Day: May 28, 2023

“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”

“And having said thus,” Luke tells us, “he gave up the spirit;” literally, expired or breathed out his last. This seventh and last word of the Crucified complements the sending of the Spirit of the Son and the Spirit of the Father, the Holy Spirit, on the Feast of Pentecost. A Greek word, it means the fiftieth day after Easter but has been commonly called Whitsunday, which is a bit confusing since the liturgical colour for the day is red as honouring the tongues of fire that rested upon the disciples. Whitsunday or White Sunday makes sense when you realize that this was one of the premier times for baptism as well, the baptizands robed in white robes, as it were, “made white in the blood of the Lamb.” It is ‘the feast of weeks’ or Shavuot in the Jewish calendar marking the wheat harvest, on the one hand, and the commemoration of the giving of the Torah to Israel, on the other hand. In the Christian understanding, it celebrates the descent of the Holy Ghost bestowing the gifts of the Spirit upon the Church.

It marks an ending and a beginning. In the ordering of the seven last words of Christ by the Peruvian Jesuit priest, Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya, in the 17th century, this seventh and last word reveals the underlying dynamic of God as Trinity and, ultimately, the doctrine of co-inherence: the co-inherence or mutual indwelling of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the co-inherence or mutual indwelling of the human and divine natures of Christ, and the co-inherence or mutual indwelling between Christ and the Church.

Pentecost is, as Lancelot Andrewes emphasizes, the “festum charitatis,’ the feast of love. Pentecost is the manifestation, the making visible of the Holy Spirit at the same time as it is the making known or revelation of the Trinity. Like the story of Christ’s baptism in the river Jordan, Pentecost is “the visible descending of the Holy Ghost … so that all might see and so take notice of the Holy Ghost, and indeed of the whole Trinity”. It has everything to do with the mystery of God and our incorporation into the divinum mysterium, the mystery of divine love.

“The Holy Ghost is the Alpha and Omega of all our solemnities,” Andrewes notes. This highlights the significance of Pentecost and its connection to all of the credal and doctrinal moments that belong to our lives in faith. We move from the ascension of Christ to the descent of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is “the essential love and love-knot” of the Father and the Son, “the love-knot between God and man” in the person of Christ, and “yet more specifically on this day the love-knot between Christ and his Church”. The Son gives up his spirit into the hands of the Father on the Cross and now the Holy Spirit descends upon the Church as the body of Christ inspiring and infusing the Church with the gifts of grace, things which we do hear and see in the wonder of Pentecost. “A sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind” – something heard – “and cloven tongues, like as of fire” – something seen. These rather elusive and dynamic images from the material and physical world help us to think about the reality of spiritual life as that which contains and holds all reality together in God, the reconciliation of matter and spirit, of God and man.

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