"In him we live and move and have our being, even as some of your poets have said." (Acts 17:28)
On Paul and Athens
Our second episode presents Paul in Athens. He wanders among the images of various deities, the gods in the market place. Quick fire gods who promise immediate relief, gods for the greedy, gods of ecstatic indulgence, gods of nationalism, gods with all the answers, gods of magic, gods of institutions, gods to bolster the Roman political system, gods to keep the poor happily poor, gods for the curious, all the gods we find in our own market places and sometimes in our churches and more. Paul confronts the savage pluriformity of a cosmopolitan world and stands up to its best philosophies. The ingredients are all there for a characteristic Jewish tirade for monotheism, much as Paul had written in the first chapter of the letter to the Romans.
But Luke’s story moves differently. Paul notes the pluriform religiosity arid somewhat playfully mentions that one image had been dedicated to an unknown God. Of this God he speaks, the creator God who cannot be captured in temples made with hands or poured into moulds of human images. This is the God of all peoples, the God not distant from any of us, the divine being present to all. There follows a quotation from Aratus, a pagan poet, from his poem Phaenomena, written about 270 BC in Athens. “In, or perhaps through, whom we live and move and have our being: for we are his family.” What an extraordinary thing for Luke to have Paul say! He quotes a pagan poet. We find the same quotation also used by very open minded Jews elsewhere. It is nonetheless very striking.
There, in your culture, 300 years ago, the truth about God was expressed. The Spirit of God was there before us. The sense of the divine which, distorted, produced this wild array of idols also came to expression in the poets. They told of the one who is not far from each of us; these pagan poets knew we belong to God and we belong to a family; we are God’s family. What an extraordinary pattern Luke lays down here.
And so in this land the Spirit was also speaking 200, 300, 30000, 40000 years ago. And we need to hear what the Spirit was saying to the Aboriginal people and what the Spirit is saying through them to us. The same Spirit brooded in the Indian subcontinent, in Arabia, and the same Spirit speaks in the language of the poets and the artists, the novelists and the playwrights of every age. The Spirit is free and our calling is to rejoice and to discover, to dialogue and to enjoy the common life of the Spirit. We need to sit down and hold hands with all who listen for the voice of the one who is not far away, who is the ground of all life and being.
But Luke does not leave it there. Paul does add his broadside now about the futility of pagan fundamentalism, which thinks it captures deity not in parchment but in silver and gold and stone. He then announces that God will judge the world by a human being, Jesus Christ whom he raised from the dead. Is this consistent with what has gone before? Yes it is. Luke is not suggesting that mission degenerate into religious syncretism, where all religions are thrown together into an amalgam of soft tolerance and truth is traded for shallow unity. On the contrary, there is a criterion, a judge, and he is Jesus. It is by Jesus that we can recognise the footprints of the Spirit. It is the love he made known which helps us discover its past victories and its defeats in the cultures of the world. This is not a Jesus imperialism of the kind that declared the world abandoned by the Spirit and claimed a monopoly for the Church on the truth. Such Christianity repeats all the arrogance of religious colonialism.
The Spirit is none other than the Spirit who came upon Jesus of Galilee. The music of the Spirit is heard in the groaning of creation for renewal, for peace, for justice. For the Spirit breathes wherever the lungs are open, wherever the heart pounds for the gospel of love. The incognito God of mercy and justice still stands in the market place and in the Church. This God still hears the cries of the people in the Egypts of today. This God still raises up the Moses, the Elijah, the Peter, the Paul to join forces with the advance party, the Spirit. This God still stands in the market place and in the Church beside the well promoted competitors and their myriad followers.
Both episodes today are about removing barriers, barriers constructed by religion itself. Both are saying that the whole world is God’s creation, the playground of the Spirit. The whole world is the object of God’s love, the love incarnate in Jesus Christ. Every attempt by human beings to capture God in images, in a book, in a temple, in a people or culture, in a religious experience or in an institution, is a denial of the Spirit. It is a re-erection of Babel’s tower, another futile assault on God’s power in the name of human power, another desperate bid borne of fear, to define out the unknown, the unpredictable, the unmanageable future God promises us. The serpent’s vision still entices us: we want to be like God.
The vision of the kingdom is our agenda. The Spirit of the kingdom is our enabling. The grace which lived and died and rose for us in Jesus feeds our souls. We are the Church, God’s risk of love in history, as mature and immature as the average of its members, but God’s promise of the kingdom for now. Let us rejoice in the freedom of the Spirit that knows no bounds, that leads us beyond our fears and our barriers to the uttermost ends of the world, and that brings us back to the centre, to the Word of God borne witness to by Holy Scripture: God in whom we live and move and have our being and whose family we are.
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