The Known and Knowing God--May 15, 2023

The Known and Knowing God--May 15, 2023

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, "Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 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." [Acts 17:22-23]

"The devil you know is better than the devil you don't know," goes the old saying. The conventional wisdom seems to be that it is safer--that is, less risky--to face a problem or enemy that you can locate and that you know something about, rather than something more elusive and foreign. A returning college student puts up with an annoying roommate in college whose habits and bad manners he is at least prepared to deal with, rather than kick him out and risk getting an even more annoying person to live with. The seasoned voter might re-elect the incumbents, even though you're pretty sure they're crooks or incompetent, rather than voting for new candidates whose vices have yet to be discovered. The young woman trapped in an abusive relationship sometimes stays with her violent spouse, because she is afraid of the unknown and thinks it might be worse to be on her own, facing challenges she can't imagine yet. We seem to have good reason to prefer the devil we know to the riskier, less manageable devil we don't know.

I wonder, though, whether it is not the opposite with God--or the gods we choose to acknowledge in our lives. A God we know--and even more so, a God who knows us--is riskier and more real than a god we do not know. Think about it--the "religion" of the people of Athens is really more of a pious hedging of bets. Having statues erected, not only to a pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses, and not only to a host of other deities from conquered peoples, but also one erected just in case for an "unknown god," is just an attempt to buy divine fire insurance. We're not even sure there are any other gods, but just in case there are other gods, and just in case that god is bribable with sacrifices, we will make offerings to him--or her--or it. That seems to be the line of thinking. It's easier to manage an unknown god--a god who stays nice and abstract, nice and hypothetical. Why, such a god might not even exist, but it makes you feel better--and more in control of things--to have a statue for it, in case an unknown god is out there who is more powerful than the gods you do worship. An unknown god can be theorized about or estimated, rather than known and dealt with on his or her own terms. The Athenians would have calculated what kind of sacrifices an average, "reasonable," deity would be satisfied with, and then simply provide those--no more devotion and no less than any other god like Zeus or Athena or Poseidon--or Caesar. It seems an unknown god would have been a pushover--no commandments to follow, no peculiar ways of life, no ultimate claims on her or his worshippers, only the devotion appropriate to one in a long line of divinities, right? And so, the conventional wisdom would have said, you could have all your bases covered and be insured against any contingencies, just by bowing down to one more statue--just in case there was a god who went with it. An unknown god would be less risky, less demanding, than a known, and knowing, God.

So leave it to Saint Paul to wreck a convenient religious arrangement. "What you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you," Paul says. He comes to mess up the safe religion they have concocted by putting a face (literally, a human face--Jesus'!) on this unknown god, and giving this God a story. Paul comes to tell them not only that there is a God whom the Athenians do not yet know, but that this God upsets the marketplace of deities they were used to. This God claims complete allegiance, not a share alongside a god of the sea and a god of harvest and a god of war. This God is not hypothetical or abstract--and this God is not even "average-able" or "reasonable." This is a God, Paul will say, who does strange, peculiar things, like making a world and giving it to humanity as a free gift; things like dying on a cross; things like rising from a grave when no one is looking; things like loving us without keeping record of our wrongs or demanding compensation in the form of sacrifices at all. This is a God who makes claims on us--and exclusive claims, at that. To know this God--and to be known by this God--is to have your life changed and your priorities turned upside down. But this God will not be bought off by sacrifices, and instead rather claims our whole lives as living sacrifices.

I wonder how much we Christians, even though we have been given the face of Jesus to recognize God, still try and turn our Lord into an "unknown god." The more we pretend we do know really know what God is like, the more we can keep the illusion that God's ways do not affect ours. If we downplay the particular character of our God--the God who shames the wise with foolishness; who blesses the heartbroken and the peacemakers; who cleanses outcast lepers and eats with tax collectors and sinners; who looks out for the alien, the orphan, and the widow; and who pays workers all the same so that they and their families can eat--then we can pretend, too, that God does not call us to the same way of life. If we keep in our heads just an abstract picture of "divine providence," like some invisible impersonal hand winding up the world like a watch and letting it go, we do not have to face the possibility that a real, knowable, and known God might call us face to face to leave our homeland like Abraham, or lie down on the altar while Dad has the sacrificial knife in hand like Isaac, or drop our nets and follow like Peter and James and John. An "unknown" god doesn't call us to such sacrifices or risks, because an unknown god does not speak. We would, it seems, have less risk in our lives if we could just keep the God who knows us at bay.

And yet, the God who knows us--the same God who chooses to be known in the life of Jesus and in the words of the prophets--is the only God we get. That is not a bad thing, even if it is riskier than the illusion of a tame, distant, theorized deity. It is deeply good that ours is a God we can know, who chooses to relate to us. It means that we can argue with God, plead with God, be surprised by God, and be loved by God. It means that we no longer have to treat faith as a heavenly insurance plan for "just in case," but can receive it as a relationship with One who is always beyond our grasp, but never unreachable.

O God, you whom we have known in Jesus, and who have known us from before we were formed in our mother's womb, let us risk knowing you as you show yourself to be. And let us risk telling others about your ways, even when they surprise and confound us. Draw us into relationship with you, O Living God, rather than into speculation about an idea of you. We ask it in Jesus' name, who showed us your face.