The Holy Spirit, whose outpouring we recall today, is described by Jesus in John’s Gospel as performing several functions, among them, leading the disciples into all truth; witnessing to Christ; convicting the world.
Jesus describes the Spirit as another Comforter. The Greek word parakletos isn’t always easy to define, but relates to advocacy, an advocacy on our behalf before God. Just as Jesus Christ is as He is among them in the flesh, so the Holy Spirit will be as indwelling them after Jesus ascension to the Father.
The Holy Spirit will abide in us forever as the Spirit of Truth. He is the Spirit of wisdom, revealing Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God in His own greatness. He reflects the goodness of the One who sends Him, and the majesty of Him from whom He proceeds. As St. Basil says, the way to divine knowledge ascends from one Spirit through the one Son to the one Father.
We keep the feasts of the Church Year, like this one, the second most important in the Calendar to Easter, to remember. Not in the sense of simply calling something from the past to mind…but in that sense of anamnesis. “Do this for my anamnesis.” Do this in order to make me present. The Holy Spirit is the agent of this remembering, and He is to act in us as an agent to help those we encounter remember who they are and what this life is about.
Jesus Himself was the new Temple of God; His dwelling place, and the words in today’s Gospel are to assure that His bodily absence after the Ascension did not mean He would no longer be present, but just the opposite. By the indwelling Spirit, the Holy Trinity would indeed indwell not merely a Temple of stone, but the living temples of His people.
Amongst many American Christians there is still a great zeal for the Bible as the word of God, and surely God speaks through His word. The Holy Scriptures are the foundation of all our knowledge of God and of salvation. By His Spirit, he inspired those who wrote, and by the same Spirit He speaks to us who read. Yet the word is not enough. If we settle for the word alone, we will be merely a people of the Book, and our God will be a God of the Book.
What God desires for us is certainly through His Word, but merely not the word of the Scriptures…as Jesus said to the Jews “Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me. And ye will not come to me that ye might have life.”
Through Jesus Christ, and by the Holy Spirit poured out this day, the apostles experienced something new. What God desired was not through just the word, but by the Spirit…an indwelling; a union with Himself.
“And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them, that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.”
Today, from the earlier part of the Gospel we hear “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.” We have been invited into union with the Holy Trinity…and yet we forget so quickly. We become so easily distracted and our minds slip away from the truths written upon our hearts, and we are caught in the throes of desire and suffering once again.
The Holy Spirit indwells us to help us remember. To transform our minds from leaky vessels and disordered ignorance to the realm of wisdom and love.
The work of transformation has been largely handed over by Christianity to the psychiatrists and psychologists, and most have forgotten that true psychotherapy, the true healing of the soul is a holy path, not a secular one, and can only be accomplished by the Spirit of God. Sometimes there are medical issues to be treated, but these do not heal the soul.
The Holy Spirit is given to heal our forgetfulness; to dispel our unconsciousness; to bring all things to our remembrance, especially the reality of our inheritance in Christ as those who are to be reflected glory, a reflection not of something without, but something within. We keep His words and show our love for Him best in becoming transparent that His light might not be obscured by the impurity of our souls.
We have been born from above and born of the Spirit in holy Baptism: the Spirit tells us “Remember who you are…remember your life is not your own…you are to be an anamnesis; to provoke a holy remembering; to live that others may see Christ and that they too might share in His glory.”
It is impossible for one’s soul to accomplish anything good, or to have power over its own passions or to escape the great subtlety of the devil’s snare if the soul is not fortified by the grace of the Holy Spirit and has Christ Himself within it. Christ promises nothing less than that He will be present and will help those who believe on Him through the Spirit.
It is all summed up beautifully in the affirmation of the Holy Trinity:
The Father is my hope,
the Son is my refuge,
the Holy Spirit is my protection:
All Holy Trinity, glory to thee.