Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter – 25th May 2025 -Readings: Acts 15, 1-2, 22-29; Revelation 21, 10-14, 22-26; John 14, 23-29.
Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens
Let’s start with a little imagination game – a little more difficult if you have never visited Athens, but close your eyes and join in if you can. It is May 25th 2025. You are in Athens standing in Adrianou (street) with the Roman Agora behind you – Roman, okay, but not everything modern is bad! You are walking in the direction of an area named after a far more ancient monument, Thisseio. Some African guys are harassing passers-by, especially young female tourists, to buy their bangles and beads. This is Plaka district of Athens, so not surprisingly you are met by shops and little street stalls selling everything tourists seem to want – from necklaces that spell your name in Greek, to key-rings in the shape of something you certainly wouldn’t take home to your elderly grand-parents as a holiday souvenir.
There are restaurants galore, all setting out before us the very best of Greek tourist menus with a designated staff member whose job it is to entice us to check the menu and chose this restaurant – oddly it is the ones with rather attractive young female staff that are the busiest. I am wondering if there is a marketing strategy here?
All along the right hand side is a seemingly endless chain of bars and tavernas and bistros.
Look to your left towards the Acropolis soaring majestically above you. What do you see? Well, rather surprisingly, first there is the Line 1 Metro line which runs from Kifissia to Piraeus. It cuts right through the edge of this ancient site. It is the first and oldest of the Metro lines. The rolling stock is old and ‘tinny’ looking and covered with graffiti – sorry, political art, as it is called. Next, the wall that separates the railway line from the original Greek agora, the ancient market place of classical Athens. Where you are standing is a major tourist viewpoint. The modern wall separating the Metro line from the Agora is one vast marble canvas of metropolitan art – that’s the graffiti again – sprayed on the wall to support every type of cultural, social and anarchist ideology.
Next is the agora iself, with is peaceful atmosphere – except when the old train goes past – with the American School reconstruction of a classical stoa to elicit from us something of the image of ancient Greek philosophers and sophists gathering to discuss the meaning of life, Epicureans, the transmigration of the soul, Platonists, and Pythagoreans, and every imaginable ancient school of thought.
Rising up beyond it stands the magnificent and impressive Acropolis, with its Parthenon first built as a temple to the Virgin Goddess Athena, in later centuries becoming a holy temple of the Panaghia for Byzantine worship. It is an iconic global icon, though I have to say it is not as old as the Temple of Aphea in my island of Aegina! That’s a little bit of local promotion.
In Ottoman times the Parthenon of Athens was used to store ammunition. It was because of this that an explosion created the ruin that we now see. I often wonder what the poor Ottoman guardsman thought when he accidentally threw down his cigarette butt. ‘Oops!’ ‘Πω, Πω’ if he had a bit of demotic Greek.
Between where you are standing and the Acropolis, there is a small hill. It is crawling with people, who look the size of little ants – but it is busy. It is, of course, the Areopagus hill, where once stood the building where the Athenian Council would meet. It is here that St. Paul spoke to the ‘men of Athens’ in his famous speech – I see you are a religious people…I saw a tomb to the ‘unknown god’…let me tell you about him; A stunning moment of Christian evangelization.
This was a long time ago, and much has changed. However much has not. Man is still polytheistic as he was when the Parthenon was erected, and he sets up shrines to his own gods. If you stand there there in Adrianou, the street named after the Emperor Hadrian, whose magnificent library is at the start of this street, you will witness some of those modern day deities. Travel, commercialism, globalization, pollution, environmental usually seek to worship what challenges us, what makes us look face-to-face with ourselves, face up to what we do to each other and to God’s creation.
So as we look towards this rather barren little hill, with the little ants crawling over it, we are drawn to think that St. Paul’s message to the Athenians, now universally available through the writing of St. Luke in his Acts of the Apostles, which we read Sunday by Sunday in the season of Easter is as relevant now as it has ever been.
