Frances Flatman reflects on the Readings for Pentecost
When I became a Catholic, the wife of the then Bishop of Oxford remarked ‘We had one in the family once and she turned out much nicer!’ Well today’s Readings are not about our personal strivings for perfection but about the miraculous change wrought in humanity through the gift of the Holy Spirit. We tend to look at our sins and see them as rather meagre things, yet we are all part of a hopelessly fallen creation, and play our part in it as consumers in some shape or form. This week has witnessed the depravity of another massacre in an American school; the outrage of the genocide and unimaginable destruction in the Ukraine together with continual attacks in Mali and Afghanistan; and Global warming threatens the very existence of the planet. Our Readings speak of a ‘new creation’ in Christ and our only hope of salvation. Left to ourselves we quite simply cannot, for all our worthy endeavours, make it all alright.
In Acts (2:1-11) we read Luke’s description of Pentecost, the one with all the strange names. It is a description of the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, and what is significant about it is that it is a picture of the harmony, the coming together under Christ of the ancient and intractable enemies of Rome. In the 1st C BCE Rome fought a series of bitter wars against the ruler of Pontus:The Mithradatic Wars, which brought the loss of hundreds of Roman lives and those of their enemies and vast amounts of cash. Mid way in this century, Crassus the Consul and his son and their armies were wiped out in Mesopotamia and there were frequent wars between Medes, Elamites and Parthians which continued up into the 2ndC CE. Judaea of course had just recently experienced the Jewish Revolt, with a million dead Jews, and the same number enslaved, and hundreds of Italian and Greek traders savagely murdered by the revolutionaries, not to mention the hundreds of dead from the Roman armies. As he was most likely the Governor of one of these Eastern Provinces of Rome, we can appreciate that Theophilus, to whom both the Gospel and Acts are dedicated would have appreciated the miraculous nature of this action by the Christian God, for he and his fellow governors would continually have been plagued by the violence which engulfed them so often.
Those who know Romans (8:8-17) will know that it forms part of Paul’s long address to Christians in Rome, which includes the passage, frequently read at Funerals where he laments the fact that, knowing the right thing, he/we frequently do the opposite; and he laments 7:24 ‘Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ All he can do is fling himself on Christ. Paul then goes on to consider the means by which we are changed from what the Greek has as our ‘flesh’ or fleshly being (unspiritual in the Jerusalem Bible) to being transformed into spiritual beings even in the here and now by the action of the Holy Spirit of Christ working in the believer. Paul himself, you will recall, was a murderer of Christians and understands this not as ‘a bit of tinkering out on our part’, but entirely the work of grace, transforming us into completely new human beings. In order to illustrate the magnitude of the shift in our reality he compares the action of the Spirit in our lives to what every Roman, hard-up on the breadline prayed for – adoption by some wealthy person whose capacity it was to make truly ‘life-changing’ differences to your existence. This even happened to impoverished aristocrats – too many sons and too little estate to divide. You can see it in Roman names like Scipio, one to conjure with, who through good fortune adopted a spare son of the Aemelliani who became Scipio Aemelianus Paullus (themselves made up of earlier adoption) and whose fortunes were changed beyond dreaming. The shift could literally lift a poor man from slavery or appalling poverty into huge wealth, as those without heirs adopted the offspring of friends or even the child of slaves to safeguard their assets from the grasp of the state where there was no son to inherit. But Paul then goes on to insist that this in the Christian case is not the end, since this action is the work of Christ, one with the Father and his heir, and that through his largesse we believers too become ‘Heirs of God and coheirs with Christ, sharing his sufferings so as to share his glory.’ Our life now and eternally has a completely new nature and dimension.
In our Gospel, (John 14:15-16.23-26) and part of the great dialogue of the Last Supper, along with the prediction by Jesus of his betrayal by Judas and his recognition that all the disciples will fail him, he delivers this section about his provision for the community after his departure in which he will ask the Father to send ‘Another Advocate to be with you forever.’ Access to this Paraclete or Advocate is simply through our keeping Jesus’ ‘word’. Surely, as we found last week, this means keeping true to Jesus himself, for he is The Word, it’s his identity. God, John’s Jesus tells us, will send us the Spirit (of both of them) ‘Who will teach you everything.’ A great sea-change is to come over the disciples, changing them/us from the terrified and spineless creatures we are, and making us witnesses for God. Since just prior to our passage we had the ‘Many mansions’ promise of Jesus, I think we should perhaps understand that the work of the Spirit in each of us to ‘know’ everything gives room for variety of explanations of the faith as it grows through the centuries, drawing us ever deeper into the life of God himself, and making it relevant and understandable in any age.
Comments