Pentecost, 1996

Intimacy

I think it is true that most of us in the Catholic Tradition used to think of the Feast of Pentecost as the Birthday of the Church, and I think, if I were pressed, I could reconstruct some of the context of that claim. But I would like to suggest that the claim itself is questionable: it is, to put the worst construction on it, self-serving at least, or, more generously, we could say it's at least too narrow a view of things... We're celebrating the advent of the Spirit of God, and so what I'd like to suggest is an alternate way of understanding this business of Pentecost: it is the birthday of considerably more than the Church. I am suggesting that with the Resurrection and the Ascension there is a kind of union built between God and us human beings through the agency of Jesus... "Intimacy" is the word that I used a couple of weeks ago and last Sunday when I talked about the continuity that exists between our human lives and what we call Heaven.

It seems to me that it is reasonable to say the union that Jesus, the man Jesus, now enjoys with the Father, this other transparency, in a kind of inevitable way, is expressed in a sort of explosion of life--it is well that Pentecost happens in spring-time. But that's exactly what intimacy with God means for us human beings. By dint of that, Jesus becomes the agent, and I don't want to give any kind of mechanical construction of it, but, simply, who Jesus now is means that Jesus radiates life through all the rest of us human beings. That's what a human being in total intimacy with the Father does. That's simply the way it is... Life... Then the part of Spirit is all through the Hebrew Bible, and it is the Jews' attempt to say: "How does God enliven us?" Of course the presence of Breath, of Spirit, is the obvious and maybe the best way of talking about that.

So we're talking about Jesus as intimate with the Father now enlivening us and here everyone opens his or her agenda as to where they need to be enlivened... This is going to be very short today because of a baptism and people have all kinds of stuff going on, but I would like to suggest one small way that might be helpful, at least I find it helpful when I'm talking about this. We talk a lot today about empowerment, and I think in the common usage this is a way of talking about more life, except I think the way that plays out in the lives of most of us means that if I am empowered I can go and tell everybody to stuff themselves... That's where empowerment lies...

Well, I would like to say that that is precisely the reverse of what Jesus and the sending of the Spirit enables us to say, namely: "that I am not powerful," which is itself, paradoxically, an act of empowerment... The act of power is to say: "I am not in control..., I did fail..., I do not know..., I am mistaken..., I have betrayed you..." I'd like to suggest that all of those are statements of power, statements of the presence of life, real life, that comes from the Spirit of God and the real life that does precisely what the Spirit of God is supposed to do. What we have in this quaint little story enables us to hear each other, all the strangers to truly hear, to truly move into the world believing that we can truly speak and be heard. But more and more I am someone beside me as a lonely old man, and there's a shock of recognition in that statement... It is enormously illuminating, if not somewhat painful, but it is true that at my stage in life I look around and see who is really connected to whom, and in what ways, whether we're talking about me and my immediate circle, or if we're talking about the world at large. This is what Pentecost is about and this is why that birthday of the Church business is highly inadequate. It's not the birthday of the Church; it's the birthday of the human family. It's either that, or it's nothing. If we believe that we can appropriate, confiscate, as it were, the Spirit of God and make Her our own, and only our own, then we fail to understand what the Spirit of God, what life, and what real power, is all about.

So Pentecost is at least as big a strain on my faith, to go back to the main theme, as the Resurrection is. It's not difficult to believe that God can raise someone to a new form of life where they are transparent to everybody else, or to believe that I can be transformed, to believe that I can be loved, to believe that I am loved, and not in some kind of private way, but only with everyone else... Only that gives content to Jesus with the Father irradiating us... We're talking about the essence of who we are and who we're called to be.

So it's a great day to have a baptism because what we're saying, what we believe, goes far beyond the miracle of the biological fact of birth: that there is something much more astonishing and far more miraculous; namely, that this child is going to be brought into intimacy with God and with all of us... So this is it, you know, when they say: "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit..."--My words, but they are everybody's words here...

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