Our Lord Jesus speaks crypically. And He speaks cryptically to Nicodemus today, saying, “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Paul said that the Kingdom of God is within us, so unless someone is born again, one cannot see truly within, it seems. But not having that teaching, Nicodemus is confused by this teaching. I think we would have to admit that all of the disciples, besides I think Blessed Mary, would also be confused. Jesus does clarify His teaching when He adds, “Unless one is born of water and Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.” Jesus further adds that being reborn is being born of the Holy Spirit. And so we have from our Lord a teaching about the power of the Holy Spirit and about life in the Holy Spirit. And this accords with ancient doctrine of the Church: that we worship the Father, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit produces the Christian life.
The predominant character of the Coming of the Holy Ghost on the Day Pentecost is one of explosive spiritual energy–truly divine power–coming upon the 120 disciples in the Upper Room in Jerusalem through their abiding in the words of Jesus in their hearts as He revealed Himself to them through the opening of Scripture and the breaking of bread. This is the birth of the life of the Church, celebrated last Sunday and in terms of Liturgy completed today on Trinity Sunday, the Octave Day (that is, eighth day) of Pentecost. The womb of the Upper Room went boom, and the boom of the explosive spiritual energy of the Coming of the Holy Ghost is so strong that nearly two thousand years later in an area of the world over ten thousand miles away from Jerusalem the religious life in our parish is enabled and lit up by the same explosive energy as that in the Upper Room.
We, as the 120 disciples were two thousand years ago, seek a personal relationship with Jesus in our hearts, recognize His presence in Scripture proclaimed, receive Him in Holy Communion, and seek to order our lives around the Mystery of Christ—ordering our lives personally and domestically, and also ordering around Him our interpretation of the world, our relations with the world and the people and creatures in it. There is no fundamental difference between what we do in our parish and what the Upper Room church did in Jerusalem. They are our contemporaries in the Christian life, as we all live as one Body in Christ on the Day of the Lord. The Church is really a continuous Pentecost, and the life of a Christian is a continual initiation into the reality of Pentecost which is the Church.
The Coming of the Holy Ghost lit a fire in the hearts of men and women, and the fire in their hearts is the fire in our hearts. And this fire is love for God, a burning heat for Jesus Christ. The Coming of the Holy Ghost causes the hearts of people to seek God, to look for Him, to yearn for Him. And all of this amounts to living life in such a way so as, in the words of Saint Paul the Apostle, to be led by the Spirit of God. In all things, Christians seek to be led by the Spirit of God, because His very nature is to lead into Truth, Who is Christ. Human beings are by our nature drawn toward what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful; and all that is good, all that is true, and all that is beautiful is of God.
Where we go wrong, and where humans have always gone wrong, is we often have the habit of defining what constitutes the good, the true, and the beautiful in selfish and self-centered ways, because of concupiscence, the name for our tendency towards appetite for personal, carnal satisfaction. This is what Saint Paul refers to in his epistle to the Romans by the technical and scriptural phrase “living according to the flesh.” To live selfishly, to live self-centeredly, to live pridefully is to live according to the flesh. This way of living leads to spiritual decay, spiritual death—and many of us know firsthand what living according to the flesh means, and the dead-ends, depression, and confusion that ensues. It very much feels like slavery, to use Saint Paul’s term: bondage, to our own frailties, our own temptations, our own stupidity.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of hope; the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a promise of freedom whereby the chains of self-centered concupiscence are unshackled from our heart, and because of being freed from what enslaves us, our hearts learn to beat with the heart of Christ in His Church. This is very much an experience of being born again, and reborn in the Holy Spirit of God the Father through Jesus Christ, by Whom we reinterpret our lives, reinterpret our priorities, reinterpret the situations in which we make choices–the life produced by the Holy Spirit.
As our Lord Jesus Christ ever teaches us, God loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. Being led by the Spirit of God is how we come to receive the testimony of Christ, to receive the Gospel—not in superficial ways, but receiving the Gospel that our heart is transformed, illumined, and on fire for Him that the fire that warms us, we can share with others in the world, that they might share in the transforming heat of Jesus Christ, who is the Light of the world, and Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, the blessed and most glorious Holy Trinity, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
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