Day: August 8, 2021

“No-one can say Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit”

“No-one can say JESUS IS LORD but by the Holy Spirit.” It is the earliest creedal statement from within the Scriptures themselves, wonderfully and significantly highlighted by being passed on down to us in capital letters (though many of the earliest manuscripts were all in majuscules – capital letters). It is a Trinitarian statement really, the nucleus of what we proclaim more fully in the great Catholic Creeds of the Church which come out of the Scriptures and which return us to the Scriptures within a way of understanding. Such clarifying proclamations give shape to our lives in grace. “Concerning spiritual gifts … I would not have you ignorant,” says St. Paul. “Now there are diversities of gifts,” and he goes on to list them. They are gifts which arise, as it were, out of this fundamental proclamation – out of what we have been given to say about God by God himself. “No one can say JESUS IS LORD but by the Holy Spirit.”

The diversity of gifts belongs to our life with God in the communion of God – the Trinity. The different gifts are about his grace in our lives; in short, about the divine unity which is the ground of all true diversity. To esteem them is to honour him. This is something communicated to us by the grace of God with us – Jesus Christ – God’s Word and Son. To confess Jesus as Lord acknowledges him as “I am who I am,” as God with us, God in the very flesh of our humanity, God made man. Only so can he be Lord. In Jesus the Old Testament mystery of God’s name – “I AM WHO I AM” (also in capital letters!) is opened to view, explored and explicated in terms of the spiritual relation of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost  and in the forms of our incorporation into that divine life through Jesus as way, truth, life, light, resurrection, door, shepherd, bread, and vine. God’s relation to us radically depends upon his self-relation, upon the communion of God with God in God, the communion of the Trinity.

This is the burden of our proclamation in which we are privileged to participate. For if we cannot proclaim with clarity the God of our salvation, then we cannot participate with charity in the divine life which has been opened to view through the sacrifice of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit.

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