Acts 17:16-20
New International Version
While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him,
“May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some
strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.”
George MacLeod
Only One Way Left (p 38), The Iona Community 1956
I simply argue that the Cross be raised again at the center of the market–place as well as on the steeple of the church I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage–heap; at a crossroad so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek…at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died. And that is what He died about.
