Canter Bridge

I have found cause to observe before in this space that the biblical vision of those things that matter most is stubbornly, relentlessly communitarian.

‘This is my story, this is my song’ is an anthem that finds its value not in narcissistic celebration of an individual’s experience, but rather in the foundationally communitarian phenomenon that we call testimony. Testimony begins and ends with community, in the first instance because the individual with a story to tell comes to us as an individual-in-context. In the second, testimony unfailingly appeals to a widening circle of shared life and shared live-ers.

It takes a village.

When the apostle Paul finds it necessary to straighten out some of the paralyzing, if not damaging, thinking of the Thessalonian believers, he does so principally via the reassurance that nobody will be left out. And that all of us in this expanding people of God will be both together and with the Lord.

The wolf at the door, here sent packing back into the woods whence he emerged, is a fragmented community and the alone-ness that results. Paul tells his readers that this particular wolf need not worry them overmuch.

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words. (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 ESV)

We should set aside the theory of ‘rapture’, at least for the moment if not for all time. It is in my view an unfortunate reckoning with texts that appear to describe events very different than the ones to which the word ‘rapture’ commonly appeals. Paul’s language of ἀπάντησις and ἀπαντάω consistently refers to a traveling out beyond the perimeter of a village or a city in order to meet a visiting dignitary and to escort that guest back into the community in which he is welcome and even celebrated. These are homecoming words.

Here the victorious and returning Lord is welcomed back into human community and, presumably, to earth. It is a transformed and wholly reconfigured earth, to be sure, where he will rule with his own. But the directionality is not one that moves out into space or off into ‘heaven’. Rather, it resettles an earth—elsewhere described as ‘new heavens and new earth’ and ‘Jerusalem descending’—that has finally been put right.

I mention this here only because it will help us to understand the communitarian nature of Paul’s instruction if we reckon with the Lord’s renewing return to that community here and as we know it. It is in every full sense ‘the coming of the Lord’ rather than a momentary stop before he takes those who belong to him off to somewhere else.

The salient point for the perturbed Thessalonians church is that the circumstances of death—in light of Christian hope the dead are here only ‘sleeping’—will not have wrecked the communitarian dream after all.

Those who have ‘fallen asleep’ before those of us who are still awake will miss nothing.

All of us will be together and always with the Lord.

The critical point, difficult as it may be for Western individualists to understand without a long, slow stare at the facts, is that this is for the apostle the very best thing he can say. He anticipates that this little clarification will banish all fears and restore peace to troubled minds.

One might as well get used to the crowd.