Exhortation, Pentecost

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Love, Augustine said, is always triadic, always involves three: the lover, the one beloved, and the love itself. God is love, and this means, Augustine reasoned, that in God there is a Lover, a Beloved, and Love itself. He believed that these correspond to the Persons of the Trinity: The Father is the Lover of His beloved Son, and the Spirit is the love by which the Father loves the Son and the Son the Father. The Spirit that comes to the church at Pentecost has been, throughout all eternity, the Spirit of love and union.

The Spirit who is Love enters a fragmented, divided, and confused world, and He comes to bind together what is broken. He comes above all to knit us to Christ. Just as a husband and wife are one flesh, so, Paul says, �the one who joins himself to the Lord is one Spirit�E(1 Cor 6). The Spirit comes to join together the members of the church into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the matchmaker who prepares the bride for her eventual union with her husband. The Spirit illumines our minds to see Christ in the Scripture, joining text and heart, and the Spirit joins the word preached to the congregation receiving that word.

But the Spirit is the bond of union not only between Christians and Christ or between Christian and Christian. The Spirit is also the power of union in human life in general. Without the Spirit, husbands and wives are at war; only the Spirit makes them one flesh. Without the Spirit, generations are estranged, fathers against sons and sons against fathers; only the Spirit turns sons to fathers and fathers to sons. Without the Spirit of the new creation, the Spirit who brings the future to the present to lead us to the future, there is no unity between past and future, no union of memory and desire.

Our culture is fragmented in many ways. We are cut off from our past; divorce rates are alarmingly high and there is often estrangement between generations; many immigrants have difficulty being assimilated into the mainstream of society. Whatever sociological reasons there are for this, the ultimate reason is that our society is bereft of the Spirit, for the Spirit of Christ is the one who binds together things that are broken. The original fragmentation is the fragmentation of the church. If our society does not display the union and love of the Spirit, it is because we in the church have grieved the Spirit and He has departed from us. What the world needs is a united and thriving church, and what the church needs is a renewal of Pentecost, a fresh burst of the rushing mighty wind of the Spirit.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, May 15, 2005 at 08:14 AM

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