Knowing the Unknown God

hen Paul stood up at the Areopagus and said:
"You Athenians, I see that in every respect
you are very religious.
For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines,
I even discovered an altar inscribed, 'To an Unknown God.'
What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.
The God who made the world and all that is in it,
the Lord of heaven and earth,
does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands,
nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything.
Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything.
He made from one the whole human race
to dwell on the entire surface of the earth,
and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions,
so that people might seek God,
even perhaps grope for him and find him,
though indeed he is not far from any one of us.
For 'In him, we live and move and have our being,'
as even some of your poets have said,
'For we too are his offspring.'
Since therefore we are the offspring of God,
we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image
fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination.
God has overlooked the times of ignorance,
but now he demands that all people everywhere repent
because he has established a day on which he will 'judge the world
with justice' through a man he has appointed,
and he has provided confirmation for all
by raising him from the dead."

When they heard about the resurrection of the dead,
some began to scoff, but others said,
"We should like to hear you on this some other time."
And so Paul left them.
But some did join him and became believers.
Among them was Dionysius,
a member of the Court of the Areopagus,

I guess that the Greeks were a tough egg to crack.  Paul had to give them the chance because that was what he and the other Apostles were commissioned to do.  They were to go through the whole world and bring the Good News of the Gospel to a land and people that were in desperate need of it.  Yet not every place where they went did the seed of the Gospel fall on fertile soil.  In Greece, it appears, that only a few sprouts reached up towards the sun, with the other seeds settling into the rocky soil.

The Greeks were a religious people.  They had temples to every god known to man. What was their problem?  Why was it so hard for them hear and accept the Good News of the Gospel?  I believe that they could not understand how a god would come down and do good to the people of earth. Remember, their gods were nothing more than legends and lights in the sky.  No one had ever seen Zeus or Apollo or any of the other gods that they worshipped, the only evidence for them to even exist was their so-called appearance in the night sky.  They had a hard time believing in a loving God.  Their gods were nasty pieces of work that had to be assuaged or they would do harm to the people, such as causing a crop to fail and bringing famine or causing infertility.  No good was ever ascribed to the Greek gods that weren't paid for in full by those that received their care. 

This talk of Jesus was different. Here was a God that came down from heaven, not to wreak revenge on His disobedient children, but to teach and nurture them and to bring to an end the scourge of death.  This was the hardest thing for the Greeks to hear.  Death has always been the end of man, no one had ever returned from the land of the dead until Jesus did.  This coupled with the loving nature of God was hard for the average Greek philosopher to grasp.  The gods just had a bad reputation and they could not see their way clear to changing their thoughts on the matter.  After all, there were hundreds of years of tradition to go by and they would wait to see what this new God did.  They didn't shut Him out completely, but they did shut Him out.  One person did receive the Word and took it to heart, he was Dionysius the Areopagite. He heard and believed and began working for the Kingdom and became the first Bishop of Athens and was proclaimed a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. 

It is interesting to see how different and yet how all the same we are. For many of us, the Gospel has been presented in many different ways and we have seen its power in our lives and in the lives of others.  Yet, we too sometimes say like the Greeks, "We should like to hear you on this some other time." 

I feel called to pray for the poor souls in Purgatory.  There are millions of us in this place of the joyful dead who need our prayers. We tend to forget about them thinking, for our own comfort and peace of mind, that they are already in heaven even if they are not there yet.  Pray for the poor souls today.  Think of the millions of Protestants who do not have anyone to pray for them.