I have been sharing information in this article about second Thessalonians, a letter which is attributed to St. Paul but probably written by someone else.

The author warns his recipients about “believers” who live in “idleness and not according to the tradition that they received.” According to him, they are “mere busybodies, not doing any work”. One passage (3:6) commands: “anyone unwilling to work should not eat”. Unless people are willing to work and seeking work, they do not deserve to be financially supported by those in the community who do work.

I’m sure that most modern Christians probably are surprised by this. This attitude doesn’t seem to jive with what we usually think. Perhaps that is because too often we have a mistaken notion of the true attitudes that the early Christians had.

This same issue is also addressed in 1 Timothy, one of the other letters attributed to Paul, but written around the same time as 2 Thessalonians, perhaps a decade or so later.

Second Thessalonians concludes with the theme of peace: “Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times in all ways. The Lord be with all of you”. It, like a few other letters in the New Testament, is a “slight” letter – a minor one that would not be missed if it were not included. But it is a window into a Pauline community around the year 100.

When Christians of Thessalonica were going through their time of trouble, many of them thought they were in that time of tribulation. It was to respond to this question that this second letter was written. In the first letter, Paul wrote to comfort them in their distress over their loved ones who had died, but this second letter is written to correct certain misunderstandings they had about the “Day of the Lord,” and this time of trouble.

There are only three chapters in this little letter, and each one is a correction of a very common attitude that many people still had about disturbing times. The first chapter is devoted to a correction of the attitude of discouragement in the face of difficulty. The Christian community in Thessalonica was undergoing persecutions and, although they were dealing with this, many of them were getting discouraged. To counteract this attitude, the author reminds them that the day when God would repay them for the difficulties they were going through was coming. They, like Paul who wrote the first letter, found out that Christ was not coming in their lifetime.