Thursday in the 21st Week of Ordinary Time, August 26, 2021

1 Thessalonians 3:7-13

We have been reassured about you, brothers and sisters, in our every distress and affliction, through your faith. For we now live, if you stand firm in the Lord.  What thanksgiving, then, can we render to God for you, for all the joy we feel on your account before our God? Night and day we pray beyond measure to see you in person and to remedy the deficiencies of your faith. Now may God himself, our Father, and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you, and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we have for you, so as to strengthen your hearts, to be blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones. Amen.

St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians from Corinth, a Greek city where he stayed for a year and a half.  St. Timothy came to him from Thessalonica and had brought him news of persecution there.  In 1 Thessalonians 2, 14-15, Paul tells them what he has heard about them: “For you, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus which are in Judea; for you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out.”  This persecution, then, is by the Gentiles in the city.  Paul felt anxious for these new Christians and burned with desire to go to them: “We 

endeavored the more eagerly and with great desire to see you face to face; because we wanted to come to you — I, Paul, again and again — but Satan hindered us” (1 Thessalonians 2, 17-18).  This reference to “Satan” may have meant unfavorable travel weather.  

Paul is very concerned to confirm the Thessalonians in their faith and so he is relieved to hear of their perseverance in the midst of their troubles.  He writes, “We have been reassured about you, brothers and sisters, in our every distress and affliction, through your faith.”  As they have suffered, so has he, as they well knew.  Yet the news of their perseverance strengthens him: “For we now live, if you stand firm in the Lord.”  We ought to marvel at the faith of the earliest Christians who had no written Gospels, no grand churches, no beautiful artwork, and only the word of another person to go by.  Paul himself admitted that he was no great preacher or speaker.  He had no honeyed words for them, no slick salesmanship.  And he had brought them the unlikely news that God had become man, suffered for our salvation, was killed, and rose from the dead, to return one day to judge the human race.  All the Thessalonians had was Paul, a recently beaten and stoned man of little account in terms of his appearance.

“What thanksgiving, then, can we render to God for you, for all the joy we feel on your account before our God?”  Paul knows how dear he is to the Thessalonians, his “children”, and he knows that his joy for them will give them joy as well.  “Night and day we pray beyond measure to see you in person and to remedy the deficiencies of your faith.”  Paul speaks again of his strong wish to see these people again in order to console them with his presence and also to complete their training in the Faith they had received from him, particularly in regards to the teachings on the end of the world and on the resurrection of the dead, about which he writes in his second letter to them.  

“Now may God himself, our Father, and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you.”  Paul will go to them when it is God’s will for him to do so, and he prays to God for this.  How often we wish to go to someone or to go somewhere, but how often do we ask God if this is his will?  “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we have for you, so as to strengthen your hearts.”  May the Lord increase their faith and also their numbers, and may he grant that they “abound” in love, just as Almighty God abounds in love for all of us.  Just as he causes our “cup” to overflow, we ought to make the “cups” of others overflow (cf. Psalm 23, 5).  We can do this with the grace of God.  “To be blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones.”  To “abound” in love is to scorn temptations which would cause harm to ourselves and others.  Sanctity, which results from unreservedly receiving and sharing this love from God, prepares us for the coming of the Lord to judgment, attended by his saints, at the end of the world.