The Experience of the Holy Spirit
Pentecost Sunday, May 19, 2002
The Most Revd Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Wales
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
St John in his Gospel always seems to have a different story to tell. In
the other Gospels the Holy Spirit comes down upon Jesus at his baptism and
enables his mighty works, and in St Luke's Gospel especially, when Jesus
ascends into heaven, it's as if the Holy Spirit is not around for a while
and the disciples must await for the gift to be given again at Pentecost.
But St John puts it rather differently. All through his Gospel there is a
sense of anticipation. The great gift, the outpouring, has yet to be given.
Jesus said this about the Holy Spirit, we read in Chapter 7, that the Holy
Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus had not yet been glorified. I
will ask the Father, says Jesus at the Last Supper, and he will send you
another comforter who will be with you forever – the spirit of truth.
And so it is, that when St John gets to the great climactic moment of the
Resurrection, the secret is broken open and the Holy Spirit is given at
once. Jesus bursts through the locked doors where his friends are and
instantly gives them the Holy Spirit. No hanging around until Whitsun there.
So what's going on in these two versions of this story? Perhaps it's
something like this. St John agrees that the Holy Spirit is at work in
Jesus, who is born from the Spirit. Just as much as St Matthew, St John
believes that this spirit makes Jesus able to say great things and do great
deeds. But it is only on the far side of the Cross and the Resurrection that
the Spirit is given, shared. It's only when Jesus is glorified, that is,
when his body has been broken and lifted up on the Cross, that the Spirit is
free to stream out and flood the lives of those around him, flood those
lives so intensely that, as Jesus says, out of our bellies will flow streams
of living water – one of those amazingly powerful and crude images that
tasteful translations of the Bible try to spare you. And surely that's why,
when Jesus comes to his friends in the locked room, he begins by showing
them his hands and his side. It's because my body has been broken and lifted
up, he says, that I can now breathe the Spirit upon you. Without that
breaking, without that darkness, without that terror and failure, the Spirit
would not be shared.
Now that gives us some very hard thinking to do about the Holy Spirit. It's
very easy to stay with the perspective which suggests that the Holy Spirit
is first and foremost given to us so that we may say great things and do
great deeds. The Spirit is given us so that we may lead extraordinary lives.
Well, maybe. But how is the Spirit shared and how does the Spirit become the
bond of community? Not just an extra top-up that makes us more special than
ever as individuals? Clearly, if we read St John's Gospel rightly, the
Spirit is shared and the Spirit becomes the lifeblood of community when our
experience of the Spirit is brought to the Cross. The Holy Spirit which
simply made each one of us individually able to do great things might be
spectacular and impressive, but it would not be the Holy Spirit of Jesus
Christ, nor would it be the Spirit which binds us together in a community
where we can understand each other's language by the miraculous grace of God
and belong with one another so deeply that we feel each other's wounds and
each other's joys. It's as if the surface of our achievement, our
specialness, our spectacular performance, has to be broken before the Spirit
really be the Spirit of communion. And so one of the paradoxes of our faith
is that we experience the Holy Spirit most deeply not in moments, in
examples, of great and spectacular achievement, but in and through moments
of loss, of being out of our depth, yes even of failure. When our
expectations are broken open, when our words are shattered, when our images
break down, in that silence, through those wounds, comes the Holy Spirit.
Now that's not, I hope, just a roundabout way of saying, in order to succeed
you have to fail. Nor is it saying, the Holy Spirit is experienced in bad
moments rather than good ones. It is to say, rather, that the Holy Spirit is
what happens in the moments of extremity. It may be a joy that we can't find
words for, just as much as a pain we can't find shape for. It may be being
projected into the glories and terrors of a new relationship of love, just
as it may be in the pain and loss of a bereavement. It may be in our
inability to say what it is that moves us about God when we feel joyful,
just as much as in the moments when we don't know what to say about God
because He seems so remote and mysterious. But those wounds, those breakages
in the smooth surface of life, and even in the spectacular surface of
achievement, those so it seems St John is telling us, those are the moments
when the Spirit is breathed in a way in which we won't experience or know
otherwise. And that's not to say that the Holy Spirit can't be discerned in
strange events, in events of speaking with tongues, or of healing, or any of
the other mighty works associated with the Spirit, but it is to say that we
will know these things as the work of the Spirit of Jesus only when they are
understood from the perspective of the far side of Cross and Resurrection.
