Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive…

Alleluia! The Spirit of the Lord filleth the world.

+ In the Name of God the holy and Undivided Trinity

…On earth as in heaven…The whole of the Good News is that God is reconciling the world to heaven. God is in the process of extending the reign of perfect peace to all things. The world may not be conscious of it, but God is at work, perfecting creation. Like all those Jews, who were amazed to hear the Galilæan Apostles speaking in their own languages, the world is experiencing a Power beyond its comprehension. In this sense (and I think ONLY in this sense) the world cannot receive the Spirit, for the world neither knows nor sees the Holy Spirit. In the same way as a fish neither knows nor sees the water, or ~ better yet ~ in the sense that we neither know nor see the air we breathe, so the world neither knows nor sees the Spirit. (The word itself is related to the word for breath.)But if we do not receive, in this sense, the air we breathe, we are nevertheless filled with it. Just as the world is filled with the Spirit of God.

The Holy Spirit is Life: the Spirit Whom God breathed into the clay to make a living human being. The Spirit was over and in the world from the beginning, when God created the heavens and earth…and the Spirit of God moved over the waters. From the beginning, the Spirit has been with the world. Spirit united with matter is life. Like other living creatures, most humans are unaware of the significance of this life we share. In this sense, the world does not see or know the Holy Spirit. But human beings of every culture have an intuition that there is more to this life than meets they eye: the Spirit filleth the world, and has from the beginning. The Holy Spirit definitely did NOT enter the world for the first time at Pentecost.

No. This is ancient dogma of the Catholic Church, whose Nicene Creed confesses the Holy Spirit as the One Who spoke through the prophets. And, although the Creed surely is referring to the Prophets of Israel, we do not err, whose Prayerbook’s catechism teaches that the Holy Spirit also spoke through many sages and saints of other cultures. The magnificent diversity of the world’s people did not encounter the Holy Spirit for the first time at Pentecost. In fact ~ contrary to the interpretation of one of the collects for today ~ it was not the Pentecost of the Apostles that opened the way of eternal life to every race and nation. A careful reading of the passage in the Acts reveals that those who heard the apostles were Jews and proselytes. That is, those who had been born to the Covenant of Moses and Abraham, and those who had joined themselves to it by choice. And these people were all pilgrims from every land on earth, who had come to Jerusalem for the Feast.

They were Jews of the diaspora, who had lived away from Palestine long enough that their native languages were no longer Hebrew. (Neither was the Apostles’ for that matter, but Aramaic.) But these people were NOT gentiles, according to Acts. They had come to Jerusalem, many of them no doubt for the first time, to celebrate what made them Jews: the gracious giving of the Law on Sinai. So it is not quite accurate to interpret the speaking in tongues as a symbol for the extension of the Covenant to every race and nation. That was already underway in first-century Judaism, as more and more people of non-Jewish descent were becoming Jews. It is certainly a mistake to draw the conclusion that Judaism was parochial, mono-cultural, and confined to one ethnic group, while the early Church, by contrast, reached out to all peoples. No. The Acts passage clearly depicts people of various nations and races who were already Jews hearing the Apostles speak in their own languages. What is clear is that, by the time of this Pentecost, Judaism itself was becoming a universal religion, which welcomed all the diversity of humanity. It will not do to misinterpret Pentecost as standing for Christian cosmopolitanism as against Jewish nationalism.

I think what IS to be found is a changing understanding of the significance of the Law. Of course, that is a big theme in Acts and in the Pauline epistles. The Feast all those Jews from all those different nationalities were there to observe was Shavu’ot, the Feast of Weeks. This was originally an agricultural festival, the harvest of the winter wheat. But by the First Century, it was observed increasingly as the celebration of the giving of the Law on Sinai, seven weeks and a day after Passover. Seven times seven days. A kind of super-sabbath, or Sabbath of sabbaths, with echoes of the Levitical Jubilee. A time of new starts and re-ordering of things. The Torah was God’s gracious gift, changing the escaping slaves into the people of God’s Covenant. The Torah created and maintained this relationship. The stone tablets upon which it was inscribed were kept in the Ark in the Temple, as the focal point of religious consciousness.

The law written on stone and delivered to one man on the mountaintop is given in a new way at this New Pentecost, the fiftieth day after the New Passover. By the time the Acts was written, the Temple had been destroyed, the tablets disappeared. The New Pentecost of the Apostles represents a renewal of God’s gracious gift on Sinai and a fulfillment of the later prophecy about new hearts of flesh. The old hearts of stone are to be brought to life by the Spirit of God, so that the Torah could be inscribed there directly ~ with no more need of external, stone tablets. And the first hearts to be renewed are those of Jews of every race and nation assembled at Jerusalem. This means that it is the privilege and responsibility of all the family-members of Israel, born or proselyte, to fulfill the law in their own way, according to their own judgment. One size does not fit all. The obligations of Torah cannot be reduced to an external written code, however exhaustive.

The letter of the Law is not enough. What we call ~ significantly ~ the spirit of the Law is our responsibility, too. In this way the New Covenant fulfills (completes) the Old. The other collect for Pentecost prays for the light of the Holy Spirit to give us a right judgment in all things. It is now up to us to judge, by the grace and comfort of the Holy Spirit, what we should do in all things. As you know, comfort means strengthening. Well, we will certainly need strength if we are to judge rightly what we are to do in all things. The Holy Spirit gives us the strength to fulfill the Torah even in its unwritten obligations. We are not set free to follow our own individual will, but to fulfill the new Law of love written on our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

When I was in seminary, it was fashionable to say, with the existentialists, that in modern times humanity had “come of age”. I thought it somewhat vain at the time. It occurs to me now that this adolescence could better be assigned to today’s feast. This Feast of Weeks, this jubilee, is an entrance into adulthood, into a new and terrifying liberty in which the People of God is no longer subject to what Paul called the pædagogos, the old slave who served as its custodian and disciplinarian on the way to Christ. The New Pentecost is God’s gift of a new capacity to be God’s People. The Holy Spirit, Who has always filled the world, now gives humanity the capacity to recognize the fact, to have a right judgment in all things, to become not only Jesus’ disciples, but His friends, and to know that which cannot be known: that, as He told Philip, to see Him is to see the Father.

AMEN

THE SPIRIT OF GOD FILLS THE WORLD

COME, LET US ADORE HIM!