The First Letter to the Thessalonians testifies to how Paul spoke of Christian identity. In the opening thanksgiving, he introduces, together with prayer and the grade of God as "our Father", the three theological virtues: "At alltimes we give thanks to God for all of you and we keep you present in our prayers, for we constantly remember before God our Father the activity of your faith, the effort of your love and the steadfastness of your hope in Jesus Christ our Lord".

Laboriousness, fatigue and perseverance show the true face of the faith, love and hope of that community. Paul gives thanks for the presence of these theological virtues in the Thessalonians and, at the same time, asks for them. The triad will appear more times in the letter (cf. 1 Thess 3:6-8 and 1 Thess 5:8). In 1 Thess 1:2-3, Paul expresses his wonder at the fulfillment of God's saving plan in these people, transformed by the power of the Spirit and united to one another as the Church. Thus, Christian identity will be defined, in a primordial way, by the active presence of the theological virtues in the members of the community.

The Greek expression that the version of the Spanish Episcopal lecture has translated as "activity of your faith" (in Greek: tou ergou tes pisteos), is translated in other bibles as "operative faith" or "the work of your faith" (which could be understood as "the work that flows from your faith" or as "the work that is your faith"). reference letter The letter as a whole leads us to see that this expression does not refer so much to "the works of faith" as to "the activity" of the Thessalonians in accepting the Christian message. Faith is thus defined as laboriousness and life, and not as verbal formalism. Faith and work mutually claim each other: the work qualifies faith; faith gives its identity to the work.

The frequent presence of the term "faith" in the Letter-it appears more than a dozen times, permeating the entire text-allows us to approach how Paul conceives this virtue, in line with Old Testament thought, but with his own originality. Faith is understood in the context of the relationship between God and man: God's promise is solid; the counterpart is man's sure trust. Thus Christians are called "believers" (1 Thess 1:7; 2:10, 13): they are those who have entered into a vital relationship with Christ by being incorporated into his death and resurrection and who, thanks to the mediation of the Son and the gift of the Spirit, have been inserted into the sphere of the divine life itself. This faith, understood as the constitutive relationality of Christian identity, is prolonged in faith as witness or advertisement, insofar as it spreads this relationality (cf. Gal 1:23): the advertisement (work) of the Gospel (faith). Faith in this letter also has the sense of fidelity (1 Thess 3:7).

The Greek expression is tou kopou tes agapes. Other bibles have translated it as "the labors of your charity" or "your striving charity". The term charity also appears frequently in the letter. The Greek word agape is found, above all, in Christian texts, and distances itself from others in the same semantic field, such as eunoia (tenderness, benevolence), eros (passion, desire) or philia (friendship). All these terms could not be applied to the love(agape) that God has for mankind, which exists even when there is dissimilarity and there is no reciprocity, or to the subject of love that, moved by the Spirit, men have for God and for other men.

In our text we are dealing with fraternal love, which is qualified by the term kopos (effort). In the same line of what we saw before with faith, here we speak of "the effort that is love". This expression, effort, makes reference letter to an aspect of love that is seen, in a particular way, in the Thessalonians. The emphasis is thus on the fact that love is concrete, not abstract, and that it has something painful, suffering and even thankless, and that it is possible thanks to the example and strength that come from Christ, who, out of love, gave his own life for us. For this reason, in this letter, the term agape is also used to speak of the apostolic mission statement (cf. 1 Thess 2:9; 3:5).

The Greek expression tes hypomones tes elpidos is translated in other bibles as "the tenacity of your hope" or "your constant hope". The OT context of this expression is that of what one is willing to endure in the present, with strength and patience, for the sake of the conquest of happiness final. Although the Greek terms hypomone and elpis are often used synonymously, here we could translate the Pauline expression as "confident and constant waiting that nourishes the hope" of the believer, oriented toward God and his saving promise.

In the Pauline epistolary, these two terms appear very frequently, both founded directly on the paschal mystery of Christ: the object of hope is the eschatological future, but with the awareness that we will then live in fullness something of which we have already been given the earnest, thanks to our incorporation into the resurrection of Christ. Hope thus adds to expectation the certainty of receiving what is expected. In this letter, this virtue is oriented towards the Parousia and towards that to which it will give access: "to be always with God". Both hope and patience (steadfastness, tenacity) have a Christological tinge: just as the word sown produces fruit through perseverance (cf. Lk 8:15), through perseverance we gain life and are saved from the snares of death (cf. Lk 21:19), as we see happening with the Servant of Yahweh in the book of Isaiah (Is 53:7).