Patrick Comerford
An early Christian thinker, Tertullian, once asked, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’
What have the ways of the world got to do with the way we live our life as Christians?
How does God respond to the cry of the poor?
How is God present in our lives?
How do we live a life of love that shows we know the love of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit?
How do we respond in love and in faith and love to suffering in the world and to suffering of those we love?
Where do we find God in the midst of all this?
All these questions are asked regularly, and the first morning reading at the Eucharist this morning was a reminder that God never leaves us alone.
Today has been the Sixth Sunday of Easter (10 May 2026), and at the Parish Eucharist in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford, this morning I read the first readings (Acts 17: 22-31), in which the Apostle Paul is at the Areopagos in Athens.
The people who worshipped the unknown God on the slopes beneath the shadow of the Acropolis were assured that God had heard their prayers, and they are now being invited to join in communion with this God through Saint Paul’s proclamation.
The Stoa of Attalos is one of the many splendid buildings beneath the slopes of the Acropolis in Athens. This stoa (στοά), a covered walkway or portico in the Agora, was built by and named after Attalos II (159-138 BCE), King of Pergamon. Its arcades were divided into shops and stalls, and it was a popular place for wealthy Athenians to meet and gossip.
There were many stoas in Athens, including the Stoa Poikile or Painted Porch, built in the fifth century BCE on the north side of the Agora.
This is where we find Saint Paul in today’s morning, in one of the most famous sites in ancient Athens. Its fame was enhanced by the paintings and loot from wars displayed there. It was in this porch that Zeno of Citium (ca 333-262 BCE) taught Stoicism, the philosophical school that takes its name from this place.
The Stoics believed in a god, and this god played an important role in their general philosophy. But Stoic theology was fluid in its concept of god. Zeno argued that the cosmos is an intelligent being, although he seems not to have explicitly identified that intelligent being as God.
According to the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero, the Stoics recognised four main questions in theology: they prove that the gods exist; they explain their nature; they show that the world is governed by them; and that they care for the fortunes of humanity.
Essentially, Stoicism is a philosophy of personal ethics. It teaches that the path to happiness is found in accepting this moment as it presents itself, by not allowing ourselves to be controlled by our desire for pleasure or our fear of pain, by using our minds to understand the world around us and to do our part in nature’s plan, and by working together and treating others in a fair and just manner.
The Stoics taught that emotions resulted in errors of judgment that were destructive, due to the interaction between cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will that is in accord with nature. To live a good life, they taught, one had to understand the rules of the natural order since they taught that everything is rooted in nature.
Later Stoics believed that virtue is sufficient for happiness.
During his visit to Athens, the Apostle Paul debates with Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in the stoa, the marketplace or the agora. They take him to the shrine of the unknown god at the Areopagos (see Acts 17: 16-19).
Saint Paul tells them that they already know God in their hearts, they just have to come to realise who God is. In his speech at the Areopagos, Saint Paul also quotes the Cretan philosopher Epimenides: ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’
Epimenides was a poet and philosopher from Knossos, so he was familiar with the ancient Greek myths. All of his works are now lost, but he is remembered because he popularised the story in Crete that Zeus was dead, which led him to being condemned as a liar by his Greek contemporaries, and because he is quoted by Saint Paul not once but twice in the New Testament.
At the Areopagos in Athens (see Acts 17: 22-34), Saint Paul, quotes from Epimenides, referring him as one of ‘your own poets,’ when he says: ‘For “In him we live and move and have our being”.’
Later, when Saint Paul writes to Saint Titus about his mission in Crete, he commits a logical fallacy by quoting Epimenides: ‘It was one of them, their very own prophet, who said, “Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.” That testimony is true’ (Titus 1: 12-13a).
The ‘lie’ of the Cretans is that Zeus was mortal, for Epimenides believed that Zeus is dead. The logical inconsistency of a Cretan asserting that all Cretans are always liars may not have occurred to Epimenides, nor to Callimachus, who both used the phrase to emphasise their point, without irony.
However, Saint Paul must have thought long about the idea of a dead god and the dead god’s tomb as he sought to preach the Resurrection Athens and in Crete.
The American theologian John Piper is a fundamentalist whose views on women and Jews I find misogynist and bordering on the antisemitic. Dismissing the horrors of domestic violence, he has said, ‘If her husband isn’t requiring her to sin, but simply hurting her, then i think she endures verbal abuse for a season, she endures perhaps being smacked one night, and then she seeks help from the church.’
In one of his books, Coronavirus and Christ, Piper claimed that Covid-19 was God’s judgment on society, and he singled out, among other things, gay people as a deserving ‘due penalty.’ When I hear things like this, I wonder whether preachers like this believe in the dead Zeus rather than the Risen Christ and the God in whom ‘we live and move and have our being.’
The old myths and superstitions are dead and gone, and with them the false expectations and demands they made on us. But the one true God has been with us always. This is Saint Paul’s message to the people of Athens in the first century. We do not believe in a superstitious way in a god like Zeus who exerts his control over weak humans in an angry and vengeful way, sending plagues and viruses to wipe us out as a way of asserting his control. We look to a loving God who has always been at work among people who seek to do God’s will: the Samaritan woman at the well comes to understand this; the Ethiopian eunuch who meets Saint Philip comes to understand this.
During the pandemic lockdown, as people asked where God was in the middle of that crisis, many of us, hopefully, realised that God is at work through everyone who is already doing God’s work. And we should rejoice in this and affirm this.
Acts 17: 22-31 (NRSVA)
22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious 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[a] he made all nations 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[b] and perhaps grope 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.’
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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