[Paul continued to say to the people in Athens:] "For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we, too, are his offspring.’ Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals." (Acts 17:28-29)
To hear the New Testament tell it (especially the apostle Paul!), once you start making gold or silver statues as objects of devotion, it's a sure sign you have lost sight of the real and living God. Instead, the scandalous claim of the Gospel is that the true God was willing to be made visible and tangible, not as a sculpture in precious metals, but in the flesh and blood of humanity--in Jesus himself.
Here in these verses from Acts 17, which continue through a passage many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, Paul the Apostle is speaking to the crowd gathered at the Areopagus in Athens and he's trying to make a connection with them. We saw yesterday that he affirmed how all humanity is created by the same one living God, and how all people are ultimately a part of the same human family. We also saw how Paul tried to get his foot in the door with this audience by latching onto one particular altar he had seen, among the many shrines, statues, and temples to a whole pantheon of deities, which was dedicated "to an unknown god." Paul saw that as his entry point and says here now, "Well, what you all have been worshipping just in case to hedge your bets as an unknown god, I have come to make known to you." And his hope is eventually to get to tell the story of the God of Israel and how this God was now being made known in Jesus of Nazareth.
But along the way, Paul is also going to have to raise the potentially unpopular, but very necessary, claim that the real and living God cannot be reduced to a human-made image, and that God will not share divine glory with statues, monuments, or idols. This, by the way, is not a new idea that Paul has invented, but of course, a pretty core claim of the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament as well. Going all the way back to the actual Ten Commandments, God pretty clearly insisted that the ancient Israelites were to have "no graven images," for any purpose--not to represent their God, not to honor their kings in statue form, and not even to mint their coins. The temptation is always too great to start to give our allegiance to the object, the symbol, or the figurehead, rather than to the living God. From there on, God is sternly opposed to the making of statues, idols, and other such images, whether it's the golden calf in the wilderness while Moses is upon Mount Sinai, or the Philistines' statue of their god Dagon that mysteriously falls over in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant, or Nebuchadnezzar's big golden statue of himself that he demands his subjects bow down to (which lands three young men in the fiery furnace for their civil disobedience). Even the coins of the Roman empire, which had Caesar's image on them, had to be exchanged for non-idolatrous coins, in order to be used in the Temple!
All of that is to say, the Scriptures are pretty well unified on the point that you don't ever want to go messing with religious ceremonies and carved statues of anybody--not your king, not your emperor, not your national (or imperial) symbols, and not your god/God. It's just a bad idea--we are always going to be tempted either to give our allegiance to something or someone that is not God, or to end up attempting to tame and domesticate God by reducing the divine to an object we can control and manipulate (whoever has access to the statues of your gods is thought to have access to the gods themselves, right?). So for Paul, walking through a city that was full of both shrines to the classical gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome but also full of statues to Caesar and the Empire itself, this was an important point to be clear about. It probably landed like a slap in the face to hear Paul say that the real and living God wasn't like gold or silver or marble, even though there were also certainly some Greek philosophers who would have surely agreed that he was right. So, why would Paul, after trying so hard to make a friendly connection to his audience, all of a sudden take such a sharp stance about God not being like precious metals or stones?
I think ultimately for Paul, it's because the claim of both Israel's story and the story of Jesus is that God has chosen to be revealed in humanity rather than in frozen poses of statues or imperial monuments meant to project strength. The authentic God is always the un-gilded God. Even before the commandment against "graven images" in the Ten Commandments and the Torah, there is the claim of the creation story that we human beings ourselves are the image of God. Right there in Genesis 1, God chooses to make humankind in God's own image. So it's not that that God is unknowable or too mysterious or too self-important to be expressed in some form--it's that we human beings are made to be that reflection of God's character. A statue will never do--it will always be inert and indifferent. A sculpture cannot love, cannot suffer for you, cannot comfort you, and cannot bleed for you. The truly scandalous claim of both Testaments is that God is more knowable through the face of a fragile human being than a masterfully carved sculpture or a statue covered in gold. All too often, statues are meant to impress, to intimidate, or to dazzle spectators; the living God doesn't need to do any of that, but instead chooses to relate to us through the flesh-and-blood fragility of human beings.
And that is precisely what will allow Paul to make the connection to Jesus--who is as utterly human as any of us, and yet who brings us face to face with the living God. And that's really what Paul has come to say--both to the ancient Athenians and to us. God doesn't stay off in some distant heaven, unknowable and unrelatable, but has chosen to come close in the humanity of Jesus. If we were looking for God to come off as impressive and intimidating like a giant statue, we have been looking in the wrong place all along. God chooses to meet us in places that seem too lowly for a respectable deity--among the poor and the hungry, in the face of the sick and the foreigner, among the imprisoned and the outcast, and with the last, the least, and the left behind. God chooses, ultimately, to be revealed in the fragile flesh and blood of Jesus, nailed to a cross in what looks like utter defeat and weakness. The reason the Bible consistently warns against falling for gold and silver statues is that we keep getting duped to give our allegiance to those signs of supposed strength when God was always wanting to be known in the commonness of our own humanity.
If that's true--and again, it seems pretty clear that the whole thrust of the Scriptures points in this direction--then you and I, in all of our fragile and finite human-ness, might just be the best way to connect someone else with God. We don't need to "wow" people with special effects, dazzle them with technological spectacles, or impress people with monuments. We just bring our own ordinary human selves into conversation with other people, as they are and as we are, trusting that we are made in the image of God, and so are they. If our best goal and highest hopes for this day are simply to help people be connected to God, that might be all it takes. You are enough.
Lord God, use us today to bring someone else into deeper connection with you, and help us to be drawn more closely to you through the people you send across your path today.
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