“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.
“They were all with one accord in one place,” Luke tells us in his account of Pentecost in Acts. This is the unity of understanding. Out of the diversity of tongues comes the unity of praise and worship. “If a man love me,” Jesus says in today’s Gospel from John, “he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” This is our unity in God through the unity of God. This is what is meant by the Holy Spirit as the love-knot that binds us together in the unity of God. It only happens through the sending of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, “whom the Father will send in my name,” Jesus says. He is the one “whom I will send unto you from the Father,” as we heard last Sunday. We are gathered into the essential mystery of God as Trinity through the Descent of the Holy Ghost.
“A rushing mighty wind” and “cloven tongues, like as of fire.” Wind and fire. These are the outward images of Pentecost. They are the most elusive of the forces of nature and yet through them we are gathered into an inward understanding of the unity of life and thought; in short, the life of the Spirit. The life of the Spirit is unity and order and peace but without negating the distinctions of nature and spirit, of creation and God, and the distinctive features of every created being within the order of creation. “The Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters” and God speaks the world into being as we know from Genesis; “Let there be light.” The Spirit of God is the pneuma, the breath or wind of God, the very Spirit which Jesus, too, breathes upon the disciples in the mystery of Easter. Spirit and Word are inseparable in Creation and Redemption. The Descent of the Holy Spirit celebrates “the renewing in us of the image of God whereunto we are created”.
The sevenfold gifts of the Spirit are taken from Isaiah in the Septuagint translation that informs the Latin Vulgate and in turn shapes the spiritual traditions of the seven gifts of the Spirit. They belong to the renewing and perfecting of the image of God in us; in short, to sanctifying grace. They perfect the faculties of our understanding and our willing as embodied spiritual and intellectual beings. Hence the constant emphasis on teaching and learning about what belongs to our life in God. The Holy Spirit, Jesus says, “will bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” There can be no separation of Word and Spirit, no flights of ecstasy away from the words and images of the Scriptures which alone reveal to us our life in God and with God.
Pentecost is more though not less than an ecstatic and emotional experience. Through the sensible albeit elusive images of wind and fire, we are gathered into an understanding of what belongs to human perfection and life as given by the grace of God in the gifts of the Spirit. They signal our good in the everlasting goodness of God and his blessedness. That requires our constant remembering, our constant thinking upon the Word of God written through the Word and Spirit of God, and the constant effort to gather all that belongs to thought and feeling into the reality of God.
“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you.”
Fr. David Curry
Pentecost 2025