Wednesday
of the 6th Week of Easter
May 4, 2016 6:30am
Readings: Acts
17.15, 22 – 18.1
John
16.12-15
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Today’s first reading shows Paul in Athens.
The Good News of Jesus had not yet reached here.
The Greeks have had some great philosophers, like
Aristotle and Plato, but at this time, they did not yet have the message of
Jesus.
So Paul goes to what is called the Areopagus.
This is the place where the civic leaders and other
high-powered people of the city would meet.
Paul is speaking about God, the Creator, the Father.
He quotes some words that I find so beautiful:
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"In him we live and move and have our being . . .
"
These were the words of
a Greek philosopher named Epimenides, who lived six centuries before
Christ.
Epimenides' was speaking
of a divine, transcendent being about whom we could know next to nothing.
But he was saying that this
God is the power or force that keeps all things in the cosmos in motion.
Paul adopts these words
to preach the Christian idea that God is intimately involved with his
creation.
So:
“In him, we live”:
God is the breath of life that animates each one of us.
“In him, we move”:
God is both the power that enables us to move and the way we are to move to
be our true selves.
And
lastly, “In him, we have our being”: God is the source of
all that is and holds all that is in existence.
So Paul takes these
words from one whom we might call a pagan philosopher and applies them to
God, the Father whom Jesus reveals.
So maybe the message
today is to live with this awareness or sense of God: “In him we live and move and have our being.”
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