Readings: 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5,8b-10; Psalm 149; Matthew 23:13-22
Today we begin reading Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians, the earliest of the New Testament texts. There is older material, of course, in the Gospels and in other texts of the New Testament, but this is probably the first Christian text to be finalised. So we are at the beginning, receiving the document in which the Christian movement first presents itself to history in written form.
It is all the more striking, then, that its opening paragraph gives us one of the finest summaries of the Christian way of life, whose most important elements are here identified as the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. Paul speaks of them elsewhere, either individually, as pairs or as a threesome (most famously in 1 Corinthians 13.13), but there is a great strength in how he describes here these essential components of the Christian life: the work of faith, the labour of love, the steadfastness of hope.
These are active gifts, then, virtues in the strict sense, graces that enable those who receive them to get down to the business of living this new way of life: not just thinking and speaking but acting in accordance with the call they have received. It requires work (ergon), labour or fatigue (kopos) and patience or endurance (hupomone). The virtues of faith, hope and charity that require these things of us are also the gifts by which we receive the energy we need in order to live them.
They are called 'theological' virtues because they unite us directly with God and have God alone as their primary object. Jesus calls us to this in the gospel reading today, criticising the Pharisees for lowering their sights and giving to things that are less that God the commitment and obedience that should be given to God alone. It is a standing temptation of religious systems, to close us in to particular forms and practices. When believing, hoping and loving God become too difficult to sustain, we fall back into religion, forms and practices that concern themselves more or less directly with the things of God and which re-assure us that we are still doing okay. Or so it seems.
The theological virtues on the other hand open us in different ways to what is transcendent, infinite and eternal - to see something of the mystery now revealed in Christ though hidden from before the ages, to entrust ourselves to Christ in what he teaches and promises about what God has prepared for us, and to venture into the ocean of God's love which has heights and depths beyond our imagination. They are ways of transcendence, looking to what is beyond, living from what is yet to come, loving as Jesus loved his disciples, 'to the end'.
Grace is not magic, and this way of living demands of us work, fatigue and endurance. What God's grace does is strengthen us for faith, sustain us in hope, and enable us to love God and one another with the greatest gift of all, God's own love poured into our hearts.
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