequence than Paul had apparently assumed in writing the first letter; and if our reading of the order and timing of these letters is correct, then this issue was being addressed by letter for the first time in our 1 Thessalonians, the letter Timothy was just then bringing with him on that trip to Thessalonica. Thus with Timothy’s return Paul now needed to deal with it in greater detail and severity than had been done before; and probably it comes at the end so as to be “heard” better by those for whose sake it was written.
On the other hand, the matter of the timing of the “day of the Lord” had become a new issue altogether; and Paul’s own uncertainty as to how this misinformation had been presented as from him in some way (see the commentary on 2:2 and 15) only adds to its complication for later readers of the letter. But because this has happened, we also now become privy to a part of Paul’s eschatological perspective that he would otherwise have had no reason to include in any of his letters.
But almost certainly lying behind the tensions created by these two matters is the increasing severity of the outside persecution that Paul deals with in the “thanksgiving” in 1:5-10. Whereas this material also adds to our larger understanding of his eschatology as such, one should never lose sight of its first purpose — to reassure these beleaguered believers that their persecutors have their own divinely appointed destiny. And therefore, even though such knowledge would not necessarily lessen their present pain, it should have served as comfort to know that God has not forgotten them, while at the same time it reassured them of God’s ultimate justice regarding their persecutors.
All of this is to say, then, that even though this is not the most significant of the Pauline letters in terms of our overall theological and ethical/behavioral insights into his gospel, it is not thereby so irrelevant as to assign it “cinderella” status among his letters. Here is another Pauline moment which as a whole helps us better to understand the nature of the final outcome of the gospel itself, while at the same time giving us insight into the “everyday” nature of living Christ in a very pagan culture.