Coping with death is never easy, especially when a faith and community leader is brutally murdered. Jesus’s followers struggled with his crucifixion; struggled to understand, to continue to believe, and to have hope. Despite this, many of Jesus’s closest followers orally passed on and lated wrote down accounts of his death, burial, and resurrection, known as called the “kerygma”/proclomation (White 106). Throughout different Gospel accounts and Paul’s letters, Christ’s followers are encouraged that Jesus’s death had purpose, was in God’s plan, and is a key tenant of faith.

Within 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10, Paul writes of a conversion of pagans to serving God. He identifies the previous traditional worship to idols, transitioning into Christians who are choosing to serve a “living and true God”. Within just a single additional verse, Paul also identifies the central belief of Jesus’s resurrection to Christianity along with the offer of eternal life to Jesus’s followers who choose to serve him. On the other hand, within the “Christ Hymn” of Philippians 2:5-11 Paul identifies Christ’s divine qualities as coming from God; but also highlights his humanly humility, obedience, and servitude and the acknowledgement from God that followed along these traditions. The core message within these scriptures is to highlight the duality between Jesus’s divinity and his humanity; the coexistence of the two and how they can occur simultaneously and that through being a suffering servant Jesus is exalted and honored by the Lord.

According to White (121), the Christ Hymn reflects early engagement with the Jewish scriptures and draws upon cultural ideas of divinity found in the Greco-Roman world by addressing suffering and the idea of being a servant (“obedient to the point of death”) such as were mentioned in Isaiah in regards to suffering servant songs.

The Christ Hymn served as a model for early Christians of God’s plan for Jesus. Watching their faith leader be crucified would have been devastating for Christians and have seemed like the “end of the road’. Paul takes Jesus’s crucifixion and describes it as something with purpose and hope. By describing Jesus as “emptying” himself and “humbling himself”, Paul makes the notion that it was a noble deed for Christ to die and within the Lord’s plan. Following the description of the crucifixion by exclaiming God’s exaltation of Jesus and the divinity of Christ, Paul reinforces the fact that Jesus is Lord and the crucifixion was an event to highlight Jesus’s divinity (Philippians 2:5-11).

Paul addresses his Thessalonian community in a time of mourning a loss of a community member, who are fear that those who pass away before the end of time will not able to participate in the kingdom of God because they were not on Earth at the time of the apocalypse. Paul relates Jesus’s resurrection to the ability of God to take those who have already died with him to the kingdom of heaven. In addition to this, he highlights that the dead will rise first, and will not be forgotten when it is time to join the kingdom of God. This teaching was important for the early followers of Jesus because it reinstilled hope in life after death and hopefully decreased fear and morning in the time of death because of the promise of a reunion with Christ (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).