NOTES for Th1 2:13-20
Addressing the Thessalonian Christians, Paul says that they received the witness of him and his companions as the word of God, and not simply as the ordinary preaching of ordinary preachers. Of course, any religious preacher speaks of his preaching as the word of God. Sometimes this means the preaching of true teaching, coming from God and established by God; at other times the preacher lays claim to direct revelation, which, according to his own words, he receives from God immediately. Among religious preachers both one and the other do in fact occur. But a Christian's witness to Christ and to the Kingdom is not religious preaching.
First of all, it is a witness to that new life, the life with Christ in His Kingdom, which has opened itself to the witness. In some ways, of course, such witness resembles that form of religious preaching in which the preacher receives some revelation directly from God and tells others about it, as, for example, the prophets of Israel did when they testified to what God revealed to them.
Such preaching can also move beyond properly religious boundaries, beyond the framework of religious teaching: living revelation often does not fit into any religious framework. But even such witness presupposes only the need to tell the hearers about something, to convey to them something important that can change their spiritual life if they take what is said into account and draw the appropriate conclusions from it. Yet the conclusions themselves and the change of life are wholly and completely the responsibility of the one who heard.
As God said to one of Israel's great prophets, Ezekiel: testify to everyone, because if you do not testify to a sinner that he is sinning before God, I will require from you the sin he has committed; but if you do testify, then I will require it from him himself. Witness is absolutely important, but each person decides for himself how to respond to it. With Christ and the Kingdom it is not like that. Here "knowledge about," theoretical knowledge, knowledge "in principle" and "in general," gives nothing. Witness to Christ and to the Kingdom has meaning only when a person treats what is said precisely as God's revelation, requiring an immediate answer here and now.
This is understandable: true Christian witness always places a person before God, opening God's presence to him. A presence to which one can either open oneself or which one can reject. The prophet tells what God wants to communicate through him to others; Christ's witness merely brings a person to Christ, as though introducing him to Him, and then leaves the person who has been introduced face to face with the One to whom he has been introduced.
Then the main thing begins: a person's direct communion with Christ, without mediators and without interpreters. The experience of such communion is the experience of Christian life itself, opening the Kingdom to a person and giving him the possibility, in turn, of becoming a witness for others. A witness who will bring someone else to Christ and then step aside in the same way, giving that person the possibility of the same personal meeting with Christ that was given to him.