What You’re Already Reaching For

Texts: Acts 17:22–31  |  John 14:15–21

There is a detail near the beginning of Paul’s famous speech in Athens that I keep coming back to. He’s surrounded by some of the sharpest philosophical minds of the ancient world. He’s standing in a city full of altars — hundreds of them, to gods of every kind. And he doesn’t condemn any of it. He doesn’t announce that they have it all wrong and he has arrived to correct them.

He looks around. He notices. He pays attention to what people are reaching for — what they have named, what they have built, what they have left unnamed.

And among all those altars, he finds one inscription that opens a door:

To an Unknown God.

Not a foreign deity. The one you have already been sensing. The one your altars are reaching for without quite knowing the name.

Paul says: let me tell you who this is.

The Most Expansive Claim in the New Testament

What Paul announces next is staggering in its scope. He quotes — not Scripture, not the Hebrew prophets — but Greek poets:

“In him we live and move and have our being.” And: “We are indeed his offspring.”

He finds Truth in another tradition and honors it. He doesn’t need to own all of it to recognize all of it.

The claim underneath those lines is this: God is not far from each one of us. Not just from the religious. Not just from the faithful. Not just from those who already know the right language. From each one of us — every person who has ever reached for something beyond themselves, in whatever tradition, in whatever language, with whatever name or no name at all — has been reaching toward the same source.

This is not a God who exists somewhere out there beyond us, occasionally descending to check on things. This is a God who is the very ground of existence. The medium in which we all live. The one from whom we draw every breath. To exist is already to exist in God.

And that source is not far.

So Why Doesn’t Everyone Know It?

This is the question John’s Gospel puts before us. Jesus tells his disciples that the Spirit of truth — the Paraclete, the one who comforts, advocates, helps — cannot be received by the world. And that sounds, at first, like exclusion. Like God showing up for some and slamming the door on others.

But that is not what Jesus is saying.

This is not about who is in and who is out. It’s about frequency.

Love and fear do not operate on the same frequency. They’re not just different feelings — they are different ways of being in the world. Fear closes down. Fear contracts. Fear turns inward, builds walls, protects itself, makes us smaller than we are. And when we are living entirely from fear, we simply cannot perceive what love makes visible.

Not because God has withdrawn. Not because the door has been shut. But because fear is not the frequency where love is found.

And God is love.

So the world’s inability to receive the Spirit is not God’s rejection of the world. It is what happens when fear rules — the world loses its ability to tune in to the frequency of its own deepest life.

This is what Jesus means when he says love me and keep my commandments. Those commandments are not a moral test to be passed before God will accept us. They are the practice of love — the way of living that keeps us attuned. To love is the very means by which we experience the God in whom we already live and move and have our being.

You Are Not an Orphan

The disciples listening to Jesus that night are terrified. They’re about to lose the one who gave their lives direction. And Jesus doesn’t hand them a doctrine or a theological explanation.

He gives them a promise:

I am coming to you.

Not past tense. Not someday. Coming. Continuous. Now.

And then: “On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”

This is the deepest truth Easter keeps revealing. Not that we achieve union with God. Not that we earn our way into divine life. But that we are already in it. The same mutual indwelling that Jesus shares with the Father is opened to include us.

That is not a reward for the spiritually advanced. That is the revelation of Easter. This has always been true. Easter is God’s great unveiling of what is already the case.

What This Means for Our Actual Lives

Think of the people in your life who don’t use your language for God.

The friend who finds the holy in a walk in nature. The family member who left the church years ago but hasn’t stopped searching for something real. The colleague who shows up with exactly the kindness someone needed — and couldn’t explain why.

They are already living in the God we know in Jesus.

That changes how we see people. It changes how we move through the world. We are not the gatekeepers of God. We are the community sent — like Paul in Athens — not to bring God somewhere God isn’t, but to name the Holy where it already lives.

To point to the altar marked unknown, and say: let me tell you who this is.

That is Easter going wide.