“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.
There is sanctification – the process of our being conformed to the image of God by lives of holiness lived out in the circumstances of our lives through the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And how does that happen? Not by the only too tangible manipulation of our hearts and minds by the winds of the world. Not by being bombarded by information overload, by fake news and by the endless agendas of the advocacy culture of our times. Not by the illusions of techno control of the world. Not by the various forms of escape into fantasy and flight from reality.
It can only happen through our being taught. It happens through the intensity of worship that engages our hearts and minds with the high things of God. Worship endeavours constantly to ground us in the mystery of God revealed and honoured, made known to us in the pageant of the comings and goings of God to which this day bears testimony. God is Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the spirit of unity and order. “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, And lighten with celestial fire;/Thou the anointing Spirit art,/ Who dost thy sev’nfold gifts impart”. These wonderful 9th century words were translated into English in the 17th century by Bishop John Cosin of Durham. Here is the “celestial fire” that inspires our souls with “Thy blessed Unction from above,” the anointing grace of the Spirit, which is nothing less than “comfort, life and fire of love.”
And what are those seven-fold gifts? They are the gifts of the Spirit. They are the spiritual and intellectual qualities of the soul, not material and physical things. They are “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge, and the fear of the Lord,” as Isaiah teaches, and the spirit, too, of piety. They are the gifts given by God that embrace and gather us to God in worship and in truth. They signal the highest potentialities of our humanity. Not only do we have an end with God in the everlasting reason of God signalled in the Ascension and Session of Christ, but we participate in the divine life now through the gifts of the Spirit made manifest in the teaching life of the worshipping church.
Paul tells us that “there are diversities of gifts but the same Spirit, diversities of administration, but the same Lord, diversities of operations but God is the same which worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to everyone for the common good” (1 Cor. 12. 4-7). All from all and all for all, a manifestation of the Trinity in itself and to us and in us. Andrewes observes about all the good things that come to us from one and the same Spirit that “all our multitude is from unity. All our diversity is from identity, [spiritual identity]. All our divisions from integrity, [wholeness]; from one and the same entire Spirit. A free gift, from the free Spirit; a gift of grace from the Spirit of grace. So from God, not from ourselves; for Christ, not for ourselves; by the Spirit, not by either our nature or industry – not alone. For without the Spirit, all our nature and industry will vanish, and nought come of them.” Quinquagesima Sunday immediately before the pageant of Lent taught us that “all our doings without charity are nothing worth.” Love is all. Pentecost manifests that everlasting Spirit that inspires and embraces us in God’s eternal love. Love is life, the life of the Spirit.
Andrewes makes an astute observation about the Pentecostal Spirit of unity and order. It is really about all things being done in an orderly fashion and not chaotically. “The word division implies order,” he notes. “Where we read divisions, some read diversities,” as in Paul’s text. But as Andrewes observes, “it is not so well that. Things that are diverse may lie together confusedly on heaps.” It is an interesting point: so often the claims to diversity are about an endless list of indeterminate and indistinct things. This is the very opposite of order, especially the kind of dynamic order that is the very life of God as Trinity, the life of Spirit, of love and order. Or to put it in another way, Word and Spirit go together.
The Gospel for Pentecost is, once again, taken from the so-called “farewell discourse” of John’s Gospel which has been before us throughout the greater part of Eastertide and Ascensiontide. It has been the formative gospel of our instruction throughout these holy times and seasons. Jesus has been at pains to open us out to the larger meaning and reality of God, teaching us that God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching us that the Spirit of the Father and the Son will “lead [us] into all truth”, that the Spirit of the Father and the Son, “shall teach [us] all things and will bring all things to [our] remembrance.” And what are those things? “whatsoever I have said unto you,” he says.
Word and Spirit go together. The comings and goings of God with us reach a kind of crescendo of understanding with the coming down of the Holy Spirit. It is about our abiding in the love that is God. “If a man love me, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” This the promised gift of the Father and the Son, the opening out of the very life of God as the ground of our lives, our lives of love. Pentecost is the great feast that gives life and meaning to all the feasts of the Church.
The whole pageant of God’s Word in the witness of the Scriptures is comprehended in the creeds and in the pattern of holy doctrine and worship and life that arises from the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the ordered and disciplined life of the Church. When we forget that, then we are at the mercy of ourselves in the idolatry of our experiences, blown about this way and that by the whirling winds of confusion. The paradox is that only in the Spirit of God, revealed in the pattern of order and doctrine, can there be the redemption and the sanctification of experience. Pentecost signals the redemption and the sanctification of human experience by gathering us into the life of God revealed. That life is the meaning of the Church as the spiritual community of the Trinity.
“He shall teach you all things”
Fr. David Curry
Pentecost 2024