For the Spirit to be free in us, our expectations of possession and
understanding and control need to go. Our expectations of being in charge
have to go, and any experience whether grievous or joyful that begins to
break our hold of control, any such experience is the beginning of an
opening to the Holy Spirit. And surely that is why the Holy Spirit is the
spirit that interprets us to one another. As the reading from the Acts of
the Apostles suggests, when our version of reality, our little world, is
broken into, then perhaps we begin to be able to listen at a new depth to
one another and to speak to another in ways we didn't know we were capable
of.
What happened on that first Pentecost? Who knows, but somehow the friends
of Jesus who had seen him crucified and met him risen, knew how to speak to
strangers so as to be understood. They had seen the wounded hands and side
that he showed them after the Resurrection; they had had their expectations
and their certainties crushed and remade in the Easter event; they had felt
the breath of the risen Jesus upon them, telling them that they could
proclaim sins forgiven; and, out of all that strange experience, they were
able to stand up on the morning of Pentecost and make sense to strangers.
We as a church are not brilliantly good at making sense to strangers and
that's perhaps partly because we have not quite felt what the disciples felt
and we haven't been so close to the Cross and the Resurrection, and we
haven't looked so intently at the wounded hands and feet and side of the
risen Christ, and perhaps that means too we haven't known what an
extraordinary thing it is to believe in the forgiveness of sins, in the new
beginning of God's grace. And so perhaps it is not entirely surprising that
if we spill out into the streets this morning speaking of God, not everybody
will react with quite the same enthusiasm as the crowds in Jerusalem on the
first Pentecost. For us as believers, to speak of God in Christ with
conviction, we have to receive the Holy Spirit in the way that the disciples
received it, allowing our expectations of our own lives, our clear images of
ourselves, our comfortable pictures of God to be blown away by the gale of
the Spirit's coming. Only in a kind of stammering, in a kind of amazement,
will we speak truthfully, and speak so as to make sense.
The coming of the Spirit in that story in Acts, is the coming of a power to
speak compellingly, but sometimes we speak most compellingly when we say in
wonder, love and praise, I don't know what to say. I can't tell you how
grateful I am, we say, meaning this is how I tell you how grateful I am. I
don't know what to say of God, we say, meaning this is the most important
thing I can say about God, that I don't know what to say of God. I don't
know how to persuade you of the overpowering love of Jesus Christ, we say,
and so we speak persuasively, it may be, by God's grace and by the gift of
the Spirit.
During the Eucharist we pray that the Holy Spirit will come down upon the
bread and the wine that we offer, and the lives we offer with them, so that
in that material reality the life of God in Jesus Christ may be alive fully
and without qualification. But the bread on which we invoke the Holy Spirit
is broken before it is shared, as if when the priest breaks the host, the
priest says, receive the Holy Spirit. We don't invoke the Holy Spirit to
make some magic thing, we invoke the Holy Spirit to come to us through
broken bread and spilled wine into our lives, into the gaps, the failures,
the inarticulacies of our lives, so that the Spirit shared with us may
stream from our bellies as living water to meet the thirst of others, as
meaning to meet the need of others, the sense and hope, as love to meet the
darkness of the world. St John's story is not so silly after all. The whole
of Jesus' life, lived under the sign of the Spirit, in the power of the
Spirit, moves towards that exalted and terrible moment when, in the language
of St John, the son of man is glorified and his broken body is lifted up.
What more natural then, that the first thing he should do when he meets his
friends after his resurrection is, in one action, to show the wounds and to
breathe the Spirit? What more natural, at this Eucharist, when the body is
broken we should come to receive the Spirit? And those who receive the
Spirit, from them something overflows, creating in that overflow not only
the community that is the church, but creating wherever it goes moments of
understanding, of shared sense, moments when without realizing it we speak
in a way that makes sense to someone else, we make a bridge into the
loneliness of someone else. From this celebration of the Spirit, given
through the broken body, it is for us to go and overflow, for us in words
and actions, not spectacular words and mighty actions, but the ordinary acts
of listening and compassion, for us to go and create community wherever we
are, to make a bridge into the meaninglessness and the darkness of other
lives, because our own lives have been broken open by God, in joy and in
grief.
So, to be as crude as the Gospel is, we take Christ into our bellies and
from our bellies flow the rivers of living water which will make growth
across the face of the earth, that will build community, which will give us
a language to share as human beings. In that shared language we finally
discover together, by the Spirit's grace how to find words to praise the God
who has saved us, the God who has been among us in the crucified and risen
Jesus and the God who now today breathes upon us saying, receive the Holy
Spirit, overflow in abundance of love, proclaim to the world the forgiveness
that it can't believe in, be sent by Jesus as he is sent by his Father.
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Views is a
publication of
St Peter's Eastern Hill, Melbourne Australia.
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