Pentecost and the Work of God

Today, in the yearly cycle of the life of the Church, we find ourselves at the point at which the work of God is, in a sense, completed. The Church year, as you will recall, begins in September; and the first major feast of the Church year is that of the Nativity of the Theotokos. This feast is the prelude, if you will, of the way in which God fulfills the promise He made to Adam and to Eve, even as they were being cast out of the Garden of Eden. By their disobedience, they could no longer live in the intimate presence of God, and speak with Him, and see Him face-to-face. Now they were sent from Paradise into the world, there to face the challenges and rigors of life, and now subject to death, and the fear of death. But God makes them a promise: A Deliverer will come, who will set them and all their descendants free from death, and make it possible for the human race to once again live in the presence of God.

God never leaves His people. He acts to cleanse the earth when sin had become so pervasive that it threatened the existence of all living things. He chooses a righteous man, Noah, to build an ark, and to preserve a remnant from the great flood He will send to put an end to sin. Later, generations after the family of Noah has spread out and grown in numbers, He chose another righteous man, Abraham, with whom God made a covenant, promising that it would be through the lineage of Abraham that salvation would come to the world. Later, from the lineage of Abraham, God chose Joseph, the son of Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, to be the preserver of Egypt from a great famine, by which Joseph was also able to save all his family. Many generations later, God chose Moses to deliver His people from the slavery that had fallen upon them in Egypt, and to bring them to the land He had promised to Abraham and His descendants. As they journeyed, God was with them, and in the desert God gave Moses His commandments, so that His people would know how they were to live a life pleasing to God. Generations later, God chose David to be the King of all the children of Abraham, and, as king, to rule according to His Law, and to enforce the Law among His people. He sent prophets to teach them, and to call them to repentance and the reformation of their way of living. Finally, in the fullness of time, He sent His Son to take on our human nature, so that all the promises God had made would be fulfilled. We celebrate His coming into our midst at the feast of the Nativity. We celebrate the beginning of His ministry among us at the time of His baptism in the Jordan River on the feast of the Theophany. Through the course of the year, we recall many of the miracles He performed, hear Him teaching His disciples, see Him confronting the people who had been told He would come, but did not always recognize Him. Then we celebrate His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and go through the events that lead to His arrest, torture, and death on the Cross. We remember Him buried, and then the glorious celebration of His triumph over death with His resurrection on Pascha. We walk with Him once more through the forty days He is present with His disciples after He has risen from the dead; and then, as we did just ten days ago, we celebrate His Ascension into heaven.

It is important for us to recall that His ministry among us, which began with His taking a human body for Himself – a body in which He lived as we do; a body in which He worked miracles; a body put to death on the Cross and buried in the tomb; a body that He raised from the dead – His ministry continues as He has ascended into heaven, taking us with Him, for He remains joined to us, His divine nature joined to our human nature. As St. Athanasios the Great teaches, He became like us, that we in turn might become like Him. With His Ascension, the promise made to Adam and Eve has been fulfilled; and the path to Paradise, which had been guarded by an angel with a fiery sword so that Adam and Eve could not return the way they had come, has been opened for us by Him. As we once lived in the presence of God, so now does He live, and our human nature is seated at the right hand of God the Father. We have, in Him, been restored to the state we had with God before the fall of Adam and Eve.

Now we have come to the Day of Pentecost, the day our Lord told His disciples to await, the day on which they were anointed with power from on high. As He promised, He sent the Holy Spirit to teach us all things, to strengthen us in our life in Christ, and to lead us into all truth.

We still have work to do. As the disciples were anointed with the Holy Spirit on the feast of Pentecost itself, each one of us, everyone who has been baptized and chrismated has, on that day, had their “day of Pentecost,” for when we were baptized we were raised from the dead, not with the life we had when we were born, but rather with the life of Christ, risen from the dead; and when we were chrismated, we were given power from on high – not in the form of the flames, but through the water of the font, and the oil of chrismation. We are called to bring into the reality of our lives the potential created by God in us – we are called to live, not according to the world, but rather by the way of the kingdom of heaven. We are called to leave behind the life we had before, and to embrace and express in our own thoughts and words and deeds the life of Christ risen from the dead. We are called to a new life, and given power for that life by the Holy Spirit within us. St. Paul tells us that our bodies are meant to be temples of the Holy Spirit; and that we are to have the mind of Christ, so that we can speak and act and show to the world the life of Christ.

When they see us, do they see our Lord? Brothers and sisters, the work of God by God is complete; but we have work – His work – to do in ourselves. Let us trust in the Lord Who has given us His life; let us trust in the Lord Who has given us the Holy Spirit, and so the power to change our lives; and let us dedicate ourselves to being transformed from who we are into the likeness of Christ, so that He may be seen in each of us, to the glory of God, and the salvation of our souls.