Saturday, June 20, 2015
Pentecost May 24, 2015
Pentecost
May 24, 2015
Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
When the Spirit of truth
comes, He will guide you into all truth.
.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Pentecost
celebrates the giving of the law on Sinai marked by thunder and lightning
flashes. It is no coincidence that the
Holy Spirit fell upon the Apostles on the same feast, with the sound of a
mighty wind and flashes of flame, which we call tongues, identifying the Light
of the Spirit with the new capacity to address all peoples in understandable
language. It is tempting to see a contrast
or opposition between these two events: Law on Mount Sinai, Spirit on Mount
Zion. This may be a mistake. After all, we affirm in the Creed that the
Holy Spirit "spoke through the prophets," the chief of whom was Moses. What Moses brought down from the thunder and
lightning on Sinai was the gift of the Spirit, Who spoke through him.
It was Paul who noticed the paradox: the law convicted us of
sin. Some gift! Without
the law, there is no sin, Paul observed.
This is a paraphrase of an old Roman adage: without law, there is no
crime, woith which Citizen Paul would have been familiar. I always thought that was all it meant. Without the law, human beings don't know
right from wrong. We have no notion that
we ought to do the things the Law commands and not to do the things it
forbids. We had to be taught the
difference between right and wrong. But
is that all? Is Paul's observation that
without the law, there is no sin, simply a theological adaptation of the Roman
adage? I got to thinking about that in
the context of the notion of sin as separation.
The children of Israel are supposed to obey the law in order
to fulfill their part of the covenant with God, Who freed them from slavery. They are to be God's people. A holy people. A people set apart, separate from other
people. That is what makes them
holy. That's what it means to be holy,
to be set apart, and the Law is what distinguishes them from everybody
else. But hold on! If sin is separation and apartness, then it
seems as though holiness, defined this way – the consciousness of being apart from others and
carefully maintaining distinctions by ethical norms and ritual practices – is
sin itself!
Isn't that what Paul was wrestling with in his Epistle to the
Romans? The paradox is precisely this:
the law sets us apart, and thereby
imprisons us in sin, which is the condition of being apart. No wonder Paul kind of pulls out his hair,
rhetorically, asking “does that mean that the law is sin? God forbid!”
Yet, the very holiness the Law produces brings also a sense of
alienation: a communal identity of separateness. We needed a notion of holiness, but it wasn't
enough by itself. The Law had to be
fulfilled, not only in the sense of being observed, but in the sense of being
completed. Christ had to nail sin to the
Cross — He had to nail apartness and separation to the Cross, publicly, and
finally destroying alienation — what Paul called the dividing wall of hostility.
Thus Christ brought a new kind of holiness to creation: the holiness that is
not apartness and separation and distinctness, but the holiness that is
wholeness and communion: what the Apostle called Grace.
As Paul says in another place, the law was our pedagogue unto Christ. We had to have the gift of the Spirit in the
form of Law, in order to develop the notion of justice and communal oneness as
our part of the Covenant with God. But
in the fullness of time, when we were ready, — when the pedagogue completed the
service of bringing us to the Messiah — we found ourselves no longer under the
constraints of observances and practices intended to set us off from other
people. Now, we were brought together
with all peoples into the universal Communion that overcomes the apartness
(sin) that the Law illuminated at the very same time it was making us into the
Community of God's people.
The law is not sin – God forbid! — But the law "convicts us." Of sin — not so much that the law reveals our
own hopeless inability to fulfill the law, but that the law convinces us that
we are separate from all other peoples.
In that way, the law brought sin into clear view, in such a way that
Paul could also say that whoever is under the Law is under a curse. Apartness and alienation are, in fact, a
curse — a curse that the Law reveals.
But at the very same time, the Law was teaching us to honor
God, and our parents, to renounce human sacrifice and other idolatrous
abominations, to sanctify time instead of place, and to respect one another in
a minimal way. It also taught us to reboot the economy every fifty years. Among
God’s holy people there were to be no permanent classes of haves and have-nots
no castes, no hereditary privilege.
Law and spirit are not opposed. As the Law came down on Pentecost,
so did the Spirit. And Moses successors, the Prophets of Israel, through whom
the Spirit spoke, increasingly proclaimed the Law more than a mere ethnic
marker to set a particular people apart from everybody else: the Law of Moses
was to make them a Light to the Nations – holy in the sense of separate, so
that they could act on behalf of
everyone else, to make humanity holy in the sense of whole, in Jesus the
Messiah. There would be no more
distinction between Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free. All are one in the New Israel created by the Fire of the Holy Spirit
Israel was
to be a Light to Enlighten the Nations. The Fathers called the Spirit Light, and Light illuminated the
Apostles, when Jesus Christ cast fire upon the earth as He had promised,
causing them to preach the Good News to all peoples. This good news is God's intention to unite with all creation, through a new,
unified humanity. The ancient fathers
called this process divinization. Here is what St. Basil of Cæsaræa said:
Through the Spirit’s aid
hearts are raised on high, the weak. Are led by the hand, and those who are
reaching forward in life are led on to perfection. Shining on those whose hearts are purified
and stainless, the Spirit makes them truly spiritual through the intimate union
they have been granted. As when a ray of
light touches a polished and shining surface, and the object becomes even more
brilliant, so too souls that are enlightened by the, spirit become spiritual
themselves and reflect their grace to others.
The grace of the Holy
Spirit enables them to foresee the shape of the future, to penetrate mysteries,
to discern the meaning of obscure realities, to receive spiritual blessings, to
focus their minds on their heavenly citizenship, and to dance with the
Angels. This is their joy on ending and their
perseverance in God unfailing. Thus, do
they become like God, and most wonderful of all, thus do they themselves become
divine.
ALLELUIA!
THE SPIRIT OF GOD FILLS THE WHOLE WORLD, COME, LET US ADORE.
