Second Saturday of Easter

Lectionary texts for Saturday:

1 Peter 1:10-25

Lectionary texts for Sunday:

Acts 3:12-19

Psalm 4 (UMH 741)

Luke 24:36-48

We return today in our Acts study to Paul's speech on the Areopagus in Acts 17. Please read Acts 17:23-31.

The theology of Paul's speech appears quite unlike his theolgoy in the letters. To my reading it doesn't sound all that much like Luke's theology either. I do want to keep in mind Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 9:22, "I have become all things to all people so that by all means I might save some." In the Areopagus, speech Paul/Luke seems to be doing his best to become like Athenians so that he might save some Athenians. He is much closer to the Stoics than to the Epicureans. He applauds the Athenians for seeking God. He applauds both Stoics and Epicureans for seeking God, although the Epicureans do very little such seeking. 

 

Paul wants to start with creation, where he thinks he may have some commonality with his audience. He believes that one God created all humankind from one ancestor and that creator God is still with us today and lives inside us. Paul then quotes a 6th century BC Greek poet, Epimenides, that in God we "live and move and have our being." Then he quotes a 3d century BC Stoic poet Aratus, "For we too are his offspring." Paul is doing his best at being a Greek to the Greeks, a Stoic to the Stoics. His best is hot succeeding. He calls his hearers to repentance and warns of God's judgment, a judgment which God assures us by raisihng Jesus from the dead.

Resurrection is a key bad point. Greek philosophy has disdain for the idea of bodily resurrection. They think negatively of the human body. The soul is good, but the body is something we blessedly get rid of at death. Thought of a resurrected body brings most of the crowd to dismiss Paul as ignorant, although some are polite enough to say they will hear Paul again on this at some later time. Paul, frustrated by their lack of understanding, leaves in mid-speech, a speech which he will never finish. 

Although the Areopagus speech is an enormous hit with us Christian readers today. It is a failure for Paul. He makes only a minimal number of converts in Athens. There will be no subsequent Church at Athens or letter we would entitle as 1 Athenians. Athens will remain pagan until the fourth century. 

Remarkably, Paul's/Luke's quotation of Epimenides remains one of our Christian chief understandings of God the Holy Spirit, an understanding from an ancient pre-Christian Greek philosopher. We are in the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is in us.

O God, in whom we have our being,

Help us not merely to understand you more deeply, but to live in you more deeply. In the name of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Faithfully,

Christian