For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body…
How do we proclaim that Jesus is Lord?
Whenever we forget that we are dependent on the Lord, we are bound to run into trouble. Psalm 104 reminds us that everything we need comes from God, who gives us not only breath but food in due time, and fills us with good things. But the residents of the city of Babel (or Babylon) failed to remember this essential truth, and so, the Book of Genesis tells us, they decide to build themselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Their sin is one of arrogance; by striving to make a name for themselves, they are setting themselves above the divinity, and so God confuses their language, scattering them all over the earth. Not until Pentecost will this confusion of language be reversed.
The Holy Spirit is Jesus’ gift to the world, a way for him to remain present with us after his Ascension. In fact, well before Jesus’ death and resurrection, he promises that rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me. This is, in John’s Gospel, a reference to the Spirit that will come upon his disciples at a later date. Later in John’s Gospel, after Jesus is raised from the dead but while the disciples are still behind locked doors on the evening of the first day of the week, Jesus breathes on them, saying Receive the Holy Spirit. In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke will place this gift later in the disciples’ journey, fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection, when a strong, driving wind – the Spirit itself – drives them from the house in which they were and into the street, enabling them to proclaim the good news in different tongues to devout Jews from every nation under heaven. The confusion of Babel ends with the proclamation of Jesus Christ, the revelation of God the Father.
Like the disciples after Jesus’ Ascension, like the Romans to whom Paul wrote, we too long for the Lord’s divine presence and groan within ourselves as we wait for the redemption of our bodies. We too long for the fulfillment of all that God has promised, and that longing itself is a gift! But the Spirit is with us always, even in our struggles, connecting us with the Lord and helping us to be aware that the Lord is present with us in different ways, as Paul told the Corinthians: the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God who is at work in us wherever we gather as the Body of Christ. We were all given to drink of one Spirit, that we might reveal that Jesus is Lord to all we meet!
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
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