“Give thanks in all circumstances,” Paul says (1 Thess. 5:18). Usually, our difficulty with this instruction is the words all circumstances. Most of us, after all, are not thankful in all circumstances.
But there’s another difficulty. We have different ideas than Paul about who and how to thank. The surprising thing is that, for as much as he gave thanks, Paul almost never thanked anyone directly in his letters. Only one time do we see him do this: Paul thanked Priscilla and Aquila because they risked their lives for him (Rom. 16:3–4). But that’s about it.
Paul came close to saying thank you another time. He acknowledged that his friends at Philippi were the only ones in recent memory to lend him financial support (Phil. 4:15–20). He recounted his joy in the Lord and said it was good of them to share his affliction (4:10, 14). But instead of thanking them for the gift, Paul wrote about how he had “learned to be content whatever the circumstances” (4:11).
At best, Paul gave his friends a “thankless thanks” to show them he could have done without their support. Even today, such a response might be considered rude.
In his intellectual history of gratitude, Peter Leithart suggests even more was at stake in the ancient Roman world. Paul was disrupting a convention fundamental to social life: If you receive a gift, you owe the one who gave it to you. By avoiding direct thanks, Paul resisted this idea of social debt (though see Phm. 19).
What Paul did instead was direct all thanks to God. He had a peculiar grammar of giving thanks. Instead of “thank you,” Paul would say something like “I always thank my God for you” (1 Cor. 1:4) or “I thank my God every time I remember you” (Phil. 1:3).
The Science of Giving Thanks to God
So Paul almost never said thank you, but he was no ingrate. In fact, if his letters are any indication, Paul was a once-in-a-century giver of thanks.
It would be difficult to find a first-century Hellenistic author whose letters outdo Paul’s in terms of thanksgiving to God. By my count, the 13 canonical letters attributed to Paul have twenty thanksgivings to God (Rom. 1:8–10; 6:17; 7:24–25; 1 Cor. 1:4–9; 1:14–16; 14:18–19; 15:57; 2 Cor. 2:14–17; 8:16–17; 9:11–15; Phil. 1:3–11; Col. 1:3–14; 1 Thess. 1:2–10; 2:13; 3:6–12; 2 Thess. 1:3–12; 2:13–14; 1 Tim. 1:12–14; 2 Tim. 1:3–5; Phm. 4–6). Two letters have blessings in place of opening thanksgivings (2 Cor. 1:3–7; Eph. 1:3–14) and two do not have any expressions of thanks (Galatians and Titus).
There is some debate among scholars about whether Paul’s thanksgivings owed more to literary convention or to his own inventiveness—that is, did Paul have to give thanks at the start of his letters or did he do so by his own initiative? My own view tends toward the latter, allowing that he built on conventions that preceded him. Even where one finds thanksgivings comparable to Paul’s, they are, in my estimation, sparser in nature.
Note, for example, the contrast between thanksgivings in these excerpts from two letters of similar length—a second-century letter by a military recruit and Paul’s letter to Philemon:
Before all else I pray for your health and that you may always be well and prosperous, together with my sister and her daughter and my brother. I thank the lord Serapis that when I was in danger at sea he straightway saved me. (Letter from Apion to Epimachus, translated by Hunt and Edgar)
I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers, because I hear about your love for all his holy people and your faith in the Lord Jesus. I pray that your partnership with us in the faith may be effective in deepening your understanding of every good thing we share for the sake of Christ. (Phm. 4–6)
Both letters interpret something that happened as the action of a deity, but, as David Pao has observed, Paul’s thanksgiving focuses on how God is at work in both his life and his readers’ lives. In so doing, Paul interprets their lives together in terms of the love and faith made possible by Jesus. This basic difference between Paul’s letters and other ancient writings appears several times over.
It seems to me that Paul gave thanks to God as much as he did because he found much before him to give thanks for: that God had raised Jesus from the dead, that God had called pagans into communion with Jesus, that God’s Spirit was working to make people holy, and much more besides. Sometimes it seems that Paul simply could not contain his gratitude to God. He once asked the Thessalonians, “How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy we have in the presence of our God because of you?” (1 Thess. 3:9).
