Day: May 19, 2024

“He shall teach you all things”

Wind and fire. The most intangible of all tangible things. Such are the paradoxes of this day. Who has seen the wind? Who can touch the fire? But such metaphors open us out to the mystery of God as Trinity, the mystery which we can only think and adore. We cannot take the mystery of God captive to our understanding. That is the essence of idolatry, the idea that God is made in our image.

Something of the spiritual reality of God is wonderfully signified in the Feast of Pentecost, in the coming down of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the Spirit who signifies the essential nature of God and whose descent upon the Apostles establishes the spiritual community that is the Church. We are raised up into the mystery of God by God’s embracing us in the vision of his glory. God engages our imaginations. God engages the cultural and linguistic distinctives of our humanity but without being reduced to the cultural, the linguistic and the experiential. God engages the whole of our humanity. It is all God and all us at one and the same time.

Pentecost gathers us into the whole pageant of God’s dealings with our humanity, the whole pageant of revelation laid out in the Scriptures. There is creation. “In the beginning God created … the Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters,” bringing all things into order and being. This is the strong sense of creation as the spiritual act of the Creator. In the Christian understanding, creation is the spiritual act of the Trinity. The Spirit moving over the waters brings order and unity to the inchoate forms of the created and material world. God breathes his Spirit into the dust of humanity and we are made living beings, made in the image of God as spiritual creatures.

There is redemption – the pageant of God’s dealing with his wayward, recalcitrant and disobedient people, all who seek to have things their way. God speaks to prophet and people, constantly and steadfastly recalling them and us to his law, to his word and will for his people delivered on the mount of glory in a cloud of majesty and awe. God leads his people in the wilderness journeys despite our persistent sinfulness, “a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of light by night.” Once again, these contrasting and elusive images of things seen and heard open us out to the transcendent mystery of the glory of God. Jesus breathes on the disciples on “the same day at evening,” the evening of the day of his Resurrection. He bestows upon them the grace and power of the forgiveness of sins consummated on the cross and extended to us in the life of the Church. The eternal mystery of God is shown to us through the God-given created differences of what belongs to the unity of creation: through the word and metaphor, even wind and fire, and through the languages and cultures of the world, equally God-given. Such is revelation.

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