“To an Unknown God”
Acts 17:16-31
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
5/25/14
A fine line separates the conviction that makes a disciple
bold, and the certainty that makes a zealot dangerous. Paul often appears to have one foot on either
side of that line. In his letter to the
Romans, he even seems to confess as much: “For I do not do what I want,” he
moans, “but I do the very thing I hate…I can will what is right, but I cannot
do it.” (Romans 7:15, 18b) And so the
apostle is alternately a bull in a china shop stampeding over breakable
treasures, and a humble mystic walking alongside fellow believers with patience
and compassion.
It is the bull in the china shop that usually gets our
attention, because that Paul shouts louder. Fully expecting God’s “fixed day” of judgment
to happen at any moment, he seems to feel a neurotic urgency to change the
world as soon as inhumanly possible.
That’s Paul, though, isn’t it? Paul has been a Jew, and not just any
Jew. He has been a Pharisee, and not
just any Pharisee. He has been a
fundamentalist, militant Pharisee. He
has been a religious zealot, not only capable of committing unspeakable
violence in God’s name, but actively involved in organizing and carrying out
the arrest, torture, and murder of Christians.
No makeup or masquerade can hide the ugly truth: Before his Damascus
Road experience, Paul was a terrorist.
After his transforming experiences on the way to and in
Damascus, Paul becomes a follower of Jesus, and he is still Paul. He still has the capacity for launching into
decisive speech and action fueled by the often blinding passion of religious
certainty. And because he is Paul, his
actions are also fueled by the lingering burden of guilt, by knowing that he
hindered the work of God in Christ, and inflicted horrifying pain on other
human beings.
“I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of
violence,” he writes in his first letter to Timothy. “But I received mercy because I had acted
ignorantly in unbelief …The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance,” says
Paul, ‘that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the
foremost.” (1Timothy 1:13, 15)
Even if Paul gratefully claims forgiveness, forgiveness has
never included forgetfulness. He cannot
shake those memories. So, as we said
earlier, in all things Paul struggles to balance his desire to love as Christ
loves, and his single-minded passion as a zealot.
Entering Athens, Paul immediately feels his zealot’s blood
begin to heat up. Everywhere he looks he
sees idols. So he heads straight to the
synagogues and marketplaces to argue with whoever “happened to be there.” (Acts 17:17) In ancient
Athens, rhetorical debate is a spectator sport of sorts, kind of a cross
between Sunday morning talk shows and minor-league hockey. So Paul grabs the china-shop bull by the
horns and leaps into the fray, arguing against idolatry. And if it’s attention he wants, he gets it.
“What does this babbler want to say?” ask the Athenians. (Acts 17:18) To find out,
they drag him to the Areopagus, the site of the most consequential debates in
Athens. In this well-known and very
public place, a place of intellectual and cultural ferment, Paul has the ears
of people whose opinions, and whose ability to champion those opinions, help to
shape the mindset of an empire. And
Paul, learning and growing into the apostle God has called him to be, speaks as
both disciple and zealot. He walks with
the hoof of a china-shop bull on one foot and the sandal of a holy mystic on
the other.
Revealing first his compassionate self, he says, ‘You
Athenians really take your religion seriously.
And that’s good. You even have a
statue set aside to honor what you call An Unknown god.’
At this point, Paul begins to paw the ground with that
bull’s hoof. He says that he knows
who that unknown God is, namely, “God who made the world and everything
in it…[the] Lord of heaven and earth…[who] does not live in shrines made by
human hands.”
In the midst of the pantheon of named and storied Greek
gods, someone or some group in Athens has had the spiritual honesty to
acknowledge the mystery of holiness. Not
all is known. Not all can be explained.
Having already dropped the gloves with sparring partners in
lesser venues, Paul arrives at the Areopagus with the wisdom, patience, and the
presence of mind to raise his game. He
focuses on the Unknown god as common ground. And why not?
It resonates with a devout Jew who surely remembers passages that say
things like “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways…For
as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
Paul will remember, too, that to proclaim and preserve the
inscrutable holiness of God, the Jewish people refuse to pronounce the name of
God, Yahweh. Instead, they say
Adonai, which means “Lord,” or they mix the vowels from Adonai with the
consonants of Yahweh to get the name Jehovah.
Paul is channeling his best Christian mystic. He knows that
God is not a created
being. God is not some perfect version
of us. As his fellow apostle, John, will
write, “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1John 4:8) God is the
creative energy within and between all things.
Paul beautifully presents the paradox of God: God is real
and near enough to be the one in whom “we live and move and have our being,”
the way fish live and move and have their being in water. At the same time, this great and mysterious
Presence, which even the Athenians acknowledge, transcends all the rhetoric,
all the “art and imagination of mortals.”
That means God transcends any given religion, as well. God simply remains beyond every effort to be
defined or known in any complete, and therefore controlling, sense.
If that paradox illustrates the truth of God, then building
altars to God becomes one more way to grope for the kind of knowledge and
control that creatures cannot have. Our
altars, even when well-intended and beautifully made, are still human
creations. Because they must be
financed, protected, and maintained, they often do more to keep us distant from
God rather than to bring us closer to God.
Altars abound in our world, be they Christian, Muslim,
Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, political, economic, academic, or any other
religion. And they all have one thing in
common. Even if they are built in honor
of God, or of some “Unknown god,” at some level, they assume a
degree of certainty that claims to have solved mystery and overcome
transcendence. And so they reduce God to
something that can be known.
Our immediate concern as Christians is to ask ourselves
some terribly uncomfortable questions:
To what extent do we turn our churches, our sanctuaries,
our committees, our doctrines into altars?
How many different gods do we allow into our altars, saying
that we need them in order to worship the God revealed in Jesus?
What non-Christian symbols and powers do we snuggle up to
in our houses of worship?
What equivocations do we write into our theologies and
polities that open the door to the kinds of selfishness, greed, fear, and
faithlessness that Jesus, whom we claim to know so well, neither invites nor
excuses?
I do not have the authority, much less the wisdom to
declare final answers to those questions.
I do think, though, that we are all very much like Paul. We have the hooves of china-shop bulls on one
foot and the sandals of humble mystics on the other. We have the capacity to do things we cringe
even to think of, and we can also act in ways of transforming faithfulness and
world-healing compassion. We are both
capable of and culpable for worshiping hand-made idols whose strengths only
reveal our weaknesses. And like Paul we
also have the capacity to speak the truth in love, and to bear witness to the
ineffable mystery of God who lies both beyond our grasp and at the very
core of our being.
In the 14th century, an anonymous author wrote a
book entitled The Cloud of Unknowing.
It is a guidebook for Christian contemplative prayer, and its basic
premise states that there is only one way for human beings to “know” God, and
that is to lay aside all of our assumptions, all of our codified beliefs and
“knowledge” about God. In an act
of courageous surrender, we then turn our minds and egos over to what he calls
“unknowingness,” and there we begin to encounter, to feel, to taste and see
God’s true nature. According
to the author, God cannot be “thought.”
God can only be loved.1
The very point of this thing called “religion,” you see, is
not to know that which cannot be known.
It is to love the One who is love. And we do that most effectively and most
affectively when we boldly, faithfully, and joyfully love and care for one
another and the earth.
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