I RECENTLY attended a memorial service in Oxford for my old Latin tutor, Donald Russell. It followed the customary pattern for such events, interweaving elements of Christian liturgy with personal remembrances. As I looked around, recognising people from another lifetime, there sprang into my mind Paul’s words at the Areopagus (the “rock of Ares”, a place in Athens where justice was enacted): “We too are his offspring.”
The congregation at the service was distinguished. But that was not the point. What mattered was that here was an assembly of one man’s intellectual offspring, his family according to the mind. Not all of us were of equal distinction, but we were all changed by association with a teacher whose expertise in language was, frankly, epic.
Every teacher has the same daunting privilege of being remembered. Some stand out in the memory for their bullying or sarcasm, others for patience, or enthusiasm. For good or for ill, we do not forget them.
Christianity is like this: a family, but not of blood, and not of learning, either: a family we can join because we are like-minded, not because we have passed a test. We become members through a sacrament of new beginning, the death of the old life giving birth to the new one.
In the reading from Acts, Paul was facing a city full of strangers: strangers by blood, and strangers in terms of culture and society. He spoke into that alien audience, in a strange place, the truths that, he believed, they needed to know. Then he invited them to join a new family, the family of the Spirit. Outside the lection for Easter 6, that story concludes by saying that some scoffed and others procrastinated (“We will hear you again about this”). But a few made up their minds then and there to join this new family of the Spirit.
Paul judged his audience well. Without compromising on Christian truth, he had looked around him with interested, noticing eyes, to see what he might have in common with the inhabitants of Athens. An image of an “unknown god” and a line of verse from a foreign poet gave him a way to touch their hearts, so that he could win those hearts for Christ.
Two centuries later, a more pugnacious preacher was doing things differently. He did not seek to win his audience through finding common ground. Confident in the superiority of the Christian cause, and hostile to everything that did not match his version of it, he asked belligerently: “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What does the Academy have to do with the Church? What do heretics have to do with Christians?”
His name was Tertullian. He may have been a lawyer; he certainly had the usual Roman education in how to argue a case, including denigrating his opponents. But abusing people who disagree with you is not a very good way to win them over — not then, and not now.
How different was Paul’s way of speaking at the Areopagus! The apostle had warmed the hearts of hearers with his courtesy and respect as he sought out what was good in what, to him, was “other”. He took the trouble to observe and reflect. He talked to the crowd in terms that did not alienate them, but, instead, made them feel heard.
The Gospel suggests that Paul, not Tertullian, chose the way that was in tune with God’s loving purposes. Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit as an Advocate — in other words, a lawyer for the defence: one whose task it is to plead a case on behalf of guilty humanity, calling for judgement to be tempered with mercy, reminding our Father that we, too, are his children. Thundering denunciation could have been our fate. But, as one of their poets has said, “to the divine it seemed otherwise” (dis aliter visum, Virgil, Aeneid 2.428).
In the New Testament, we mostly see Christians as they were when they were not on the top of the pile socially, culturally, politically. Becoming history’s top dog did not make Christians better or kinder. These readings encourage Christians today to recover the biblical model promoted by Peter and Paul: interrogate your prejudices. Listen first. Do not resort to anger and hostility when others challenge you. Meet them instead with “gentleness and reverence, and a clear conscience” (1 Peter 3.16).