Acts 2:1-11; 1 Corinthians 12:3-7,12-13; John 20:19-23
Fr. Prior Simon
We know about the humility of God's only Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Over the past six months the Liturgy has been teaching us about his self-emptying: how he took flesh from the Virgin Mary; how “he learned obedience through what he suffered”; how he died and was buried, then descended into the lower parts of the earth, for our sake and for our salvation. There is something triumphant, majestic about this downward march of the Son of God – in spite, or perhaps because, of the Cross. From where we now stand in salvation history, in the light of the resurrection, the wounds and humiliations of the Cross appear glorified. We can easily relate to them. They have become openings through which the light of hope pours in, and so we rightly revere them, kiss them and thank God for them. What would normally inspire fear, disgust even, and pull towards despair, became in Christ Jesus an opening towards life everlasting, a door between our limited earthly lives and God's own eternal life. The question is: how do I access what's on the other side of this door; how do I lay claim to a share in this exchange of gifts within the Trinity?
Today we are celebrating the completion of the greatest mystery of our faith, and the beginning of a new and final era of history: the era of the Spirit and of the Church. “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled!” exclaimed Our Lord to his disciples not long before his Passion. And then, soon after his resurrection: “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you. Receive the Holy Spirit!” Liturgically speaking, the fire is finally being kindled today. “Suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting, and divided tongues as of fire rested on each one of them”. The whole of the grace placed by God at the Church's disposal was poured into the disciples “who were all together in one place”. This was a special group of people, of course, carefully selected and prepared for this very moment. And yet if not for Our Lady in their midst, I don't think they could have survived the impact. She was there to absorb any excess grace which the various degrees of sinfulness in the disciples resisted, and she stored it in her heart for future redistribution. At least that's my theory. In any case, from there we spread and filled the world with Christ's teaching; and together with the Holy Spirit we keep making him present in various ways, primarily by celebrating the Eucharist.
Having said all this, just as the humiliation of the Cross was a stumbling block to many who knew Jesus in the flesh, and many others later too: so also this new era of the Spirit has its own stumbling blocks. The Catechism uses the phrase “divine self-effacement” in this context: specifically with regard to the Holy Spirit. We never see or hear him. The Catechism states: “we know him only by the movement by which he reveals the Father's Word to us and disposes us to welcome them in faith”. That is why the world cannot receive him, because it “neither sees him nor knows him”, as Our Lord put it. “You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you,” he added.
Here lies the challenge! Yes, on good days we do. And yet somehow it still remains very easy either to ignore God's Spirit, or to presume on him; to move from seeing his work nowhere (and then everything is wrong with the world and with the Church), and then seeing it absolutely everywhere (a kind of naïve optimism: it's all progress towards universal salvation; all religions are about the same thing really, and so on). It's easy to go from hardly ever mentioning his name to such a torrent of “spiritual” talk that it all becomes almost meaningless, impossible to distinguish from New Age pantheism. Just as it wasn't easy to understand what the Cross meant before the resurrection, so now, after Pentecost, it's not at all easy to get the Spirit right, and we constantly oscillate between ignoring him and treating him as a force of nature. But he is a Person!
“Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption,” wrote St Paul to the Ephesians. Do not grieve, do not sadden the Holy Spirit! It is as if God's Spirit was shy somehow, diffident, withdrawing, vulnerable. You don't see him when he comes and, when grieved, he will slip quietly away. But if it is so, then we must remember that it's a shyness of someone who knows that if he but sneezed suddenly in your presence, he would obliterate you together with the whole universe. It's a shyness of someone in possession of unthinkable powers coming into contact with small, delicate, flimsy creatures – us. The Holy Spirit loves us and wants to pour grace into us, and so he holds his breath and waits for an opening. He makes himself invisible and silent, he moves behind the scenes, writes and submits scripts, thinks up scenarios, moves those who have already let Him in to do and say things to us. He gathers church communities and makes Christ present in their midst. It is he who has gathered us all here today; it is he who inspires us to recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread. He quietly pours grace into people and events, he gently lifts burdens from off our shoulders and sets us free, his work is extremely delicate.
When we pray, it is always ultimately the Holy Spirit that we pray for. When we try to purify our hearts through ascetic efforts and pious exercises, it is so that we can perceive his movements, in order to make room for his grace. All our religious practices are but means, wrote St Seraphim of Sarov. As he said: “the true aim of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God”. When St Paul exhorts us to set our minds on the things of heaven, this is what he means. It's not that we should fantasise about what heaven is like: rather, our main preoccupation should be acquiring and keeping God's grace. Nothing is more important in this new era of the Spirit, this time between Pentecost and the Second Coming of Our Lord. We can't afford to be distracted from our pursuit, it's life or death, slavery or freedom.