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  "description": "Readings\n\n * Leviticus 19:26–37\n * 2 Thessalonians 1:1–12\n * Matthew 6:25–34\n * Psalms: [70], 71; 74\n\n\n2 Thessalonians 1:1–12\n\nPaul, Silvanus, and Timothy,\n\nTo the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:\n\nGrace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.\n\nWe must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing. Therefor",
  "path": "/tuesday-in-the-fifth-week-of-easter/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-07T09:01:22.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.parrott.ink",
  "textContent": "## Readings\n\n  * Leviticus 19:26–37\n  * 2 Thessalonians 1:1–12\n  * Matthew 6:25–34\n  * Psalms: [70], 71; 74\n\n\n\n## 2 Thessalonians 1:1–12\n\nPaul, Silvanus, and Timothy,\n\nTo the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:\n\nGrace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.\n\nWe must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing. Therefore we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring.\n\nThis is evidence of the righteous judgment of God and is intended to make you worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering. For it is indeed just of God to repay with affliction those who afflict you and to give relief to the afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in a fiery flame, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. These will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, separated from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes to be glorified by his saints and to be marveled at on that day among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed.\n\nTo this end we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.\n\n## Notes\n\nA new letter, and one that comes with a complication. _2 Thessalonians_ is one of the _disputed_ letters of Paul, meaning that scholars have not reached consensus on whether Paul actually wrote it. James D. G. Dunn calls the debate \"roughly evenly split.\" A 2011 survey of 111 scholars at the British New Testament Conference found 63 in favor of Pauline authorship, 13 against, and 35 uncertain. Ernest Best summed up the issue better than anyone: _\"If we only possessed Second Thessalonians, few scholars would doubt that Paul wrote it; but when Second Thessalonians is put alongside First Thessalonians, doubts appear.\"_ The differences are not just in vocabulary; they extend to the whole structure of thought.\n\nFor our purposes, the question of authorship matters less than the question of _how to read what's in front of us._ Whoever wrote it—Paul, or someone writing in his name and tradition—the letter is in our canon. The work is to read it with care, especially in places where the theology gets hard.\n\n**Verses 3–4.** \"Your faith is growing abundantly and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing… we ourselves boast of you among the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith during all your persecutions and the afflictions that you are enduring.\"\n\nIn 1 Thessalonians 1:3 the famous triad shows up — _faith, love, hope._ Here in 1:3 we get _faith and love._ **Hope is missing.** This was the pastoral concern Timothy reported back in 1 Thess 3:6, and apparently the issue hasn't fully resolved. By 2:2 we will find out _why_ : some in the community are now teaching that _the day of the Lord has already come_.\n\n**Verses 5–9: the hard part.**\n\nLet me say plainly: I do not love this passage. The picture of God _paying back affliction with affliction_ sits awkwardly next to _don't repay anyone evil for evil_ (1 Thess 5:15) and _love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you_ (Matt 5:44). If Christians are commanded to forgive their persecutors, it is hard to see how God's primary mode toward those same persecutors could be retaliation. Something has to give.\n\nA few things help me read this passage through the lens of love and liberation without flattening its difficulty.\n\n_First: divine aikido._ The theologian Greg Boyd uses the analogy of the martial art aikido, where a practitioner turns an attacker's force back on the attacker, to describe how God's \"wrath\" actually works in much of Scripture. God does not need to _act_ in a special punitive way to bring evil to ruin; God has so structured the world that _evil rebounds on itself._ The violence of empire devours empire. The cruelty of an oppressor consumes the oppressor's own soul. Read this way, \"it is just of God to repay with affliction\" can mean something closer to: _God has set up the moral architecture of the universe such that the harm inflicted on others will, in the end, return to its source._ That is not God being vindictive. That is justice as the structure of the world.\n\n_Second: the language is softer than the English suggests._ The verb behind \"inflicting\" in verse 8 is _didōmi_ — _to give_. The noun is _ekdikēsis_ — _the giving of justice._ \"Inflicting vengeance\" is one possible English rendering; _giving justice_ is another, and truer to the Greek. Verse 7's \"give relief to the afflicted\" uses the same conceptual frame. The God of this passage is not _primarily_ a punisher. The God of this passage is the _one who gives justice,_ relief to the wronged, accounting to those who wronged them.\n\n_Third, aiōnios does not mean \"infinite duration.\"_ The English phrase _eternal destruction_ in verse 9 carries 1500 years of theological freight. But the underlying Greek adjective _aiōnios_ is from _aiōn_ , which means _age,_ a long but bounded period of time, or a _quality_ of time (the time of the coming age). _Aiōnios destruction_ is more accurately rendered _the destruction belonging to the age,_ the destruction that comes when God sets the world right. It is real and serious. It is not _infinite torment forever._ This translational point is contested, but it has serious advocates from Origen onward, and David Bentley Hart's recent translation of the New Testament makes the move explicitly. The CEB renders verse 9 as _they will pay the penalty_ , which is a marked improvement over _they will suffer_.\n\nThe word for _destruction_ in verse 9 is _olethros,_ and worth flagging that this is the _same word_ Paul (or whoever) uses in 1 Corinthians 5:5: _hand this man over to Satan for the destruction (olethros) of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord._ In Pauline vocabulary, _olethros_ can be destruction _in service of salvation_. The destruction is not the end of the story. It is the part of the story that comes before redemption.\n\n_Fourth: the reparations frame._ Universalism is sometimes critiqued for being morally cheap. _Are we really supposed to say that the murdered Jews of the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler are all going to hug it out in heaven?_ That is a serious objection. The answer is _no, not without something else happening first._\n\nIf Colossians 1 is right that God's project is _the ministry of reconciliation_ , then _reconciliation involves real repair._ Origen argued that those who have committed real evil may spend ages being purged of their sins and _doing the work of repair_ before being reconciled to God and to those they harmed. The promise is that reconciliation will, eventually, happen. The path to it runs through _restorative justice_ , not amnesia. Verse 6 — _it is just of God to repay with affliction those who afflict you_ — can be read as that promise. Those who have done real harm will, finally, do the real work to repair it.\n\nThat is not the picture of God most American Christians have been handed. But it is, I think, closer to the New Testament's God than the picture of _eternal conscious torment of the unsaved_ that has been so often substituted for it.\n\n**Verses 10–12.** The passage closes more gently. Jesus will be _glorified by his saints_ and _marveled at among all who have believed._ The frame returns to worship. And then a prayer: that God will make the Thessalonians worthy of the call, fulfill every good resolve and work of faith, so that the _name of our Lord Jesus_ may be glorified in them and they in him.\n\nThe end of this passage sits in tension with its middle. Verses 6–9 describe a justice that is hard to take. Verses 10–12 describe a community being made worthy by grace. Both are in the text. The interpreter's job is to hold them together — to take the difficulty seriously, but not to let it eclipse the larger pastoral arc, which is that the God of this letter is finally the same _God of peace_ (1 Thess 5:23), whose deepest character is reconciliation, not retribution.\n\n## Questions for reflection\n\n _Where in your imagination of God has retribution been doing the work that justice should be doing — and what would change in how you pray, hope, or grieve if those two were not the same?_\n\n_Origen believed real evil requires real repair before reconciliation can happen. Where in your own life or relationships have you been hoping that forgiveness would let you skip the repair work?_",
  "title": "Thursday in the Fifth Week of Easter",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-07T13:34:21.279Z"
}