To the Unknown God, Sunday 23rd August 2020
‘To the Unknown God’
The writer and poet GK Chesterton (who once worshipped at St George’s) says: ‘God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them … The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.’ It may be as well to bear this in mind during the next five minutes.
There is much food for thought in our reading today. Those of you who, like me, are interested in the ancient world or who have visited Classical sites can imagine Paul in Athens. This highly intelligent and passionate man debating with all those clever Greek philosophers on the Areopagus (a hill dedicated to Mars west of the Acropolis). There were the Epicureans, whose gods lived in a separate world to that of men, and the pantheistic Stoics who believed God and the world were essentially the same thing. The gods were certainly a reality to the Athenians as could be seen in their many temples decked out with wonderful statues of their diverse deities – but to whom was this mysterious shrine ‘to the unknown god’ dedicated?
On his website Faith & Worship, the Methodist writer John Birch tells us how these shrines ‘To the Unknown God’ (as there was more than one of them) came about:
‘Around 600 years before Paul walked down that road there had been a terrible plague in Athens which threatened the whole city. A Cretan poet, Epimenides came forward with a plan. A flock of black and white sheep were let loose in the city and wherever a sheep lay down it was sacrificed to the nearest god. If it lay down near a shrine of no known god it was sacrificed to ‘The Unknown God'’. So Paul has wandered past these shrines, maybe stopped and taken note of which god or no god they were dedicated to and, then, as all good preachers are supposed to do, he took that as his illustration and formed around it this tremendous sermon.’
Paul uses ‘To the Unknown God’ as his springboard and launches into his wonderful description of how God can be known, how he manifests himself in the Cosmos and in the world – and, of course, in us ourselves. Paul says that the Athenians do not need all those beautiful buildings and that amazingly life-like sculpture to worship this unknown God. For the ‘Lord of heaven and earth does not live in temples made by man… nor is he served by human hands… since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything’.
This might not have come as a surprise to the Stoics who believed that everything in world, including mortals, contained the Divine Spark, Spirit or Logos. Paul goes on to acknowledge this when he says:
‘“In him we live and move and have our being,
as even some of your poets have said,
“For we are indeed his offspring”’.
So, we are children of god, we are in a sense intimately connected with him and yet he is still unknown – or is he?
After a Zoom lecture on a course I am currently studying another student posted a comment: ‘This helps me to know God’s personality better’. I must say that I was rather shocked when I read it as I did not think that God had a ‘personality’. But, on reflection, remembering that the word persona is Latin for ‘mask’, perhaps she did have a point. This mask is to protect us as we are told in Exodus (33:20) ‘You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live’ and St John tells us twice that ‘No one has seen God at any time.’ And yet Jacob, Moses, Isaiah and other prophets, all say they saw God face to face. And of course, Jesus tells Philip: ‘He who has seen Me has seen the Father’. But what does it mean ‘to see’?
Now we are back where we started in the realm of philosophy – the ancient Greeks must have enjoyed debating with Paul – and we are left with the Law of Paradox, where a pair of opposites comes together in tension and forms a trinity. God can and yet, at the same time, cannot be known – but as St Paul says: ‘he is actually not far from each of us.’ I told you what GK Chesterton said would be useful.
Lindsay Fulcher