In God There Is No Change.
We Must Change for the Better -
Reading: Acts 17:22-31
17:22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, "Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 17:23 For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, 'To an unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you."
We tend to forget, that the Creator God is ultimately not human. We cannot argue or quarrel with Him, for even our whole imagination is not capable of encompassing Him. That is why we talk about Him as if He were a human, like an old man with a white beard or a Santa Claus figure. It is also why He had to send us messengers, like angels, patriarchs, and prophets, to intermediate and teach us to understand the creation and the universe, the earth and the heavens, calling us toward truth, justice, and love.
His love never changes, but Isaiah still spoke about God as a punisher who breaks down walls and cities, commanding deadly droughts that leave unfaithful vineyards devoured. We should understand again that this picture of a destroying God is symbolic speech too, just like the parables told by Jesus.
The parable of Jesus was given to the disciples about the mutinying workers in the Father's vineyard, where the workers killed all the messengers of the King, the owner of the whole Earth, sent to the vineyard in order to supervise them. As it is written in the parable, after sending other messengers, finally God "sent his son to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.' But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, 'This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance,'" which means they want to rule heaven.
The retaliation is announced by Jesus in an Isaiah-like style, saying: "Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?" They said to him, "He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time."
Because of the language of the parables, this is still symbolic speech, as if God were a revenging or retaliating human person, but actually He is not.
Then what is happening? Humans simply cannot touch God. Thus, what they do is hurt themselves, because breaking the law is like a sharpened metal boomerang. The blade hurts the person who throws it as well.
It means that we are the very punishers of ourselves. What does this mean on earth? On the planet, if we cut the breathing belt of rainforests and we pollute the oceans and the air, then we and the next generations will have to drink this man-filled cup of poisons. Just in the last century, because of a lack of love, compassion, understanding, care, and normality, we had two global wars and perpetual local wars since then with hundreds of millions of casualties altogether, and it is probably still not over.
We reap what we sow, as we sow our deeds and our omissions.
In the eyes of the first congregation of Jesus-followers in Jerusalem, who were explicitly Jewish, they followed an extensive and often complicated Jewish system of rules and regulations, in order to serve God in a Jewish way. Nonetheless, they also maintained that every other nation must obey an "after-Flood" minimum set of laws, the so-called Seven Laws of Noah.
These Seven Laws of Noah are the following: You shall not worship idols. You shall not curse God. You shall not commit murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not eat flesh torn from a living animal. You must establish courts of justice.
Nowadays, despotism and dictatorships are often camouflaged by a skin of democracy. Even ancient Greece was created on the sweat and tears of slaves. The free voters of ancient Athens, the example of ancient democracy, were slave-owning free citizens. Around half of the population were slaves. In the Roman Empire, whose legislation is taught in all universities through the world, around two-thirds of the population were slaves.
Jesus admitted that this is known and usual; sad but nothing is unheard of. It was always so, at least among the Gentiles, that rulers are mostly ruling for the interest of the elite, as it is written in the Bible, that their great ones are tyrants over them.
However, JESUS added that you, His followers, should not do the same.
Among you, which means among us, there should exist another rule, and it is the Gospel. Among us there is another ruler, and He is Jesus. As He says: “Whoever wishes to become great among you, must be your servant.” Not a tyrant but a servant, the opposite of a despot.
Our Lord says, that GREED is the way of the world, you know it well, but it shall not be yours.
We need real Christian legislation to ensure that the Gospel rules, and there must be no needy among us.
We should show in our communities a real life, visible Christianity, in which we share all of the resources we have, we share the workload of which should be done, and share the wealth according to our rule, which is the Gospel, and according to our ruler, who is King Jesus Christ, in order to eradicate poverty once and for all.
In the artificially created world of greedy competition, people act as enemies, opponents, or competitors to each other, or at least like contestants in a cruel and permanent war for bread and gold, for roof and beer, influence and power.
The Christian way differs. It must differ. We believe that we are brothers and sisters in Christ.
The congregation shall act as a family, and the world Christianity shall act as an extended family, as we are all children of one Creator. Imagine the scope of Christianity, which is on paper the biggest religion on Earth, having 2.4 billion followers.
We should have changed the World for the better a long time ago. Regarding mere numbers, we could have easily done it, and we still could do it. Normally in a family, even in an extended family, we do not fight or kill each other. In a family, if someone is hungry, we do not ask whether they have money or not; we share the food, roof, and even money, because the family is the community of true and organic love.
As the Lord says in the Gospel of John: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Following Jesus, we have to follow the measures of His love toward humanity, in order to live in the communion of God, who is our Father by the Holy Spirit, as it is written:
“He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” We have to live according to our call to amend this world, by Faith and Grace, in order to inherit the World to come. AMEN