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that ancient people were not in the habit of giving thanks to God. We are still discovering ancient texts with messages of thanks. In the mid-20th century, an ancient Jewish collection of thanksgiving psalms (Heb. Hodayot) was discovered near the Dead Sea. Earlier in the 20th century, a researcher found a nearly complete collection of early Christian hymns of thanksgiving to God called The Odes of Solomon in a stack of Syriac manuscripts.
But it is one thing to thank God in a collection of hymns and quite another to do so again and again in the personal letters you write to people. Rolf Jacobson speaks of a “costly loss of praise” when thanks to God happens only in the context of worship. We need also to articulate thanks to God in our daily lives. We need to learn to discern God’s work in the world, to name it as such, and to respond to God with thanks.
So thanksgiving calls forth attention. Paul does not give thanks to God for things in general but for particular things in the lives of his readers. He gives reasons for his thanksgiving based on what he knows of their lives. He thanks God for the Corinthians’ gifts of speech and knowledge, for the Philippians’ participation in the gospel, and for the faith and love of the Romans, Thessalonians, and Colossians. Whatever Paul thanks God for, he makes visible as God’s work in the everyday lives of the saints.
Thanksgiving, when done in this way, interprets what is most important in our lives in terms of what God is doing.
I remember the first time I experienced giving thanks like Paul. I had left home to attend university. I had only just begun to understand the effect that growing up without a father had on me. All that I might have learned, all the support I might have had—they now figured in my past as a shapeless absence. At that point, I wasn’t grieved so much as bewildered. What was I to make of it?
At a mountain retreat, in a windowed room surrounded by redwoods and twilight, we began to sing “This Is My Father’s World.” I couldn’t make it past the first verse before tears restrained me. What was it that so moved me? In that moment, I realized God had already made someone to be like a father to me: Ted Petrikis, a retired pastor who served at the local rescue mission where I volunteered. And as I gave thanks to God for Ted, I learned to think of the kindness and love he showed me as God’s own kindness and love.
Thanking God for Ted in the context of worship helped me learn to give thanks to God for Ted when I would see him. And in the years since, I have found myself thanking God for people who have loved me and whom I have loved. In recalling the faces of those I’ve been fortunate enough to know, I remember the grace of God. In this way, thanksgiving can convert memories into miracles.
Gratitude Changes Our Desires
To reverse an old saying—to thank is to think. That is to say, when we remember people and thank God for them, new possibilities open for how we think about our lives with them and with God. In giving thanks, we learn to think about our lives together in terms of God’s faithfulness, kindness, and mercy. I mean, think of it—in his thanksgiving for his friends at Philippi, Paul calls God the one “who began a good work in you” (Phil. 1:6).
I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve mastered thanksgiving—my everyday words of thanks to God for people are far too sporadic and thin. But in the last month, I’ve begun keeping a journal. And most mornings, I write half a page thanking God for someone. My prayers end up loosely following Paul’s structure: a line thanking God for someone in particular, a few lines on why I thank God for them, and a line or two praying for God to work in their lives. I’ve found the exercise worthwhile.
Beyond writing prayers, I wonder what it might look like to adopt Paul’s grammar of thanksgiving in our everyday speech. What if we said things like “You know, I was thinking of you, and I thanked God because …” or “I thank God for you, specifically for the way you …” or simply “Thank God”? Yes, there’s a way to do this that’s hollow and cliché. But if we express thanks in a way that shows how someone’s words or actions reflect God’s presence in the world, it’s more than likely to be weight-bearing speech.
In Paul’s thanksgivings to God (and his notable aversion to saying thank you), there is a deep theological conviction at work. Those of us in Christ are bound together in an exchange of kindness and love that originates from God. We can all thank God for the people in our lives because God really is at work in them and in us.
And if, like Paul, we are surrounded with people in whom God is at work, perhaps it is possible for us to “give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thess. 5:18).
Wil Rogan is an assistant professor of biblical studies (New Testament) at Carey Theological College in Vancouver and the author of Purity in the Gospel of John.
