The Areopagus is Not Everywhere

The gospel cannot be preached the same way twice

Acts 17.22-31

Though I’m known to creep regularly upon the half-hour threshold, the proclamation of the gospel, in point of fact, requires only three words, a subject and a predicate: Jesus is risen. If preaching fails to open up its hearers’s future as a promise rather than a threat— Jesus, the friend of sinners— is risen, then the preaching has not been gospel preaching. As Father Al Kimel writes: “The gospel is proclamation of the risen Lord cloaked in eschatological promise.”

Jesus lives with death behind him!

This is the novum the apostles raced out into the Mediterranean world to transmit. This spare and simple message, however, is more complex than the sum of its words. The Risen Jesus is not merely the content of the proclamation; the Father’s Son is the speaker.

Sermons and sacraments are Christ’s self-communication.

The Lord Jesus addresses us from the future into which the Father resurrected him; he does so address us through word and water, loaf and cup.

Critical to Karl Barth’s emergency homiletic, the Second Helvetic Confession puts it so: “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.”

You really spoke to me today when you said… the parishioner will say to me often before adumbrating observations and proclamations that were not— at least not as I thought— in the sermon I’d prepared. This is because, as a preacher, I am as ordinary and passive a weapon as bread and wine. The Risen Jesus is the active agent of the gospel message, “Jesus is risen!” Jesus is the preacher, the proclamation, and the present, for the gospel is a word in which Christ gifts himself to us.

Because the Jesus-who-is-not-dead speaks from the last future through the day’s preacher to address listeners in precise present moments, the gospel, Robert Jenson insists, can never be spoken the same way twice.