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The Sixth Sunday Of Easter
O God, who hast prepared for those who love thee such good things as pass man's understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards thee, that we, loving thee in all things and above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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The Sixth Sunday Of Easter
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Scripture citation(s): John 14:15-21
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
John 14:15-21
✛
Speaking of God
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It is a truism about sermons that they are local events. That is, they are delivered to certain people, at certain times and places. Most of them come into being for a short time, and then pass away, their humble job done, and their passage into the mists of history probably a small mercy for all involved.
Others have a bit more staying power, and one of those makes up our reading today from the Acts of the Apostles. In the portion we heard, the apostle Paul speaks from Mars’ Hill, the Areopagus, to the people of Athens. Paul’s speech on Mars Hill has been called [by Adolf von Harnack] “the most wonderful passage in the book of Acts,” and it is rightly pointed to as an encounter that foreshadowed the way that Christianity would develop its long relationship with Greek culture and philosophy.
What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? There on the hill, Paul told the Greeks why it was that a Jew from the provinces, Jesus of Nazareth, was of the greatest importance to their cosmopolitan lives, why he was in fact what their souls longed for, even though they did not know it. Though they did not know the name Jesus Christ, it was he who could bring their lives, their communities, their religious practices, to fulfillment.
For all of their cultural and intellectual sophistication, Paul told them that they were in fact asking for too little; they had set their sights too low. Their gods were too small. The God Paul preached was not one of the many gods whom they saw every day. He is not found in temples made with hands; he is not found in intermediate things given ultimate importance. He is above all things. Not a creature, he is the one who gives life to creatures. He is not, as some of the Athenians would have expected, the philosophical abstraction that set things in motion and then stepped back: on the contrary, as their poet had said, it is God in whom we live, and move, and have our being.
When Paul spoke in the synagogues, he preached the story of Israel, its covenant and its history. Speaking here to the Athenians, he preached what was of ultimate concern to them: what creation is and how it came about; who human beings are, and how they came about.
God himself was not created, Paul told them, but he is the creator. He created the world out of his own generous free will. He created human beings of one blood, without distinction, and oriented all of them toward himself. In language they could follow, showing both the continuities and discontinuities with their own religious understandings, Paul preached the gospel of God to these Gentiles.
For all of that, and for all of the subsequent importance that the Church has given in this engagement, the results of the speech were mixed, at best. “Some mocked,” it says; others were willing to hear more about it; at least a few became believers.
This episode on the Areopagus is of more than just historical interest. More fundamentally, it makes the perennial and crucial point that God comes to us where we are, in whatever state he finds us: he came to Abraham as he traveled; he came to first-century Palestine as it was under occupation; he was coming to the gathered Athenians as they listened to Paul; and he comes to our congregation assembled to this day, as we carry on with lives seemingly far from the times of St. Paul and Mars Hill. He comes to us, as he came to them, because he wants to be with us. He wants to live in us, and he wants us to live in him. He speaks our language, whatever that language is. Paul made that point by speaking to the Greeks as a Greek, and to the Jews as a Jew. God spoke then, and he speaks now, to each one of us, addressing the human heart that will never find rest until it rests in him.
But he does not say just anything when he speaks, and the end of Paul’s speech may come as a surprise given what came before. After touring them through classical theology, explaining creation and humanity, ensuring them by implication that God speaks their language, and is speaking to them that very day, then he tells them what God saying to them, and it is: repent. Repent! That may come as a surprise to us. We might expect him to say something a little softer, to ease them into the faith, but Paul was not one for the soft sell. Paul tells them, in the absolutely charming King James phrasing, that in previous years God has “winked at” the idolatry of the Gentiles, sympathetic to their ignorance. But God is not winking anymore, Paul says, God is speaking, and he is speaking in your language, and what he says is, “Repent.”
It might sound harsh to us, especially when we are thinking about Paul’s unformed audience, or thinking about our own efforts at speaking of the gospel, that is, doing evangelism. Surely a softer sell would have been something like telling them that the unknown God is known, he created the world, and he loves you. God loves you! That is what he could have said, and surely that would have been a little less confrontational, and it has the added benefit of being true. God does love you, and he loved the Athenians, and everyone else besides.
But if we are surprised by Paul’s exhortation, then we are not thinking like him. (Few people do.) Paul remembers what we might forget: for him to say to them “repent” is for him to say “God loves you.” The point of the Greeks’ turning away from idolatry was not to replace one god with another. The point was to turn toward the one who is the source of all life, the one who is turned toward them in Christ, the one who wants to be in relationship with them—the one who loves them. The unknown God of their unformed devotion was now known, and he looked like Jesus, and he was reaching out for them.
So repent and turn toward him, Paul said. The Greeks did not know it, but in all of their quests for the good, and the true, and the beautiful, it was the God of Israel who was the real end of their desire, the actual one their cultured souls longed for. For Paul to tell them to repent, to turn toward God, is in essence for him to point them in the direction of the goal that they had been trying to find. What they did not know was that their goal was trying to find them as well. It was not a philosophical abstraction, or an elegant formula, or a perfectly-wrought statue that they were after. It was the living God of Israel, incarnate in Jesus, present in the Spirit.
Paul presumably knew that Jesus had told his disciples that, after his death, though they would struggle, he would be present with them through the Spirit. The Spirit would be with them, and the Spirit would be in them, Jesus had said. Because he lived, they would live also. Not just any spirit, but the spirit of truth, would comfort them. The truth that the Greeks were chasing after would be there, and in him they would live, and move, and have their being.
Paul preached this sermon to the Greeks, but the good news itself came from the Father when he spoke the true sermon, when he spoke the Word to his people, the Word that was made flesh. The God who loves us is turned toward us, and present with us still.
