Day: June 8, 2025

“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you.”

Pentecost is the alpha and omega of all the festivals of the Church year, the life-force, if you will, of their essential meaning. In every liturgy we are gathered and taken up in the Spirit. It would be hard to say which is greater,, the mystery of Christ’s incarnation, incarnatio Dei, the incarnation of God, or inspiratio hominis, the mystery of our inspiration, the inspiration of man. They are intimately bound together. Pentecost is not simply an add-on, one more item in a list of things, but brings out the essential unity of all that pertains to our life in the mystery of God. “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten with celestial fire … Teach us to know the Father, Son, and thee, of both, to be but One”. Who, not what is the Holy Spirit? Nothing less than the love-knot of the Father and the Son, binding God with God; the love-knot too that unites the two natures, the humanity and divinity of Jesus, God with man, and the love-knot that gathers and unites us to God and to one another, making us “partakers of the divine nature”.

For this day marks a royal exchange: “whereby, as before He of ours [our nature], so now we of His are made partakers. He clothed with our flesh, and we invested with His Spirit”. In Christ, God partakes our human nature so that we should be partakers of his divine nature. As Tertullian puts it, the coming of Christ was the fulfilling of the Law, the Old Testament, while the coming of the Holy Ghost is the fulfilling of the Gospel, the New Testament.

This is not abstract talk but the truth of the images of Scripture, especially on this day, the Feast of Pentecost, commonly called Whitsunday. The very names point to the paradoxes of spiritual life, of unity expressed through difference. Pentecost refers to the fiftieth day, looking back to the Jewish Passover (now the Christian Easter), on the one hand, and Whitsunday, meaning White Sunday, even though the liturgical colour is red, symbolic of the tongues of fire resting upon the Apostles of the New Testament, on the other hand. Why white? Because of baptism; our incorporation into the life of God through Word and Spirit, our being incorporated into Christ’s death and life. We are like those, as Revelation puts it, who have “washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” The paradoxes of revelation require our thinking through the images and grasping their unity in understanding. Pentecost signals the constant necessity of sticking close to the images and thus to their meaning as opposed to the modern tendency to fly from images into various forms of abstraction or the problem of reification, turning metaphors and images and behaviours into things, or objects but only through abstract categories of indeterminacy. This is a failure of thinking and a negation of the power of language and the importance of metaphor.

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