Keep My Commandments: A Meditation on John 14 and Acts 17 for the 6th Sunday of Easter

 

If ye love me, keep my commandments.

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter,

that he may abide with you forever;

Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive,

because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him:

but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.

I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.

Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more;

but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also.

At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father,

and ye in me, and I in you.

 He that hath my commandments,

and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me:

and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father,

and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.

 

…

 

Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said,

Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious.

 For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions,

I found an altar with this inscription, To The Unknown God.

Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.

 

Jesus’ teaching to His disciples in John 14 continued with a theme of both faith and revelation:  to love Jesus is to keep His Word, and by that love will the Holy Spirit be given to reveal Jesus ever further.  As Jesus is the Eternal Word of the Father sent to us, so abiding in Jesus is to abide in His Word, and abiding in the Word of Jesus is to also abide in the Father who sent Him.  That restored relationship of mankind with God by faith in His Word creates all the renewal of life man had lost by his fall into sin and death, because in Jesus alone is the forgiveness of sins, eternal life, and salvation from the judgment all men earn by their evil.  Added to this, Jesus noted that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth whom the world cannot receive in unbelief, would be not only given to those who believe in Jesus, but that Spirit would indwell all those who believe.  The economy of God’s salvation of man reunites him again in the fullness of his Maker, restored by the Word to the Father, and empowered by the Spirit to live forever in His Trinitarian fellowship.  The fullness and unity of God in His Holy Trinity, is brought forth to mankind that all people might be restored in Him, taught by Him, enlivened by Him, empowered by Him, and preserved in Him forever.

 

Yet if this inestimable gift is brought to man by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, what remains for those who are without faith?  St. Paul’s sojourn into Athens, recorded in Acts 17, is a fitting example:  superstition, misdirected religious piety, and esoteric philosophical speculation.  Paul started by debating with the Jews in Athens, where some believed, and many did not, despite having the testimony of the Old Testament Prophets which all pointed forward to the Christ.  Outside the Jewish synagogue, the majority population of Athens were devotees of the pagan gods of Greece and Rome, or of a philosophical school which gravitated either toward the lustful living of the Epicureans, or the rigorous discipline of the Stoics… or some blend of all three.  It was these Athenians who brought Paul before the Areopagus—a council of philosophical and religious judges who heard disputes and debates among the people for centuries prior to Paul’s arrival.  Educated and aware of the perils of Athenian debate, not the least of which were described in the trial of Socrates some four centuries earlier, Paul began his proclamation of Jesus and His Word.  Not lost on him was that he stood on Mar’s or Ares’ Hill, the gods of war to the Romans and Greeks respectively, in full site of the magnificent Acropolis not far away, with all its idols and statues to the Olympian deities.

 

Paul met them where he found them, which is to say, he engaged them in language they understood and the context in which they lived.  He identified among the vast number of idols one that was dedicated to the Unknown God, as if something in the back of the Athenian mind knew that for all their vaunted education and history, there was something very important they still could not see.  Paul declared that Unknown God to them, beginning with the Creation of the universe, the nature of man made in God’s image, and culminating with the redemption of all mankind through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  Paul’s witness to the Gospel was more than fanciful legend cast forth by poets, morality tales that supported a political or social order, or philosophical school that tortured logic and reason to justify a desired lifestyle.  Paul’s Gospel was one that happened in real time, with real people, and had real consequences for all mankind, because the God whom Paul proclaimed made it clear that He alone was the one and true God from whom all things came forth and to whom all things shall return.  Some of those Athenians received Paul’s Word of Jesus, and many did not… at least at first.  Dionysius the Areopagite, one of the judges gathered to hear Paul, followed him together with others.  Celebrated now as a saint in both eastern and western churches, Dionysius is often remembered as the first Bishop of Athens, in a country that would later become synonymous with eastern Christianity in the whole Greek speaking world.

 

Our world is not so unlike the first century AD, with rising tides of pagan religions and philosophical confusion bringing increasing darkness to many cities around the world.  But the Light of Jesus and His Word still shine forth, dispelling the demons who cloud men’s minds and enslave their souls.  Yet it does not come by speaking to pagan audiences as if they were well schooled in the Hebrew Prophets and the Apostolic faith set forth in Holy Scripture, because this is simply not where they are.  Neither does it come by watering down the Word of God until it is indistinguishable from the sophistic soup of modern intelligentsia, like one other path to therapeutic moralism or political utopia.  Rather, what cuts to the quick of our modern malaise is the reality of the world as God has made it, which testifies to the nature of the Creator and His creatures; the reality of good and evil, of truth and error, of life and death, of time and eternity; the reality of the only One who could conquer all darkness by His life, death, and resurrection, so that He might offer forgiveness, eternal life, and salvation to all who would trust in Him.  The inescapable reality of Jesus and His Gospel stands by the divine power of His Incarnate Word, and moves all people to either receive Him in faith or reject Him in unbelief.  Yet by that Word works the Holy Spirit, so that all who believe do so by the grace of God, and in that faith which itself is a gift of grace, receive grace in abundance together with the indwelling of God’s Spirit to lead, enlighten, empower, and preserve them in God’s fellowship forever.  The task of the Christian in evangelism is not to seek out new and crafty words to woo people into the church, but rather to present to Living and Eternal Word to all people, that all who might repent and believe in Jesus would live in Him by His Word.

 

We must not be daunted by the peculiarities of our age, nor the hills upon which we are called to testify.  The same Word which gave life to the world at creation, is speaking and breathing life into the world today, and shall continue to do so until it speaks in judgment on the Last Day.  That Word of Jesus is the Means by which He has sought and saved us, and the Means by which He continues to seek and save all who will put their trust in Him.  Have no fear to stand atop the war-god’s hill and proclaim the saving reality of Jesus, for there is nothing in all creation that can overthrow the Eternal Word of God, and that Word alone is the fellowship of life to all who will abide in it.  Solid Deo Gloria.  Amen.