Daily Devotional • June 30
A Reading from Acts 17:12-34
12 Many of them therefore believed, including not a few Greek women and men of high standing. 13 But when the Jews of Thessalonica learned that the word of God had been proclaimed by Paul in Beroea as well, they came there, too, to stir up and incite the crowds. 14 Then the brothers and sisters immediately sent Paul away to the coast, but Silas and Timothy remained behind. 15 Those who conducted Paul brought him as far as Athens, and, after receiving instructions to have Silas and Timothy join him as soon as possible, they left him.
16 While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17 So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. 18 Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, “What does this pretentious babbler want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.” (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) 19 So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.” 21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.
22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. 23 For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.26 From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27 so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.28 For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we, too, are his offspring.’
29 “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. 30 While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
32 When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed, but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” 33 At that point Paul left them. 34 But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.
Meditation
Were the grumblers right about Paul? Was he “a proclaimer of foreign divinities” in Athens? To some of these eavesdroppers, it sure seemed so: going on about some things that happened to a very Jewish Jesus during a very Jewish passover in a very Jewish Jerusalem. And though we readers know where this story is going, we also would and should in some way happily affirm the sentiment of this incredulous Athenian. Yes, Paul is bringing good news to these Greek gentiles from Israel’s God, the One who made covenants with Abraham, was named by Hagar, wrestled with Jacob (no such record of intimate dealings with Epicurus or Zeno, by way of contrast!).
But Paul will not allow us or our Athenian to remain here, nor does he even recount what we just rehearsed. No, Paul instead goes to the practices and speaks in the idiom of these Greek foreigners. He tells them that they in fact are already worshiping him. The only change Paul is bringing about is that he is making this “unknown God” of their worship known! He quotes their own poets who already testify to this ‘foreign’ God’s existence and majesty. Paul is not proclaiming any foreign divinity; he is proclaiming a divinity that is already at work within the very things that make Athens Athens, already secretly drawing the grumbling Athenians to Himself. Paul does not bring a foreign God, he brings proclamation of the God they already worship as unknown.
This is the great mystery Paul proclaimed to the Athenian grumblers and to us: this God is both foreign and native; always beyond our grasp yet truly known in our own language and culture; beyond all things yet closer to our self than we are to it; particular yet universal. He is all this without ever collapsing into one side of the paradox or sublating these terms into some kind of synthesis: such is the great mystery and majesty of this God.
Maxine King is a lay Episcopalian and student of theology at Virginia Theological Seminary.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Waco, Texas
Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui