Think of a couple who are having trouble with their marriage or partnership. The man says “I tell her I love her but that doesn’t seem to help.” You can see and hear me give this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQDYV_hyeBU
We all know the answer don’t we. Love is not just a nice feeling it is an ongoing action. It is not enough to say we love someone, we have to put it into practice. What’s more, in any long term relationship, the way that one’s love is put into practice will vary as circumstances change. So, we need to be awake to what kind of new thing we are called to do, and awake to the resources we may need as we move on in life.
I’ve started with this example of love because it is one that is fairly easy for us to understand, but I am using it to try to explain how we should be open to God the Holy Spirit working in many different ways through every aspect of our lives. You see what I am trying to help us to understand is how the Holy Spirit can be present in us as a Life-giving Force from the moment of our conception; and yet be given to us, almost as if we hadn’t ever received anything, both in our Baptism and in our Confirmation, and indeed in and through all the other Sacraments of the Church as well as at other moments in our lives when we are in need. Our 1st Reading today (Acts 2:1-11) certainly tells the story of Pentecost as if until that moment the Holy Spirit was not with the disciples, and yet in St John’s Gospel Jesus gives them the Holy Spirit on the day of his Resurrection (John 20:22) when he “Breathed on them and said ‘Receive the Holy Spirit…’” And yet if the Holy Spirit had not already been working in them, they would not have been open to see the Risen Jesus giving them what in a way they already possessed.
I suppose “In a way” is the clue here, because the point is that the Holy Spirit works in many different ways, (see 1 Cor 12) not just because we are all different, but because the Holy Spirit will work in us in whatever way is appropriate to our particular need. I have just been visiting the latest engineering feat in Britain, the Crossrail project taking trains under London from east to west, and was able to marvel at the skill both of those who designed it and those who actually built it. But as a Christian, this and any other great feat of engineering must be seen as an example of the way God (and specifically God the Holy Spirit) works in and through the minds and the muscles of people to create such marvels, even if they do not believe in the God who I believe is working within them.
Perhaps it is because of this truth, the truth that God the Spirit is present in all that is good and beautiful, that when St Paul speaks about the Spirit in our 2nd Reading (Romans 8:8-17) he makes clear that when he speaks of the Spirit he is speaking of it as given in and through Jesus. So although he talks first of “The spirit of God”, he then goes on to specifically call the power that gives us life as “The spirit of Christ.” ; and of course the life that he is talking about here is not ordinary fleshly life, but what he calls spiritual life, or as we usually call it eternal life. Our translation talks wrongly of ordinary life as “unspiritual” implying that God the Holy Spirit is not in ordinary life in any way, which as I hope I have demonstrated is not true, whereas St Paul uses the term fleshly life, of being “in the flesh” rather than “in the spirit.” (Romans 8:9 in better translations)
Now I used the example of marriage earlier, not just to make the point that love, which is after all one of the “Fruits of the spirit”, (Gal 5:22) has to be practised in many ways, but also to remind us, as we often hear in the Bible, that our relationship with God is like a marriage. God of course is always the faithful partner who continues to love us how ever often we fail to respond to his love, and go our own wilful and selfish way. God is with us, even if we are not with him. But what we need to do of course is to aim to respond more fully and actively to that love that God is trying to pour into us. His love is in us, or to use that other term for God’s love, his Spirit is in us, whether we use that love or ignore it; but when we choose to use that love, to open ourselves to the Holy Spirit as the disciples did at Pentecost, the results in us can be quite remarkable, even in our ordinary fleshly lives.
The point is that God is not a thing that we either have or do not have. “God is love” (see all through 1 John 4) and might even therefore be described as more like a process, an endlessly active life-giving force, rather than as a thing that can be defined and contained. As I said last week, God is like light. Think of a dark day in midwinter. There is light and we can see, but it is nothing like the light of midsummer and yet it is the same light. In one sense we have the light in midwinter, but in another sense we dearly need the light of midsummer. So I might say, if I lived for years in an endless winter, that I did not have light because what I experience now is so very different from what I had before. (C.S.Lewis expresses it well in the Narnia story The Silver Chair of the Prince who is trapped underground) Equally God is like air. We may well breath it in and out without thinking much about it, but if we run a race, or do something else equally strenuous, then we need air in a much more powerful way, and thank God, the air is then there for us to breath in and give us the strength for whatever we are in the process of doing.
So Pentecost is not really one moment long ago, but is a never ending process in which all sorts of different human beings in different ways receive the Holy Spirit in this powerful way for many different purposes. Of course, we call some of these people “Saints”, but in fact God the Holy Spirit can and will work in wonderful ways amongst all of us and when this happens we sometimes say things like “Well I never knew I had it in me,” when we should really be giving praise to God for what he does in us when we are in need. Of course, he may not make life easy for us, but he does help us to face up to whatever life throws at us, however hard that may be, and he gives us an assurance that he will be with us beyond our death and into life with him for ever.
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