Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Acts 17:22-31

The Closer We Get, the Less We Know

Paul makes a point the intelligentsia of Athens get right off: the sculpted forms of the gods are not the gods. There is a difference between the representation and the power that is supposedly represented. But sculpture is not the only medium that has such limitations. For instance, how do we render the gospel in our words? That is always Paul's challenge. We can note as readers (consumers of written art) that there is a difference between the power of God manifested in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the particular form the orator (Paul) or editor (“Luke”) employs in shaping the testimony to that power. Art mediates that difference. Indeed, the unique rhetorical character of Paul's oratory sets this passage off in the book. He is using a different template. There is no Jewish reference apart from a general reference to the concepts of righteousness and judgment, and, eventually, the Jewish apocalyptic categories of death and resurrection, which is a real stretch for those poor Greeks! No Abrahamic or Mosaic metanarrative. No name of Jesus, or appellation of Christ or Messiah. Yet we would presume he is telling them what they need to hear so that they have some egress to God who is God. 

Just as the Greek artisans would insist on necessary cultural conventions in the shaping of their theological statuary, many in the Jewish and Christian world insist on necessary terms, in the verbal shaping of testimony to God. Russell Rathburn in his blog raises the issue to Christians who would play the “I know Jesus” card as a way of sidestepping the dilemma of the difference between our representations of God and God. The “cultural Jesus” we know is just as much a graven image as those Greek powers forged in metal and stone. The apophatic tradition of the Christian faith has been aware of this for a long time. 

The character of the “unknown god” is a curious case – one that Paul leverages to open up a witness to God beyond control and representation. This God that Paul is aiming at, we know, is none other than the Creator in the book of Genesis of the Hebrew scripture – the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ in the New Testament. We know this through the Church's scriptural canon and the common creeds. All these “knowings” seem to be predicated on the art of writing – or sacramental enactments, which include, among other media, writing-as-script. Theater. By the same pretext that Paul critiques the Greek statuary, it is clear the media are not the message. Some depiction of a "cultural Jesus", for instance, designed with such a temperament that we can nail him to our wall to bless our ideology or life style, is not the resurrected Lord. Media (in all its collective singularity) is about image making, whether practiced by Athenian artisans or Jewish storytellers or church theologians.

Except for the case of the Unknown One. The unknown is huge. Even the narratives that, in a sense, form our faith, are full of slips and fault lines that expose God who is always, in some manner, veiled from our eyes, whether intended in the story or unintended by close critical reading. The resurrected Jesus, as in the road to Emmaus incident, is eventually recognized, but never completely known. He comes and goes. Paul, using the unknown god, has thrown us all back into an epistemological quagmire. What may have been intended for Athenian ears has echoes, not only in modern and postmodern Western doubt, but in the very veiled nature of God attested in the Hebrew scriptures. And yet there is an irony in all this that Paul claims in Athens:

From one ancestor 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, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him--though indeed he is not far from each one of us.

              vss. 26-27(NRSV)

Alas, God is both "groped for" and "found" while "not far" and unknown. We see this played out in Paul's own story. This is the very Paul (Saul) we found last week overseeing the murder of Stephen! Such is the nature of lectionary time! In this case it does us a service, for we find, through Paul's transformation, that the closer God draws to us, the less we know of God in our assumptions. Likewise, the closer we are drawn by God, the less we presume to know of ourselves. Our personal knowing is a kind of sacramental knowing: we are totally at the mercy of our baptism where the death and resurrection of Jesus not only reveals the Person of God, but the person we are becoming. But we are out of our cognitive element. God's universe(s?) won't stay put for us! In the whole of creation there is no solid ground on which we can ultimately conceive, let's say, reality. Or truth. Everything is being changed to the point that even the categories of death and life are unstable. Our "knowledge" is really more or less an awareness of what is going on. An awareness of the limit of knowledge even as we treasure what we discover.

And yet - this knowledge and this unknowing are, of all things, the result of a family relationship! This was not lost on Paul in his appeal to the Athenians. (vs 28) In Christ we have been bound with an unequal partner within the divine family. The traditional categories of transcendence and immanence fail, in the end, to make sense of God's nearness or distance. The wilderness terrain that we do not know involves a move that crosses through our cultural taboos to the very ground in which we are revealed as children of God.

© 2011 Andy Gay