“As I strolled round admiring your sacred monuments, I noticed that you had an altar inscribed: To An Unknown God. Well, the God whom I proclaim is in fact the one whom you already worship without knowing it.” (Acts 17. The image on the left is an ancient Greek monument to an "Unknown God" but it is not from Athens).

This is one of the most surprising statements of the New Testament.  I think Paul is doing much more than simply trying to connect the gospel to the Athenian’s experience.  This is a deeply theological statement. 

People have a built-in desire to know and love God.  When people get in trouble, or see something beautiful—at the best and worst moments—their eyes turn up, their inner voice addresses something/someone bigger.  

This isn't true just of Christians, it’s true of all of us.  And Paul is recognizing this very real dimension, even worship of the one true God, in the practice of the pagan Greeks. 

We believe that God is present to, and calling out to, every human person on the face of the planet.  And if they listen, if they respond, they can truly know him. Jesus is the way to the father, but you don’t have to explicitly know that.  It is not a quiz that grants admission to heaven, it is a relationship.  In the Incarnation Jesus makes a human relationship with the Father possible, and he provides us spiritual and intellectual tools for discovering God, tools that can be metaphorically related to the senses.

Paul says:  “All people might seek the deity and, by groping their way towards him, succeed in finding him. Yet in fact he is not far from any of us, since it is in him that we live, and move, and exist.”  The image is that of a blind man, who is searching for something.

But the reason that the blind man has such a hard time finding the thing he is looking for is, Paul says, that the thing he is looking for is all around him, it is his full experience.  It would only be through the labor of touching as much as possible, over a long period of time, that he could come to recognize his surroundings.

I had a friend named Maria when I was living in College Station who was blind.  After some time of knowing her, she asked me if she could "see" my face.  That meant feel my face until she could form a mental image of what I looked like.  It is a very intimate experience.

For a person to come to know God without the help of Christian revelation, it would take years of constant and patient reflection, on the best and truest things of life.  He or she would have to spend a lot of energy on groping in darkness, feeling around, but that person COULD actually begin to see the face of God.  Through a spiritual sense of touch—given by Christ.

But remember what we sang on Easter Night.  Notice what has accompanied us at liturgy for the past 6 weeks.  Our Easter Candle.  Proclaiming that Christ is our Light.  He is the light by which we can easily see the Father.  His life, death, and resurrection throw light upon our lives and our experience lights up with comprehensibility.  It is only in the light of Christ that we can simply relate to God without that arduous groping.  So we can use that energy, the energy of our hands, to serve others instead of groping around.