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22 So Paul took his stand in the open space at the Areopagus and laid it out for them. "It is plain to see that you Athenians take your religion seriously. 23 When I arrived here the other day, I was fascinated with all the shrines I came across. And then I found one inscribed, to the god nobody knows. I'm here to introduce you to this God so you can worship intelligently, know who you're dealing with. 24 "The God who made the world and everything in it, this Master of sky and land, doesn't live in custom-made shrines 25 or need the human race to run errands for him, as if he couldn't take care of himself. He makes the creatures; the creatures don't make him. 26 Starting from scratch, he made the entire human race and made the earth hospitable, with plenty of time and space for living 27 so we could seek after God, and not just grope around in the dark but actually find him. He doesn't play hide-and-seek with us. He's not remote; he's near. 28 We live and move in him, can't get away from him! One of your poets said it well: 'We're the God-created.' 29 Well, if we are the God-created, it doesn't make a lot of sense to think we could hire a sculptor to chisel a god out of stone for us, does it? 30 "God overlooks it as long as you don't know any better - but that time is past. The unknown is now known, and he's calling for a radical life-change. 31 He has set a day when the entire human race will be judged and everything set right. And he has already appointed the judge, confirming him before everyone by raising him from the dead." ( Acts 17:22-31 The Message Bible)
Are you a person who loves to learn new things? Or, the kind that enjoyed learning to a certain point and then decided enough was enough? We are reading the writings of a man who loved to learn and we heard his discourse to a people, like him, who believed they never learned enough. They were people who believed in many gods and reached a point where they, in order to cover all their bases, dedicated a shrine to "The Unknown God," Or as this modern version says, "The god nobody knows." What an opening Paul sees in this shrine.
Paul is standing in the most intellectually prestigious public space in the ancient world — the Areopagus, the hill of Ares in Athens, where philosophers, poets, and civic leaders gathered to debate ideas and adjudicate matters of consequence. The city around him is breathtaking, honeycombed with temples and altars, statues of gods rendered in marble and bronze so polished they gleam in the Mediterranean sun.
Paul is not a tourist. He is, Luke tells us earlier in the chapter, deeply distressed by what he sees — not because it is ugly, but because it is misdirected. All this longing. All this seeking. All this magnificent human reaching toward something beyond the ordinary — and not quite finding it.
And yet, in the middle of all those shrines to gods that Athens knew by name, Paul spots something that stops him cold: an altar with the inscription, To the God Nobody Knows. Somebody in Athens knew that their catalogue of deities was incomplete. Somebody had the intellectual honesty to leave a space, to hedge against the possibility that the divine was bigger than their imagination.
Paul steps into that space. And what he says there is one of the most remarkable pieces of preaching in the entire New Testament — a sermon that begins with a compliment, moves through creation and poetry, and lands, hard, on a fact: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
It is a model for Eastertide witness. And it has something urgent to say to us.
Paul’s opening move is theological and bold. He introduces the God Nobody Knows not as a tribal deity, not as the god of one people or one place, but as the one who made the entire world and everything in it. The Message renders it with characteristic punch: “This Master of sky and land doesn’t live in custom-made shrines or need the human race to run errands for him.”
This would have landed as a provocation to an Athenian audience steeped in temple culture and the elaborate rituals of feeding, clothing, and appeasing the gods. The gods of Greece needed things from human beings. They were, in a sense, dependent on human devotion to keep them satisfied. Paul announces a God who is in need of nothing — who gives life and breath and everything else to every creature, rather than receiving them.
But here is the part that should slow us down in Eastertide: Paul does not describe this God as remote or indifferent. Quite the opposite. He says God arranged the world — the spread of nations, the contours of history, the very texture of human experience — “so we could seek and find him.”
And then these words, which The Message renders with particular grace: “He doesn’t play hide-and-seek with us. He’s not remote; he’s near. We live and move in him, can’t get away from him.”
Paul is quoting the Greek poet Aratus here — a pagan poet, writing centuries before Christ — who intuited something true about the nature of the divine: that we are embedded in God the way fish are embedded in water, the way lungs are embedded in air. The capacity to seek God is not foreign to human nature. It is written into it. We are, as Paul puts it by way of another Greek poet, the God-created.
This has profound implications for how we move through the world during Easter and beyond. Every person we encounter — however far they seem from faith, however buried under skepticism or distraction or hurt — is someone for whom the seeking has already begun, whether they know it or not. The longing is already there. Paul’s sermon is a reminder that we are never introducing a stranger to a stranger. We are introducing people to the one in whom they already live and move and have their being.
