Polycarp Sailing The Wine-Dark Sea

 

Of course, it is the Greeks who came after Sappho who were largely responsible for the levels of cerebral meditation that now intervene between us and nature. To understand why the Greeks matter to us today, we must appreciate their careering variety of human responses -- the lightning-quick transmutations, the Odyssean resourcefulness, the inexhaustible creativity -- that came to its final end in the contractions of the Byzantine state after so many centuries of constant change and renewal. There was nothing the ancient Greeks did not poke their noses into, no experience they shunned, no problem they did not attempt to solve. When the world was still young, they set off at the first light and returned early from the agora, their arms full and their carts loaded down with every purchase, domestic and foreign, natural and artificial, they could lay their hands on. Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on the way back.

Wow ... after typing that final paragraph from the fourth book of Thomas Cahill's The Hinges of History series, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why The Greeks Matter (ISBN 0965811115), that sentence about "arms full and their carts loaded" sounds like what you and I do when we go shopping! But more often than not, we don't go shopping for new ways to think about the world around us; no, we're quite content to believe that the world as it is has ALWAYS been as it is. That's where we need some fine-tuning. And while when I got first introduced to the ancient Greeks in middle school or so and what I've learned since then helps me to admire them in many ways, the older I get the more ruthless and the more irritating I find a society that built its greatness on twenty percent of freeborn citizens buttressed by the contributions of women, non-citizens, and slaves. That believed they were right -- and by many of our standards they were -- but tried to impose that on everyone else by oppression and not guidance. (I must brush up on my Thucydides ...)

As for Polycarp sailing -- the "wine-dark sea" is an allusion to Homer, writer of the Iliad and Odyssey in the eighth century B.C. about events that reputedly happened four hundred years earlier (i.e. the Trojan War and its aftermath) -- THAT could have possibly happened in the late first or the first half of the second century of our own era. I'm not up on my hagiographies (biographies of saints, so yes, Virginia, you have learned a new word here today) but Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna whose death is commemorated in most Christian churches today, was a disciple of the apostle John (one of Jesus' original Twelve, the one who wrote out the Gospel of John, three letters, and Revelation from most standpoints that aren't exacting burdens of proof expected of no other source, but I digress) who at eighty-six years old had Roman authorities come to his house to arrest him for his activities as a Christian. Nothing seditious, you understand, but any belief that got in the way of honoring the Emperors of his day as deities was suspect at least and treasonous at worst.

Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong.
How then can I blaspheme my King and Saviour? Bring forth what thou wilt.

The story I read about Polycarp in my devotional this morning I did not know. When the guards came to his house to arrest him, he welcomed them in and invited them to sit down for a meal, for they must have had a long journey to get to him! As they ate and accepted the hospitality of the man they were about to arrest and who'd likely be put to death (and they all knew it) they had to have had some doubts. The story of Polycarp's death is that he was to be burned at the stake, but the fire wouldn't touch him. So he got stabbed through the heart instead. Whether he was actually eighty-six years old at the time of his death (and that what's most commentators I've seen go with) or he had accepted Jesus as his Savior and Lord eighty-six years before his death ... I don't think it matters very much. Dang ... it occurs to me as I type this that I'm at the halfway mark, for I'm forty-three years old. And I was about to throw it all away Saturday afternoon on my way home from work because I was -- well, I thought I was -- in a hurry.

I won't go into details, just that when I came home Saturday after Marketplace I was white as a sheet. I was trembling and freaking out my family as well as me. There's no excuse for that, and I need God's forgiveness for that. One thing that especially concerns Martha and I is that the kids need to hear how to talk to and show respect for others by seeing how we talk to and show respect for each other and others as well ... our grades lately have not been as above average as we would like. Sunday morning instead of our regular Sunday school classes -- I start up next week on Emmaus -- we had a family Sunday school class where the kids and those adults who participated (at least I did) got to tape a cross on canvas and paint around it, then peel the cross off. There's some awesome work we did, and I'm not saying that of just me and my kids, though they're pretty cool too! There was also a pancake and sausage breakfast going on to raise money for Lutheran Campus Ministries, one of those times where if you go away hungry it's your own fault!

And YES, we did have a great worship service too. For the crowd that showed up at both services when outside it was sixteen below zero, we did very well indeed. Heck, it was so cold for me despite the three layers I wore on the paper route I had Sunday I almost didn't want to go to church, and Martha would have supported me on that ... but I know if I don't go (despite my having missed church maybe two, three times I can think of in TWELVE YEARS) I suffer, and the people around me do as well because no matter how much I study, no matter how much I know, there are people, fellow believers in Jesus as their Savior and Lord -- that sounds like a very roundabout way of saying "Christian", but there's a reason I use it -- who, let's face it, I can learn something from. I haven't been married the decades some couples in my church (a few Sundays ago one couple celebrated their 67th anniversary) are or have the grown adults who were once children they have or are engaged as much in city life as I perhaps should be -- and in practically every ancient Greek city, you had no choice --

But I'd like to be, David