by CCW | 9 June 2019 15:00
“The old world,” Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) famously claimed, “made spirit parent of matter. The new makes matter parent of spirit,” thus capturing and anticipating the materialistic spirit of Darwin and Marx that still haunts our thinking. Pentecost provides the strongest counter to such determinisms. It does so not simply through the many, many examples of the “confluences of mind and matter, and indeed, of mind precedingmatter,” as John Lukacs observes about contemporary science (At the End of An Age) but by way of a sacramental understanding whereby the things of the world are made the instruments and vehicles of spiritual grace.
It is all about the Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God. Pentecost celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit to give birth to the Church as the spiritual community of our humanity. As such, and as we have seen throughout Eastertide and the Ascension, it is about the redemption of our humanity. It is neither reductive nor gnostic. It is not about the collapse of God into the material world (reductive) any more than it is about a flight from nature and matter as if they were somehow evil, as if spirit and matter were to be understood in some sort of fatal opposition (gnostic). Precisely through the wonderful yet elusive images of wind and fire we are opened out to the mystery of God at once with us and beyond us. Precisely through the differences of languages that so often divide and separate us we are recalled to the truth of God, to a unity of the understanding that grounds the diversities of human language and culture in what is universal, in God.
The simple point is that the human community has no unity in itself, only in God, and only in our being gathered and guided by God’s Holy Spirit given to us, as Pentecost teaches, through these signs and wonders, through these sacramental realities, we might say, which envision our unity and our understanding. For all of the ecstatic and experiential features of the Pentecost story, what stands out are the qualities of things intellectual and spiritual that redeem and sanctify every other aspect of our lives individually and corporately. As the Gospel makes clear, Pentecost shows the indwelling power of God in himself and with us. “I am in my Father,” Jesus says, “and ye in me, and I in you,” and all through the truth of God as Spirit, transcendent and beyond, yet immanent and near. It is all through the Comforter “abid[ing] with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth.” “Ye know him,” Jesus says, “for he dwelleth with you and shall be in you.” Pentecost is about the indwelling love of God in us. This happens only through teaching, only through the opening of our minds to the spiritual realities of God and of ourselves. “He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”
Pentecost is profoundly redemptive. That is to say, it gathers up so many of the fragments of our lives and experiences as well as gathering up a host of images from the Jewish Scriptures. Rabanus Maurus’ beautiful ninth century hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus, here in Bishop John Cosin’s seventeenth century translation, speaks, for instance, of the “sevenfold gifts” of the Holy Spirit. His translation largely replaced a longer version of this hymn used in the pontificals, meaning the services of ordination for priests and bishops in the medieval rites, and which carried over into the earlier English Prayer Books. Cosin’s version has became a more familiar feature of those services as well as a hymn in various hymnaries (e.g. # 480). What are the seven gifts of the Spirit?
The reference is to Isaiah 11 which speaks of “a shoot coming from the stump of Jesse” a reference to the grandfather of King David and thus in the Christian view, a kind of foreshadowing or anticipation of Christ. “And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.” Those of you who are especially quick at numbering will have noted only six gifts of the spirit in that list.
It is a question about translation. The tradition of the seven gifts of the Spirit derives from the Greek Septuagint translation of Isaiah 11 which added, perhaps out of a poetic sensibility for couplets and/or for the symbolic significance of seven, (who really knows?), the gift of piety or godliness. Jerome in his Latin translation, the Vulgate, a seminal and foundational text for the Latin West, followed the Septuagint on this point. This was carried over into Wycliffe’s fourteenth century English translation but with Tyndale (16th c.) and the later King James Version (1611), the Hebrew text was followed instead. Yet the pastoral, devotional, and spiritual tradition of the seven gifts of the Spirit has remained and appears again in Cosin’s beautiful hymn.
Piety or godliness points to the Godward direction of our whole lives, to the spirit of prayer and praise and to the habits of service and sacrifice. The sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit are the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might or strength, the spirit of knowledge and piety, and the spirit of the fear of God. They are all about spiritual and intellectual qualities which speak to our minds, to a kind of metanoia.
Metanoia is the Greek word for repentance but in a profounder sense than what we usually imagine. It is really about our minds in the activity of ‘thinking after,’ in other words, reflecting upon our “thoughts, words, and deeds” which is only possible through our thinking upon God. In that sense of reflection, there is a turning back, a return to a principle. In the meaning of Pentecost, we are being turned to God by the Spirit, a turning, too, which is about a remembering of the words of Christ, “whatsoever I have said unto you”. This in turn shapes our lives in the spiritual community of the Church.
As Cosin’s hymn wonderfully puts it, the grace of these gifts is “comfort, life, and fire of love.” It is “perpetual light” that alone can counter “the dulness of our blinded sight” and alone can “anoint and cheer our soiled face.” Such is “the abundance of thy grace” bestowed through the descent of the Holy Ghost.
One further point about translation. The Prayer Book uses Holy Spirit and Holy Ghost interchangeably and thus reflects something of the origins and characteristics of the English language. Two of the dominant influences on the shaping of early modern English and its subsequent expressions are Anglo-Saxon or Old English which is Germanic in character, hence gäst or geist from which we get Ghost, and Latin, via the French of the Norman conquest, hence spiritus from which we get Spirit. It seems to me especially important to retain both those expressions as part and parcel of our cultural heritage and as belonging to our living memory.
The key Pentecostal term is Comforter, a rendering of the word paraclete that signifies one who is called upon, an advocate and a counsellor. The term ‘comforter’ is particularly suggestive and reminds us of the real meaning of ‘the comfortable words’ in our liturgy. They strengthen us just as the Holy Ghost strengthens us in our understanding. How? By recalling us to wisdom, by recalling us to our life in God and with God. Such is a kind of metanoia, our circling back and around and into the life of God. Andrewes’ redire ad principia is about that circling, a kind of dance of the understanding and one in which we are strengthened and comforted.
Peace and unity flow out of the descent of the Spirit however much we are troubled and anxious about our world. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you” Christ says, meaning through the promised gift of the Father and the Son, the gift of the Holy Spirit, but states that this is “not as the world giveth.” It is about a peace known in the world but not of the world. “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” Through the enlightening gifts of the Spirit we are constantly recalled to who we are in the sight of God. Such is the blessing of Pentecost, the blessing of our life in the Spirit, our peace and our joy.
Fr. David Curry
Pentecost 2019
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