An Altar to An Unknown GodRead Time 9 min

A few weeks ago in the lectionary, we heard the reading from Acts of the Apostles where St. Paul speaks to the ancient Greeks: “You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious. For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’ What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.”

I am always struck by this passage. There is something almost haunting about the idea of an altar to an unknown god. True, there could be a variety of reasons why someone would build such an altar. But it makes me think of those all throughout history who were attentive enough to the world God created to see echoes of him in it, even if they did not know him, those who heard the voice of an unknown god. And for a moment that makes me feel that God was very distant to them — until I remember all the ways that Jesus is eagerly desiring relationship with every one of them.

This reading is the story of St. Paul being sent to some of those people, to tell them of the God they were seeking. But St. Paul also speaks of some of the other ways in which Christ is always the one initiating the relationship. He loved us first and he is present to us in every facet of his creation:

“It is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything. He made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.”

This story is an ancient one; it takes place in the Areopagus and references altars to the Greek gods. Our world might be unrecognizable in many ways to the ancient Athenians, but the core of this story is an unchanged call to evangelization and a practical lesson from St. Paul about our approach.

St. Paul paid attention to the non-Christian culture to which he was sent. He looked at their altars and cultural movements — just as we might look at TV shows and movies today. He saw and called out a specific place in their lives where he could see the ways in which they were seeking. The parallel longings of our secular peers might not be so clearly marked as “an altar to an unknown god,” but they are there. And those deepest longings are always the arrows pointing to God and the places he most longs to encounter his people. Because the truth is everyone has a God-sized hole in their heart and everyone, at least at some point in their lives, tries to fill it up with things that are not God.

Any call to evangelization is also a call to us to grow deeper in relationship with God. If I am not willing to bring the deepest longings of my heart to Jesus and to trust him to be the one to fulfill them, how will I tell someone else that Jesus is the answer to all their questions? The deepest longings of my heart are not clean-cut and simple. They are not abstract or easily resolved at the end of each prayer time. But God only deals in the real. We are made for relationship with him, and the immensity of our desires is just another signal that we are made for something that is too big to comprehend: eternal relationship with the Trinity. Pasteurized questions and simplified prayers are not the place where Jesus dwells. He meets us in the wilderness of our hearts as they really are.

As St. John Paul II said as pope, “It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.”

Jesus meets us in the most authentic desires of our hearts, and he desires that same depth of relationship with every human being. The more we have allowed him into every crevice of our own hearts, the more we will be prepared to invite others to do the same.

St. Paul took the time to learn the culture of the Greeks so that he could point to that ache in a way they would understand. When he preached the Good News of Christ, it was as an answer to their own deepest question. We can all do that. In fact, it is imperative that we all do that. We are called to preach the Good News to everyone we encounter. The externals will be different than they were for St. Paul, but at the center, our job remains the same.