Paul could have stopped there. He could have left his Athenian audience with a beautiful, philosophically palatable vision of a transcendent and near God, and many of them would have nodded along. Stoics and Epicureans both had room for something like that in their systems. It was agreeable, even sophisticated.
But Paul does not stop there. He makes a move that is neither philosophically convenient nor socially comfortable. He says: “But now God has drawn back the curtain and shown us who he is.”
The phrase is arresting. After all the epochs of human reaching and seeking, after all the shrines and philosophies and altars to unknown gods — God has acted. Not to give us a better idea, or a more refined theology, or a more elegant argument for divine existence. God has acted in history, specifically and concretely, in a way that changes everything.
And the act is this: the Resurrection of Jesus, raised from the dead.
The Message puts it starkly and beautifully: this event “signals a new beginning, a new order of things.” It is not merely a miracle in the category of unusual events. It is a hinge. Before it, the world is one thing. After it, the world is another. The resurrection is not a footnote to the story of God’s engagement with humanity — it is the turning point on which all of history pivots.
Paul does not offer the resurrection as one item in a list of evidences. He offers it as the evidence — the thing God has done that makes the identity of the God Nobody Knows no longer a mystery. You want to know what this God is like? Look at the man raised from the dead on the third day. Look at the one who went into the tomb and came out the other side. That is your answer. That is who you are dealing with.
For those of us in Eastertide — still living in the light of that first Sunday morning — this is the irreducible core of our faith. We do not offer people a philosophy or a lifestyle or a community, though all those things matter. We offer them a fact and invite them to reckon with what it means. The God who raised Jesus is alive. The curtain is pulled back. The God Nobody Knows has a name and a face and an empty tomb.
Paul ends his sermon with a call that The Message renders with urgency and clarity: “Everyone is called to a radical life-change.”
Other translations use the word repentance. But The Message captures something important in the texture of the Greek word metanoia — it is not merely feeling sorry, not merely a private emotional transaction. It is a reorientation of the entire person. It is what happens when you have been living as though the universe is a closed system — as though the last word belongs to death, to power, to the forces that crush and consume — and you encounter the news that the universe is not a closed system after all. That death has been broken open from the inside. That the last word belongs to the one who raised Jesus.
When that news lands in a human life, it changes things. Not all at once, and not without struggle. But it changes the fundamental orientation of a person — the direction they are facing, the thing they are building their life on, the story they believe they are living inside.
Paul calls this God “the God-who-raises-the-dead.” It is a hyphenated title in The Message, and it functions almost like a name — a name that tells you everything you need to know about who you are dealing with. Not the God-who-is-vaguely-benevolent. Not the God-who-rewards-the-virtuous. The God-who-raises-the-dead.
That title matters enormously when we are in the valleys of our own experience — when a relationship feels irretrievably broken, when a dream has died, when grief has settled in and will not move, when the church feels exhausted and the culture feels hostile and the resurrection feels like something that happened a long time ago to someone else.
Paul’s sermon at the Areopagus says: the God who raised Jesus is the same God in whom you live and move and have your being. He is not remote. He is near. And the thing he is best known for — the thing that drew back the curtain on his identity once and for all — is raising the dead.
That is not past tense. That is present tense. That is who he is.
For Reflection
Paul at the Areopagus gives us a portrait of Eastertide witness that is worth sitting with.
He did not begin by condemning his audience. He began by paying attention — by walking around the city, noticing what people were reaching for, finding the altar where the longing was most honest. He started where they were, not where he wished they were. And then he pointed them from their own longing toward the God who had already answered it.
That is a model worth imitating. The people around us — the ones who have no church, no creed, no framework for faith — are not godless in the deepest sense. They are seekers, often without knowing it. They have built their altars too: to meaning, to connection, to something that will hold when everything else gives way. The question is not whether they are reaching. The question is whether we are paying close enough attention to see it — and whether we are ready to say, gently and clearly, let me tell you about the God who raised Jesus from the dead.
Paul’s sermon did not persuade everyone. Luke tells us that some sneered when he mentioned the resurrection. Others said, politely, “We’ll hear more about this later.” And some believed. That is still the pattern. The resurrection is not a message that lands the same way in every heart. But it is the message. And Eastertide is the season to remember that we carry it — not as a burden, but as the best news the world has ever been offered.
PRAYER: God-who-raises-the-dead, open our eyes to the altars of longing around us, and give us the grace and courage to point every seeking heart toward the risen Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Pay attention to the altar of longing in one person’s life — the question they keep returning to, the ache they can’t quite name — and pray for the moment to say, simply: let me tell you about the God who doesn’t hide.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! We have seen the Lord! Now go and make Him visible to others!
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
