N.T. Wright
The story is told of a minister who dreamed that he was preaching a sermon, and woke up to find it was true.
One can hardly imagine that happening to St Paul—although there is the famous story of the lad who nodded off during one of Paul’s all-night teaching sessions and fell out of a window (Acts 19:7–12). But clearly Paul the traveller knew all about staying awake when one would rather be going to sleep—or perhaps we should say going back to sleep, because here he is talking about people who are up earlier than everybody else, staying awake to see the sunrise.
The warning to stay awake has echoes, of course, of the story of Jesus himself. He urged the disciples to keep watch with him in Gethsemane (Mark 14:34, 38). He warned of forthcoming events which, he said, would be like a burglar arriving when least expected (Matthew 24:43; Luke 12:39; 21:34–35). Here, in one of his earliest letters, Paul echoes what Jesus himself had said and done 20 years previously, while conscious of the need to bring the same message to hearers in a different situation.
Of course, being Paul, he isn’t content with one picture (staying awake rather than going back to sleep) if four or five will do instead. The robber at night goes quite well with the command to stay awake, but actually Paul’s point about staying awake belongs not so much with the danger of burglars but with the all-important difference between the old age, the age of darkness, sin and death, and the new age, the age of light, life and hope. He thus combines two quite different ideas: staying awake because of the terrible things that are about to happen (for which he supplies a further well-known biblical picture, that of the woman going suddenly into labour-pains); and staying awake because it will soon be dawn and time to put away night-time habits.
This second theme is the heart of the paragraph. For reasons that now become clear, Christians are daytime people, even though the rest of the world is still in the night. We who live in an age of travel by jet aeroplane know what happens when we cross several time zones in quick succession. Our bodies get confused; we find ourselves waking up in the middle of the night as though it were daytime. This happens, for instance, if you fly from Britain to America, or from America to Japan. Here you are, wide awake at four o’clock in the morning; your body is telling you it’s already daytime.
Well, says Paul, here you are in the middle of the world’s night—but the spirit of Jesus within you is telling you it’s already daytime. You are already children of the day, children of light. God’s new world has broken in upon the sad, sleepy, drunken and deadly old world. That’s the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus, and the gift of the spirit—the life of the new world breaking in to the old. And you belong to the new world, not the old one. You are wide awake long before the full sunrise has dawned. Stay awake, then, because this is God’s new reality, and it will shortly dawn upon the whole world.
Two more pictures complete the rich, if confusing, paragraph. The first is of people (night people, Paul would say) who mumble to each other in their sleep, ‘Peace and security, peace and security. Everything’s all right. Nothing’s going to happen.’ No, says Paul, everything’s not all right. Sudden disaster is on the way.
Who is he talking about? Anybody who imagines that God’s new world will never break in, shining the light of divine judgment and mercy into the world’s dark corners. But the slogan ‘peace and security’ was also one of the comforting phrases that the Roman empire put out, to reassure its inhabitants around the Mediterranean that the famous ‘Roman peace’, established by Paul’s time for more than half a century, would hold without problems. That is what Paul is really attacking. Don’t trust the imperial propaganda, he says. The world will soon plunge into convulsions, bringing terror and destruction all around. Within 20 years of this letter, the warning had come true.
That is why Paul adds the last of his potentially confusing pictures. The dawn is breaking, the birth-pangs are coming upon the world, the robbers might break in at any time, and the empire itself is under threat—so you need to put on your armour! Verse 8 is a shorter version of the fuller paragraph in Ephesians 6:10–20; here he mentions only the two main defensive pieces of armour, the breastplate and helmet.
He began the letter with the trio of faith, hope and love (1:3), and that is how he draws it now towards its conclusion. Faith and hope are the breastplate, to ward off frontal attacks. The hope of salvation is the helmet, protecting the head itself. Underneath it all, as always in Paul, we find God’s action in Jesus the Messiah. In verse 10 we hear again the basic Christian creed: he died for us and rose again. That is the main defence against all that the dark world can throw at the children of light.
We, like the Thessalonians, need to remind one another of this as we face a world where sudden convulsions still occur, the world into which, one day, the final dawn will break. As children of the new day, we already belong to the Messiah, as do even those who have died. (Verse 10 refers back to those who have ‘fallen asleep’, not in the sense of verses 6–7, where it refers to bad behaviour, but in the sense of 4:13–14, where it refers to bodily death.) Here, emerging like a clear tune out of the complex symphony of the paragraph, is Paul’s main message: hold fast in faith to the gospel message, and you will find in it all the comfort and strength you need.
Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 127–129.
