by CCW | 27 June 2010 18:46
St. Paul’s sermon on the Areopagus is one of the most remarkable and influential sermons of all time. It illustrates wonderfully, I think, the contemplative theme of this Sunday, the theme of mercy, signaled in the Eucharistic Gospel. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” But what is the mercy? It is the mercy of revelation. What was unknown has been made known. We walk in the light of what has been revealed. If we do not, then we walk in the darkness and lead others astray as well; “shall they not both fall into the ditch?” Such is the import of the Gospel parable of “the blind leading the blind.” Our self-righteous judgments point accusing fingers at the minor faults of others while being blind to the major faults in ourselves.
The point of the reading of the Scriptures in the public and common life of the Church is to reveal God to us and us to God. We learn about “the good, the bad and the ugly” of ourselves in the light of God’s mercy and truth. This requires our openness to the Scriptures and our willingness to engage and think the Scriptures. The Old Testament lesson from 1st Kings[1] is particularly instructive, too, because it illustrates the theme of mercy over harsh judgments in the reign of King Rehoboam who ignores the wise counsel of the old men in favour of the rash advice of the young men. It is a supreme instance of an abusive authority that imposes impossible demands.
“To your tents, O Israel” is the only response, a fleeing from what is persecutory and destructive but only so as to recall ourselves to what is primary and definitive. Ultimately, God has tented among us. “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us;” literally, “tented among us,” a phrase which picks up on the Old Testament image of the tent of meeting between God and man, the tent of meeting where the glory of God is made known.
We are not strangers, of course, to abusive authority whether within or without the church. “To your tents,” recalls us to what defines us, namely, the matters of revelation and redemption; in this case, the lessons of mercy proclaimed in and through the ordered pattern of the liturgy.
Portia’s wise counsel to Shylock in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, makes the point that our liturgy constantly teaches, namely, “that in the course of justice none of us/should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,/and that same prayer doth teach us all to render/ The deeds of mercy.” Mercy, she explains “is an attribute to God himself/and earthly power doth then show likest God’s/when mercy seasons justice.” The seasoning of justice by mercy is the perfection of justice; ultimately, it is about our participation in God’s justice which is equally his love.
But the mercy of God has to be made known. That is what St. Paul is doing on the Areopagus[2] to the Greeks of Athens and, by extension, to us today. His sermon is addressed to the philosophic spirits, mentioning by name the Epicureans and the Stoics who are skeptical and even hostile to the idea of a God who can be known, even as today there is a skeptical and hostile spirit within and without the Church about the idea of God and his revelation. The Epicureans and the Stoics of the ancient world have their modern day counterparts.
Epicureanism is associated with hedonism, the philosophy of sensual pleasure. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die” captures something of its fundamental outlook, as well as its sense of fatalism and despair, though it has to be said on Epicurus’ behalf that his philosophy is quite moral and cautious. There is a God but he cannot be known and his will cannot be known to us, therefore all our actions are at best but provisional, restrained and very circumspect. It is really a philosophy of cautious restraint lest one over-commit and experience a certain perturbation of soul as a result. This was before the age of Prozac to keep us calm (and before Viagra, to keep us happy!) In a way, it is about suspending judgment for fear of being mistaken.
The Stoic philosophy, we associate, I suppose, with the qualities of endurance and suffering, “keeping a stiff upper lip.” Like Epicureanism, it seeks a certain imperturbability of the soul in the face of the hardships of life and in the course of an implacable and unknowable fate. What will be, will be and there’s no doing anything about it. There is a kind of despair in such an outlook.
That there is wisdom in these positions should not be denied. It is important to know the limits of our knowing and to be aware of the dangers of our presumption. These are the lessons that the Gospel parable and the story from 1st Kings also teach. Yet, it is equally important to realize the nature of the assumptions that are made, the assumptions about the unknowability of God and, as a consequence, of human actions, too. What is at stake is human freedom and responsibility and, most importantly, human dignity. The great medieval poet, Dante, puts the Epicureans in Hell, for instance, in the circles of the violent, not for their failure to belief in any particular tenet of Christianity, but because he sees in their denial of God and the denial of the soul – which according to the Epicureans also cannot be known – a violence against reason itself.
St. Paul, in his Areopagus sermon, is speaking to the positive qualities of the ancient Greeks. He perceives that they are a religious people and he recognizes their humility of mind. As with Plato, truth is constantly to be sought but without presuming that you can ever possesses it completely, rather the truth possesses you. And that is Paul’s point, too. He proclaims the spiritual reality of God who has created the whole world and our human minds – “we are his offspring,” he says. And he proclaims the resurrection of Christ. Such things are about a fuller realization of our participation in the truth and life of God than the ancients could ever have imagined. It is, in a way, the seasoning of our souls. As always, both then and now, some are prepared to listen and others are not.
But there is an important point to his sermon. God is not a deus absconditus, a hidden God. This does not mean that God is captive to our minds, but rather, through revelation, there is our reasoning upon what is made known and there is the captivity of our minds to the God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ. In the light of that revelation, we are accountable for “our thoughts, words and deeds,” which is another way of saying that our lives are not nothing. Nor are we cramped and constrained in some sort of suspended animation, in the paralyzing fear of making decisions. That would be our unfreedom. The challenge is to be careful about our judgments, without pointing fingers of accusation at one another while ignoring our own great faults and failings, on the one hand, and without imposing harsh condemnations and abusive expectations upon one another, on the other hand.
As St. Paul’s sermon points out, what is at stake is the nature of God who is not to be confused with the things of this world. Such is idolatry, the idolatry of our minds, both in mistaking the things of this world for God and in denying the making known of God by reason and by revelation. We are to walk in the light of that truth, the truth of God revealed. We do so by way of the witness of the Scriptures, a witness which shows us a way of understanding and opens us out to God’s dwelling with us, even his tenting among us.
Something of what that theology of revelation means is captured best, perhaps, in a wonderful phrase by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.
He that keepeth the word of Christ, is promised the love and favour of God,
and that he shall be the dwelling-place or temple of the blessed Trinity.
Or even a tent! St. Paul’s Sermon on the Areopagus reminds us of God’s Revelation of himself to us in “the Word made flesh” who tented among us.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor
Trinity IV, ‘2010
10:30am (Morning Prayer)
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/06/27/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-after-trinity-1030am-service/
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