Tuesday past was the feast day of St. Peter and St. Paul. In today's second lesson at Mattins, we read of St. Paul, in Athens, where, “He preached unto them Jesus, and the Resurrection” (Acts 17:18). The apostle preached his sermon on the hill of Areopagus, or Mars hill as it is also called.
Several weeks ago, on the Sunday after Ascension, as I was reviewing the progress of the Church year, observing that from Advent Sunday right through to Pentecost, our focus was on God’s breaking into the sphere of space and time in the Person of Jesus Christ, I mentioned that the Creeds remind us that the Birth, Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord are unique. Therefore the Apostles’ Creed reminds us daily that Jesus Christ is what makes Christianity unique. In the aforementioned lesson from Mattins today, St. Paul is making the same observation to the Athenians on Mars Hill in preaching to them Jesus and the Resurrection.
At the end of said lesson, we heard that some of those Athenian listeners mocked St. Paul when he preached to them the Resurrection. Is it truly any different today?
Thursday past was Canada Day, and my wife and I were invited next door to share what we thought was going to be a quiet afternoon, even with the neighbour’s five and two year old children. As several younger couples began to show up, all with at least two young children, all hopes for peace were dashed. Actually the children were all remarkably well-behaved, even to the point that there was complete quiet in the backyard at least twice during the afternoon. During one of these quiet periods, as I was sitting under the umbrella, trying to recover from one of Jamie’s suicide chicken wings that did not come with a warning, I recalled from several years ago a going away party for my next-door neighbours on the other side when there were also many children present. At that time, I was suddenly left sitting with one of the parents, while all of the others ran off with the children to some sort of parade – a pretty unusual, and not-to-be-missed event for metropolitan North Gower. Religion was never really a topic of discussion with these neighbours; rather, it was more a great game of their two young daughters “helping” me in the garden. Katie, the older of the two was actually very helpful with her much smaller hands than mine at planting carrot seeds – which of course were then called Katie’s carrots. But the said help, after the watering of the carrots, usually degraded into Katie and her sister chasing me around the back yard with the garden hose while their parents encouraged them.
This particular day, some years ago, offered a rare opportunity for one of the parents to engage me in an obviously long pent up conversation without the distraction of the girls. In the time before the hordes returned, we covered much ground in dealing with what would best be described as a crisis of belief, rather than a crisis of faith. Underlying this person's inability to accept Christianity was much confusion, frankly as a result of lack of knowledge about Christianity. One item that popped up, and that I'm sure that most of us have heard before, was that the beginning and end of Christianity was the Ten Commandments - in this particular case, further complicated by the conclusion that the Ten Commandments were nothing more than the musings of a very clever human mind, and that this started the whole thing about religion, from which the world has not been able to liberate itself.
One must answer such an accusation with great care, as we must not deny the importance of the Ten Commandments, we cannot dispense with them at least as a beginning, a first step in Christian conduct – but, they are not the central point of our religion. Any who have fallen into the trap of accepting that Christianity is primarily a type of consent to the teachings of Scripture especially as regards morality, beginning with the Ten Commandments, or who feel that basing their faith on such is simply a different and acceptable interpretation of the Bible are, frankly, off the mark. If any of us assumes so, it is because we do not know our Bibles the way that we should. What was the crucial question that Jesus asked His disciples, after they had been with Him for many months? “Whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God’,” as we heard read this past Tuesday on the feast day of Ss. Peter and Paul (Matthew 16:15-16). It is not just a question of believing in God - Jews and Muslims do it as much as we do. Nor is it a matter of accepting the commandments; Jews and Muslims, and many others, have no problem about that, but they would probably not appreciate us calling them Christians on that account. It is Jesus Himself Who is crucial!
