[Note: the audio recording above will vary in places from the prepared text below.]
The episode recorded for us today by Saint Matthew begins with Jesus seeing the crowds of around Him. They are described as “sheep without a shepherd.” Thus they were not only without Jesus Christ, but also without the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, Who always bears witness to Christ and reveals Him as both truly God and truly Man. Without the Holy Spirit, Jesus appears as merely man, which is a false sense of Who He is.
We are told as well more generally that Jesus would meet groups of people in just this sort of condition, teaching in their synagogues and preaching. And what we are told He preached is the “Gospel of the Kingdom.” It is worth realizing that the Gospel Jesus is preaching cannot yet be the Gospel of His salvific sacrifice on the Cross, because He has not died yet. But whatever His preaching on the Gospel of the Kingdom is, we know it is be similar to what He charged the Twelve to do in their ministry, which was to preach “The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.” To preach that the Kingdom of heaven is at hand (or the Kingdom of God, for it means the same thing) is what Jesus began to do at the very onset of His public ministry after His Baptism by the hand of Saint John Baptist, and it is what He continued to do throughout all His public ministry. And I will say, and then explain, even at His death, when after He said “It is finished” He gave up the Spirit, upon Blessed Mary, John, and the other Holy Women at the foot of the Cross.
The explanation of what I mean that He preached the Gospel of the Kingdom on the Cross is that the Kingdom of Heaven (and the Kingdom of God, which means the same thing) refer to the Holy Spirit; and this is something important to know. Kingdom of Heaven and of God are a way of characterizing the Holy Spirit, experientially. We arrive at this connections through two teachings: from Jesus and Saint Paul. Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (that’s Luke 17.21). We put that together with Paul, who said, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (that’s 1 Corinthians 3.16). The Kingdom of God is within us, and God’s spirit dwells in us, His temple: thus both point to the Holy Spirit being the Kingdom of God. And this fits theologically: the Holy Spirit is the Kingdom, within which Jesus is King, and He is the King Who sits on the throne of His Father.
And this is a good place to point out as well that in the Our Father prayer, the clause “Thy Kingdom come” refers to the Holy Spirit. “Our Father, Who art in heaven” refers of course to the Father; “Hallowed be Thy Name” refers to the Son, for as Paul taught, the Father “has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name” (Phil 2:9). That leaves “Thy Kingdom come” which refers to the Holy Spirit and completes the trinitarian beginning of the one prayer Jesus taught His disciples to pray. By the Our Father prayer, we adore the Holy Trinity and agree that His will be done.
The take-away of all this, my dear brothers and sisters, is how we see the Holy Spirit in the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel. And the Holy Spirit’s place in the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel is this: He (the Holy Spirit) prepares for preaching about Christ’s salvific sacrifice. The coming of the Holy Spirit was central to Our Lord’s preaching, and He taught it was to be the primary message preached by His disciples. And it was this kind of preaching that brought spiritual growth in the Church – spiritual growth as the vocation accepted by the Twelve, and spiritual growth as the vocation accepted by disciples to be baptized on Pentecost (3,000, Saint Luke tells us).
Proper preaching, in other words, leads to spiritual growth. If a parish is experiencing spiritual growth, then the Holy Spirit is being preached; the Kingdom of God is at hand, and disciples are truly taking to heart the reality that the Holy Spirit dwells in us, in our heart, in our mind: the Holy Spirit enlightening our hearts and purifying our minds: that we truly are His people, and the sheep of His pasture, and feeding on Christ as Scripture is opened and Bread is broken. Amen
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