Pentecost
Excerpted from A Confirmation of Faith: Chap. 8 The Holy Spirit
You may have experienced the Holy Spirit. You may be singing a familiar hymn in church, and you are moved by the words that suddenly have a deeper meaning than you realized previously. You are sitting by a river in a beautiful valley and are overwhelmed by the beauty of the place and the sense of God’s presence. You wake up thinking about someone in need and feel compelled to call or visit that person.
Richard Rohr describes the Holy Spirit as that aspect of God that works secretly, largely from within at the deepest levels of our desiring. It is an inner compass, a “homing device” in our soul, “an implanted desire that calls us to our foundation and our future.” Metaphors of the Holy Spirit in scripture include wind, fire, a descending dove, and flowing water.
Michael Horton emphasizes that the Holy Spirit is the presence who works within us, even to the point of indwelling us and interceding in our hearts.
In John’s gospel, Jesus comforts his disciples before his arrest and crucifixion by saying that God the Father would send an advocate in Christ’s name, the Holy Spirit, who “will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). We celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost Sunday every year.
The Holy Spirit was dramatically at work in the early church. Luke and Paul make frequent reference to this member of the Trinity in their epistles. On the day of Pentecost, after the speaking in tongues and an inspiring sermon by Peter, many in the gathered crowd welcomed his message and were baptized. According to Acts, about three thousand persons were added to the followers of the Way that day. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). Acts makes frequent reference to the Holy Spirit in the courage of the disciples to preach and heal and bear witness of the Gospel to skeptical leaders. Paul wrote to the church in Rome that it is the Holy Spirit that pours God’s love into our hearts (Rom. 5:5), intercedes for us when we don’t know how to pray (Rom. 8:26), and leads us from fear into confidence as children of God (Rom. 8:14-16).
The earliest Christians spoke of the Holy Spirit as a feminine figure. Many early Christian authors—in particular, those who had been practicing Jews—spoke of the Holy Spirit as Mother. An essential reason for this practice is the fact that the Hebrew word for Spirit, ruach, is in nearly all cases feminine. Also in Aramaic, the word for Spirit, rucha, is feminine. The first Christians, all of whom were Jews, took on this practice.
The Holy Spirit is at work in the church today. The Greek Orthodox prelate and theologian John Zizioulas maintains that the Holy Spirit is “the person of the Trinity who actually realizes in history that which we call Christ,” our Savior. Saint Augustine wrote, “what the soul is to the body of man, that the Holy Spirit is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church.” Our ability to love the stranger and see the Christ in others is a gift of the Spirit. And, as we like sheep are prone to wander, it is the Holy Spirit that intercedes on our behalf and draws us ever so gently but insistently back into fellowship with God.
- Stephen Isaacson, A Confirmation of Faith. (Eugene, OR: Resource/Wipf & Stock, 2023).
- Richard Rohr, Falling Upward. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), 88-90.
- Michael Horton, Rediscovering the Holy Spirit. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 26.
- Johannes van Oort, “The Holy Spirit as feminine: Early Christian testimonies and their interpretation,” HTS Theological Studies, Vol. 72, No. 1, Aug. 19, 2016, hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/3225/7763
- John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York: St. Vladmir’s Seminary, 1997), 110-11.
- Augustine of Hippo, as quoted by Huston Smith, The Soul of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005), 86.
Improbable Benedictine 