Wednesday, May 25, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Standing up at the Aereopagus
I would have moved into the aptly named student house Aereopagitica in the fall of 1969, at the beginning of my junior year at Valparaiso University, but I got married instead. The philosophers and Greek scholars at Valpo couldn’t believe how skewed my priorities were.
But the Greeks’ priorities were mixed up too. Zorba the Greek could never have thrown in his lot with these thinkers. Mostly they lived for conversation about their ideas, which seems a little skewed to me. Paul joined in, but with a difference. The idea he presented brought new life.
The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in human sanctuaries, nor is he served by human hands.
Turn it around, Greeks.
Rather it is this God who gives to everyone life and breath, and … everything! He made from one man and woman the whole human race. He fixed the seasons and the boundaries of earth and sea.
And he did this, not for himself, but for us.
So that we people might seek God, even (perhaps) grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.
Paul knows his Greek philosophy, history and poetry. He isn’t exactly trying to impress his listeners, but he certainly wants them to hear his gospel message. His Greek is impeccable, and his quotations are appropriate.
For “in him we live and move and have our being,” as even some of your poets have said, “For we too are his offspring.”
Aratus was a Stoic Greek poet who lived in Macedonia and Syria 200-300 years earlier. His famous poem on the subject of astronomy, Phaenomena, included this statement in his opening invocation to Zeus. I imagine Paul’s listeners lifted their eyes in surprise to hear Paul transferring their attention from Zeus to the Unknown God, and then to Jesus, using one of their more famous quotations.
God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent because he has established a day on which he will judge the world with justice through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead!
This was too much for some of them but very intriguing to others.
Some did join him, and became believers. Among them were Dionysius, a member of the Court of the Areopagus, a woman named Damaris, and others with them. Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Paul must have thought long and hard about what he missed while studying with Gamaliel, instead of following Jesus with the other disciples. He joins them as personal witnesses of Jesus, but he surely knew his vision on the road to Damascus was at least different, if not inferior to the daily experiences of the disciples on all the roads of Galilee.
Nearing the end of his discourse before his arrest in Gethsemane, Jesus spoke with great love to his disciples.
I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. And when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.
Paul did not have the pleasure of reading these words, which were written by Jesus’ disciple John about the time Paul was writing his own letters. But in his speeches and sermons, and certainly in his letters, he poured out his heart, his mind, and his soul. He brought new life wherever he went, including to the Aereopagus in Athens.
(Acts 17, Psalm 148, John 14, John 16)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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