“…and He did this so that they might seek
the Lord and, by feeling their way
towards Him, find Him…” Acts 17:27
These words are from Paul’s sermon in Athens, at the Areopagus. He is explaining to the Athenians the glory of the one God; a God who needs no temple, no altar, no statue to honor Him. Paul is telling the Athenians that there is a God, greater than any they have imagined; greater than Zeus, and Apollo, greater than all their honored gods. He proclaims to them the one God, the God who made all things and gives breath and life to all living creatures. A God who decrees even the times and limits of their habitation of the earth; of their lives—of our lives. And, Paul says, He did this, He set that limit upon our lives, for a reason: that we might seek Him.
That is where I paused in my reading today. Thinking about this note, I was reminded of a joke from a teacher I know. He says: Life is a lot like a sexually transmitted disease, but –on the plus side—at least it‘s terminal.
At least it’s terminal! He jokes. It sounds clever—especially at 7:15 in the morning, when you are getting your first cup of coffee or checking your mail. We all laugh and wander off to our classrooms, but… For me, this joke has always left a strange little itch of a thought, something like a tiny splinter, catching at the back of my brain.
And then to read Paul’s words this morning; it was as if something snagged on that splinter. A beautiful seamless garment catching on an imperceptible thorn…
And there was something else it reminded me of: in the third chapter of Genesis, there is that strange moment when God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden –not as punishment for their sin, but—so that they do not reach out their hands and eat from the tree of life and “live forever.” (cf. Genesis 3:22-23)
That idea that God didn’t want humans to live forever has always puzzled me. Why? Wouldn’t living forever be a good thing? It would free us from the fear of death, and wouldn’t that solve a lot of the world’s problems? No more Covid. No more cancer. No more starvation. No more hospitals. And no more funerals!
Why was that “tree of life” even kept apart? Why were we not supposed to eat from it? What was it God feared? Or what was it God wanted for us that required us not to live forever? I think the answer to that question is found in what Paul is teaching the Athenians here.
God was not afraid of us living forever, but afraid for us. God understood that, if we were to live forever, we would be doomed to thinking we were sufficient unto ourselves; we would begin to think were our own gods. For our own good, we needed temporal limitations as a kind of driving force –an urge within—an itch of sorts, to make us begin to scratch the surface of our existence, make us begin to seek something else, something beyond ourselves. For only in seeking to scratch this itch, to resolve the problem of our limitations, our need for shelter, for safety, for sustenance, for security, for help, for another…. only be scratching at the itch of our insufficiency, our mortality, would we discover that beneath the surface of this life, there is something more, something so much more.
Later in Acts, as Paul looks toward what will become his final mission trip, he announces “…it is clear to me that imprisonment and persecution await me…” (20:23b) And yet Paul is not afraid. He is set on going forward, toward whatever will come; imprisonment, persecution, or worse. As fearful as these seem, Paul is set on going forward with his mission. Because he knows, it’s not about him. It’s not about his will, or comfort or pleasure. There is something much worse than discomfort, worse than imprisonment, worse than persecution that we should fear: and that is the curse of thinking we are enough, thinking the world revolves around us; the curse of becoming our own gods.
We need the prison of our mortality, and the persecutions of the flesh—vulnerability, weakness, sickness, pain, exhaustion, hunger, desires—to open our eyes to our own insufficiency, that we might discover the truth and the blessing of our need. And discover there, in our hunger, in our insufficiency, in our longing for something more, something beyond ourselves, a kind of theology. A theology of need.
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