As I recall we finally got beyond the Ten Commandments and the associated idea of being a "do-gooder" in our conversation, and I tried to introduce Jesus as a fundamentally important point in belief, as the essential difference in belief, but, I started to get a bit of a glazed look in response - almost the feeling that the other person was thinking, “Oh no, he's going to start to sound like a television evangelist,” – which I probably was. At that point, I guess that I probably experienced somewhat the same feeling as St. Paul might have had on Mars hill. The entire verse, from which we extracted the words, “He preached unto them Jesus, and the Resurrection,” reads, “Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the Resurrection.” That from the King James translation. Other more modern translations try to give a better idea of the opposition that St. Paul encountered; the New Jerusalem Bible, “Even a few Epicurean and Stoic philosophers argued with him. Some said, Does this parrot know what he's talking about? And, because he was preaching about Jesus and the Resurrection, others said, He sounds like a propagandist for some outlandish gods.” J. B. Phillips, “He seems to be trying to proclaim some more gods to us, and foreign ones at that!” In St. Paul's case, rather than glazed looks, the thirsty-for-knowledge Greeks dragged him off to Mars hill and asked him to expound on his strange new teaching.
Jesus, and the suggestion that someone might have actually risen from the dead, were entirely new to the Greeks, so it is perhaps natural that they would want to hear more before they made their judgement. Today, many non-believers have at least heard of Jesus, perhaps only a very little bit, but it would appear to be enough for them to also have made the same sort of judgement that some of the Greeks made, “and when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked.” In the case of my conversation partner, it was clear that the knowledge was very limited, but, the all too common assessment, “I don't need to know anything else if you intellectually helpless Christians actually believe that He rose from the dead.” And how common is that response today!
My conversation partner, as is so common in our age, was not as thirsty for metaphysical knowledge as were the Greeks in St. Paul’s time, so I was not able to make much further progress. As I recalled this, and many other similar conversations through the years, I was reminded of a very common issue for many people today – they are only prepared to believe or accept something on their own terms. Perhaps somewhat alarmingly, this can also be true of Christians as it relates to their beliefs. However, truly, honestly, to be a Christian means to accept Christ on His own terms. Christian faith is not a matter of opinion, of partial acceptance of Jesus and His teachings, it is a relationship to Jesus as a living Person, risen from the dead. St. Paul was not trying to give people in Athens a rehash of what had happened in Jerusalem some 25 years earlier, or to entertain them with the ideas of a martyred Teacher, or his own interpretation of them. What he was concerned to do was to confront them with Jesus as the One whom they were to know as their Lord and Master, whom they were to worship and obey. The Church’s task is no different today. To miss this confrontation with Christ is to fail to grasp what Christianity is truly about; without it, everything else loses its real point. Morality becomes a mere set of rules, instead of the expression of a changed life; worship becomes mumbo-jumbo, instead of the family gathering of those who belong to Christ; church membership becomes a social convenience, instead of the new relationship to people that springs from our relation to Christ.
On a personal basis, would each of us have the boldness, if we were dragged off to Mars hill, to proclaim that I am a Christian because life without Jesus as my Lord and God is pretty empty and meaningless? And that I am a Catholic Christian because the only honest way to follow Christ is to accept the whole Gospel, and not my favourite bits and pieces. And that I am a traditional Anglican because I believe that this Church, with all of its faults, is committed to the whole Christian Faith, nothing altered. It is very easy today to find a church and a preacher who would not put it in such direct terms, not insisting on adherence to the Gospel; yea, rather all too willing to change the Gospel message to make it more politically and socially palatable; but frankly, that, to a large extent, is what lead to the confusion and crisis of belief on the part of my conversation partner – significant parts of Christianity in North America have become a mish-mash thanks to compromise, watering down and the like. Small wonder that marginal or non-believers have doubts that for them present insurmountable obstacles.
None of us should pass by opportunities to preach Jesus and the Resurrection, just because we may risk being embarrassed or even rejected as was St. Paul by most of his hearers. Remember, as we heard in last Sunday’s Gospel reading, there is much joy in heaven over even just one sinner that turns to Christ. God will use us, just as He used St. Paul, so that a few, perhaps only one thoughtful person will take the message seriously, will be touched in their hearts and accept Jesus, to whom, with the Father, in the Unity of the Holy Spirit, be all honour and glory, now and forever. Amen.
THE ANNUNCIATION OTTAWA 2004 CLRK
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