Behind our two lessons today are two contexts or two settings, yet the conclusions very much support one another.
In Luke’s description of Paul dialoguing with the Greek philosophers of his day on the mount of the Parthenon in Athens, we see the complex religious scene of Paul’s day: the traditional Greek gods, mystery religions from the east, and new cults emerging, even one “to an unknown god”, whom Paul identifies with the Lord of heaven and earth who sent his Son, Jesus Christ, into the world. There was probably also a Jewish synagogue somewhere at the foot of the Parthenon where Paul visited and proclaimed Jesus Christ as the promised Messiah to the Jews.
Paul, the faithful Jewish Pharisee, whose life had been turned around by his vision of the Resurrected Christ on the road to Damascus, when he was called to be the Apostle to the Gentiles, moved back and forth amongst all these diverse religious traditions, Jewish and pagan, proclaiming the resurrected Christ. His new deep faith in the resurrected Christ never wavered, whatever the context, whatever the location, whatever religious and social setting he faced, whether he was free or in prison, young or old. Christ reigned for him.
The context of John’s Gospel is later and much more settled. It is a stable Christian community, probably in Asia minor, that has suffered from internal problems and disputes, perhaps about the nature of Christ and his relationship with God. There is perhaps some conflict between Jewish and Gentile members of the Christian community or conflict with the Synagogue. In that context, the author goes back to words of Jesus that emphasize the complete unity of himself and his Father; and that out of that infinite love is promised an Advocate or Guide (the Greek word is Paraclete, the one standing beside, speaking) who will, after Jesus’ departure from earth, lead the community into all truth and peacefulness.
Like the passage about Paul, the message is deeply Christological: the perfect love of Christ is continued in the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, guiding them (and us) into all truth. In two weeks we shall reach Pentecost, the celebration of the Holy Spirit. This passage from John, of course, is also one of the passages from which the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is derived.
In both passages, out of the local conflicts, whether external or internal, emerges Jesus Christ as liberator, peacemaker, source of truth: whether through Paul’s deep faith in the resurrected Christ, into which others are invited, or through the promised gift of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, guiding us into all truth. The answer is not through our own cleverness (especially not through clever expositions of doctrine or even ministry) but through a basic openness to God’s love, wherever it is found.
How might we be drawn into and participate, so to speak, in these two stories? (That is our relationship with the Bible; we are invited into the stories so that we participate in them in our own lives.) Because they come out of two very different contexts, it is probably best to treat each story differently than to combine them into a single story in which we try to participate.
The story of Paul on the Parthenon amongst the pagan gods should resonate a bit for us today in our multicultural context and often, so-to-speak, supermarket approach to spirituality – take your pick off the shelf of what works for you. Paul does not unilaterally condemn but appreciates how Christ might be present in something that looks very pagan (a shrine “to an unknown god”). A friend or family member goes for a quiet walk in the woods on a Sunday morning or sits quietly on the deck with a cup of coffee and announces, “I am spiritual, not religious, that is why I do not go to church”.
That sounds just a bit like an updated version of the inscription Paul sees on a shrine, “to an unknown god”. How do we respond? Not with condemnation (though the temptation to condemn on the social media might be great) but with listening and understanding; and perhaps the suggestion that there is more to spirituality than being quiet in a quiet and peaceful place. “God has acted in Jesus Christ and we and our world are changed for the good because of it; come join us”, might be the eventual invitation.
Or friends simply may simply be struggling, with life decisions, with grief, with problems of intimacy, with illness, with old age. They may feel a glimmer of God’s love (“an unknown god”) and we are able to be with them and invite them into our fellowship. Therefore, a community should, as much as possible, be a place of vibrant faith and love, not a place of constant doubt and quarrelling.
That leads us to participating, both as community and individuals, in the community of John’s Gospel and the promise of an Advocate, Counsellor, Comforter, Paraclete or Holy Spirit, the perfect love of the Ascended Christ imparted to us by the Father. John quotes Jesus, “if you love me, you will keep my commandments”. Of course, the greatest of those commandments is to love with Christ-like love. The Advocate is the Spirit of God’s perfect love in Jesus Christ. So, we do not cherish conflict and disagreement, we do not promote it, we seek unity, we do not let paranoia take hold, we are willing to let go with faith that the Holy Spirit will work through the community and love will thereby grow and prosper. And the Holy Spirit leads to constant encouragement and bearing one another’s burdens. We become a Spirit-filled community.
The common result of these two ways of being a Christian, Paul’s and John’s, both rooted in Christ’s teaching, can be found in today’s psalm, 66, drawn from the Jewish tradition perhaps three centuries before Christ’s birth. It is a psalm that I believe we can be certain that both Paul in the synagogue and the Johannine community in the church used in moments of great joy. Possibly it is a very late psalm, written after return from exile in Babylon. The psalmist has been through great travail; he has been through fire and water but though the love and mercy of God has prevailed. Now he offers thanks and tells his story of salvation, concluding, “Blessed be God, who has not rejected my prayer, nor withheld his voice from me.”
Sometimes we make an overly sharp distinction between the Old and New Testaments but both are sacred Scripture and both reveal the nature of God and divine love and justice. Thus, early Christians, Jew and Gentile, continued to pray the psalms, as we do to this day. The psalms have an extraordinary range of themes but this is a psalm of thanksgiving. In singing it liturgically with the passages about Paul in Athens and the Johannine community and the Holy Spirit, we are reminded that because we share in the grace of Christ’s Resurrection and because we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth, the only proper response is thanksgiving to God; and this psalm says it all. We are reminded that a basic mindset of thanksgiving to God, despite whatever pain and suffering we endure, is essential to the Christian life. In Paul’s own words in his epistles, Christian life is all about thankfulness for God’s grace. Grace comes from the Greek word for gift.
Putting these three lessons together, we come up with the centrality of the resurrected Christ as a kind of anchor amidst all the cultural, religious and ideological diversity of our age; deep faith in the power of the Holy Spirit operating in the community to bring us into deeper love of one another and the world around us, leading us into all truth; and finally a deep thankfulness for God’s grace, protection and love, even though at other times we may feel like invoking the psalms of despair and anger.
I think it is a reasonable hope that as a parish we might exemplify these three themes in our ministry to one another and in the world around us. That requires listening and engagement (Paul on the Parthenon amongst the pagan gods), active trust in God’s spirit of love and letting the Holy Spirit direct us (the Johannine community of love) and always (with the psalmist) being thankful: “be joyful in the Lord, all you lands!” Who can resist that? Thanks be to God.
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