“You know him, because he
abides with you and will be in you.” St.
John 14:17
My late father had a personality
that could fill a room. We come from a
family of storytellers, of gregarious men.
But Dad was unusually gifted. He worked for years as a hardware
salesman, which helped him learn to feel comfortable relating to many different
kinds of people, and finding just the right topic for small talk. It made me smile to watch what would happen
when he walked into a family reunion, a wedding reception or coffee hour after
church. People would immediately walk in
his direction, smiles would break out, the room would grow louder and more
animated as people began to speak up.
Some people have this kind of social
pull because they have to be center of attention. They dominate conversation
and cultivate eccentricities that make them stand out. But aside from being able to tell a joke
really well, there wasn’t much that stood out in the way dad presented himself
to others. He didn’t interrupt or
compel, but was genuinely interested in other people. He was able to draw them toward others, to
bring out what was best in people. You
might say that his presence lifted everyone else, that he infused a kind of
power into gatherings that made them altogether different than they would be
without him.
We noticed this more clearly after
dad died, when his absence loomed much larger than I think any of us had
expected. The family reunions were more
subdued. People didn’t stick around as
long. We decided to let go of a few
events that had been part of our family’s social calendar because they just
didn’t seem to work as well anymore without dad to pull everyone together. It wasn’t just that he was gone. The life he brought into our social
interactions had faded away as well.
Today is the feast of Pentecost,
when we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, poured out on the apostles fifty
days after our Lord’s resurrection.
While I’m sure that we are all deeply grateful for the gift of the
Spirit, we sometimes find it very difficult to understand who the Spirit is and
how He works in the Church and in our own souls. The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the
“forgotten person of the Holy Trinity,” because many Christians neglect to pray
to the Spirit or to acknowledge his role in our spiritual lives.
I think in part that’s because the
Holy Spirit is both a power and a presence, as Jesus clearly indicates in
today’s Gospel. In some ways it’s
difficult for us to relate these two ideas to each other. We might even see them as contradictory. But I think that we get a helpful glimpse of
what this is like in people like my late father, who have dynamic
personalities. Their social presence is
weighted with power, and changes the lives of people they encounter. But let’s unpack this a bit.
First, the Holy Spirit is a power,
changing people’s lives by infusing them with supernatural strength and new
insight. When Jesus spoke to His
disciples about sending His Spirit into them after His resurrection, this is
probably where their understanding began.
Indeed, Saint Luke records Jesus as pointing ahead to the day of Pentecost
as the moment when “power from high” would come upon them[1]. In the Old Testament, this is almost always
how the Holy Spirit is described, as a power coming from God to equip people
for a particular task. The Spirit came
upon Samson, and gave him strength to pull down the pagan temple onto the
Philistines. Solomon’s wisdom came from
the Spirit, and the prophets spoke God’s word through insight sent by the
Spirit.
In our Gospel lesson, Jesus tells
the apostles that they will do even greater works than he has done after He has
returned to the Father and the Spirit has been sent on them. The Spirit will equip and sustain them to do
far more than they were capable of accomplishing before.
And
indeed, the Pentecost story shows the Spirit coming down and sending out power
in unmistakably dramatic ways. The
apostles are crowned with flames, and they speak in new languages. It becomes clear, in an instant, that the
good news of Jesus Christ is not just meant for Palestinian Jews like Jesus and
themselves, but all the citizens of the world.
The apostles “do greater works,” just as Jesus had promised. Peter probably made more converts with his
single sermon that day than Jesus had made in his entire ministry. It is clear that there’s a new power at work
through them.
What
would have been new for the apostles in Jesus’ message, and probably what we
also find more difficult to understand, is that the Holy Spirit sent on them is
also a Presence, God with them as a Person, in a relational way. In today’s Gospel, Jesus promises that the
Spirit “will be with you forever.” “He
will abide with you,” Jesus says, “and will be in you.” When God poured out His Spirit before the
coming of Christ, it was almost always for a particular task, a limited
time. The Spirit would stay while the
work was being done, and then would vanish again
But
the Spirit rests on Jesus in a lasting, permanent way. The Holy Spirit is the bond of love that
united Jesus with the Father, the Source of Jesus’ words and works. Jesus didn’t just use God’s power, God was
present in Him and acted through Him. He
was never apart from God the Father, because the Spirit filled Him completely.
And
the same Spirit is sent on the apostles and on each of us in Holy Baptism. The Spirit that proceeds from the Father and
the Son, abides in us and is in us, because He abode in Jesus and was in Jesus
first. We receive God’s strength to do
His work, yes; but not as a fuel that is spent and needs to be topped up
again. God Himself has made His home
within us. We are filled with His
Presence by the Holy Spirit who lives in us.
The strength to do His work flows out naturally from that Presence. It’s not a reservoir but a fountain, ever
fresh, ever new, inexhaustible.
You
just can’t separate the presence from the power. To go back to where we started, my dad’s
social power had measurable effects. You
could measure the way the volume in the room changed, the way people moved when
he walked into a room. But that power
was intimately connected to dad’s presence, his inimitable personality. When
dad was gone, that power went with him.
The
gifts of God, in the same way, cannot be separated from the Presence of God, by
His Spirit, within us. We can ask God
for specific gifts of course: deeper patience, greater insight, wider
compassion. But what we are really
asking for is more of the Spirit. We
want the Spirit to reveal Himself to us more clearly, pushing past our own
sinful desires and persistent bad habits, so that we come to feel and think and
act as God does. Spiritual growth means
more of God and less of ourselves in our lives.
The opposite is true as well. When we see God’s power working through
us, we feel closer to God, we know Him better.
That’s because the One who dwells within us is working through us.
Today,
we rejoice that the Holy Spirit, who came down that first Pentecost, is among
us, that He abides with us and in us. We
pray that we would see His power revealed in what we think, say and do. And we ask that He would reveal His Presence
to us more clearly each day, so we may know His joy, peace and love more fully.
[1]
Lk. 24:29.
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