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The Day of Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): John 14:17
A Sermon by
The Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne
on
John 14:17
✛
A Sermon for the Day of Pentecost
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John 14:17: This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him.
If the Spirit is indeed the Spirit of truth, how can it be that the world does not see him? For St John the ‘world’ is not all that is, but all that is opposed to God, all that is in bondage to the Father of lies rather than open to the Spirit of truth. Worldliness in this sense involves a closure of the mind and a radical attitude of denial. To be in the world means more than simply being outside the visible Church, for there are many truth-seeking people who have not yet found enough of the truth of Christ to be able to belong to the Church, but whose quest for truth is genuine and guided by the Spirit, even if many of them are unaware that this is so. ‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes,’ as Jesus says to Nicodemus earlier in the gospel (3:8). For example, I see the Spirit at work in the truth-seeking community of science, even if many of my colleagues are unable to understand their work in those terms.
There is something veiled, almost elusive, about much of the working of the Spirit. In the Trinitarian iconography of the Western Church, the Father is represented by a kingly figure, the Son by the figure of Christ on the cross, but the Spirit has a modest, almost anonymous, presence as a small dove. Even that is sometimes missing, as in a Trinitarian image in the St Calixtus Chapel in Wells Cathedral in England. Outside the charismatic movement, Pentecost is probably the Great Festival that excites the least excitement and anticipation in the mind of the average Christian. We tend to call it simply ‘the birthday of the Church’ which, of course it is but a grander and more fitting title would be ‘the Pouring of the Spirit’. Trinity College, Cambridge once commissioned a sketch for a possible painting of Pentecost for its Chapel. It turned out the presence of the Spirit was to be indicated by a kind of semi-transparent floating amoeba, hovering above the heads of the disciples, who bore a striking resemblance to a party of Cambridge dons.
Acts gives us a much more vigorous picture of Pentecost, though even here there is ambiguity as some of the bystanders suppose that the exuberant disciples are simply drunk. There was the sound of a rushing wind and we are told that ‘divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them and a tongue rested on each of them’. In medieval paintings the scene is often somewhat quaintly represented by the disciples looking like a collection of human candles. Yet, an important theological truth is expressed in the separation of the tongues of fire. The disciples are not engulfed in a single overwhelming sheet of flame, but the Spirit rests on each of them individually. The pouring of the Spirit is not the obliteration of individuality but the affirmation of individuality and individual gifts.
In my own Christian life, and particularly in my ordained ministry, a very important truth for me has been the Pauline vision of the Church as the body of Christ, in which all have their specific roles to play and their particular gifts to offer. No single person is adequate to the fulfilling of the Church’s call to service and witness, for this can only be accomplished together, a task in which the contribution of each believer is indispensable to the work of the whole. It is the Spirit who empowers this ministry and who binds together those engaged in it. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, ‘There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit, there are varieties of services, but the same Lord, and there are varieties of activities, but the same God who activates all of them in everyone’, a Trinitarian account of the communal life.
This diversity of gifts and services is realised within the one communion of the Holy Spirit. It has often been observed that Pentecost is the reversal of the fragmentation of the human life symbolised in the story of the Tower of Babel. The overweening pride of its builders was humbled when they were dispersed and scattered as ‘the Lord confused the language of all the Earth’. At Pentecost, as the Spirit is poured out on the disciples in a new way, all hear them speaking and all are able to understand what is being said. Paul expressed this reversal of Babel when he wrote ‘For in one Spirit we were all baptised into one body, Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, and we are all made to drink of one Spirit’. The conventional divisions of humankind, whether cultural and religious (Jews and Greeks) or social and economic (slaves and free), are no longer of account when it is the one Spirit who is at work in all of us. Differences of gifts and experience, differing vocations of caring, labour or intellect, are not obliterated, but they are transcended so that we can work together to achieve a potentiality and fullness that none of us could attain on our own. The work of the Spirit is patient formation of the body of Christ and it is in the disseminated character of this work that we find an important theological explanation of why, despite all these fruits and gifts, the work of the Spirit so often seems to be veiled, hidden from sight.
A degree of obscurity by no means implies a lack of positive creativity. A simple parable from science can illustrate the point. It is an important scientific insight that the regimes in which true novelty can emerge, such as life from inanimate matter, are always ‘at the edge of chaos’. That is to say, they are regimes where order and disorder, clarity and obscurity, are inextricably intertwined. If things are too orderly, too clear, they are too rigid for anything really novel to be possible; if things are too disorderly, too clouded they are too haphazard for any novelty to be able to persist. Fertility lies in a balance between the two extremes. In an analogous but much more profound way, the working of the Spirit is both reliable but shrouded from detailed analysis.
The Eastern Orthodox Church has a way of thinking about the manifestations of the divine Persons that is helpful to us here. The Orthodox speak of the way the Persons of the Trinity bear witness to each other. One of their twentieth-century theologians, Vladimir Lossky, wrote:
The divine Persons do not assert themselves, but one bears witness to another. It is for this reason that St John Damascene said that ‘the Son is the image of the Father, and the Spirit is the image of the Son’. It follows that the third Hypostasis of the Trinity is the only one not having His image in one of the Persons. The Holy Spirit, as person, remains unmanifested, concealing Himself in His very appearing.
According to this understanding, there is a self-emptying self-effacement present in the manifestation of the Spirit, whose full revealing awaits fulfilment in the eschatological assembly of the community of the redeemed. And we must surely add to that, awaiting also the total transformation of this present suffering world into the world of God’s new creation. The Spirit hovered over the waters of chaos and, as Paul told the Romans, participates in the groaning travail of creation, and His action is not confined to humanity alone but it will be fulfilled in the new creation where ‘God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away’ (Revelation 21:4). Then the Spirit will be unveiled in all His glory, manifested in a redeemed Church and a redeemed creation.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
__________
Note: Reverend Dr. Polkinghorne gave a free public lecture called “Can a Scientist Pray?” at Saint Thomas on Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 6:30pm, which is webcast here.
