Does God’s love
flow from within you?
At the time of the
construction of what we call the tower of
Babel in the Book of Genesis, the people were too thrilled by their own
ingenuity in brick-laying to be paying much attention to God, and the resulting
confusion of their languages is a
sign of the barrier they have erected between themselves and the Lord. No love flows from them, only arrogance,
as they feed their own egos. That barrier will be eliminated with the coming of
Jesus, who, in John’s Gospel, invites all to come to me and drink, that Jesus’ love will flow from within him who believes. In the words of Psalm 104, Jesus, sending his
Spirit, will renew the face of the earth. Only then can the Spirit come to the aid of our weakness, as Paul tells the Romans, opening us, breaking down any
boundary or barrier we have created, that we might be united through prayer to
God, and through our actions, to other.
John’s Gospel also tells us that,
after his resurrection, Jesus breathes
on his disciples, filling them with his Spirit, so that the Spirit of truth will guide them to all truth, that they might testify to his life, death and
rising. The Spirit will indeed fill the
disciples in Luke’s account of the Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles,
reversing the confusion of Babel by the creative act of God’s Spirit, in the
form of breath and wind. It is a moment
of profound transformation wherein the Spirit enters the disciples and then
flows through them, is released by them, that they might proclaim the Good News. As
Paul tells the Corinthians, each may be given a different kind of spiritual gift, but we are all given to drink of one Spirit, that we might, as the Letter to
the Galatians notes, know the fruit of
the Spirit, that is, love, joy,
peace, and more. And that love and joy and peace must flow from us to the
world.
We all thrist for
depth, for love as God knows it. To
believe in Jesus is to come to him, so that that which you seek will flow from
within you. As we participate profoundly
in the love of God, a life flows from us into the lives of others, and back
into us. The more we are connected, the
more we recognize what flows between us, connecting us. So let us, on this Feast of Pentecost, be filled with the Holy Spirit, and allow
that Spirit to flow like a river from us, connecting us, one and all, in the
love of God.
This post is based
on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: http://www.wordle.net
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