Where does the Holy Spirit sit? Where does Christ sit?

Icon of the Pentecost

We’re right on the verge of the Feast of the Holy Pentecost – the first revelation of the mystery of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles. The drama of the moment for the Apostles is startling, even as Saint Luke puts it before us. The sound came from heaven like a mighty rushing wind. It filled that little upper room in that little house in Jerusalem where they all twelve were gathered. And then ‘appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire’, and the flames struck their heads and caught upon them. And they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit moved them to speak.

This week, in the Twin Cities, we have been touched by other mighty winds, and far less obliging cloven tongues of fire. We have seen before us the spirit of life depart, undeservedly, from a man innocent of any real crime, George Floyd. We have seen the force of a state whose correct end is to protect order and serve justice, behave in a way which is neither orderly nor just. And in response, we have seen the town erupt into division and strife, with curfews being imposed and disorderly behaviour destroying and disrupting entire blocks of the city. And we are trying to restore justice to our state.

Consider, though, how it must have been for those twelve Apostles, huddled up in that corner of that upper room of that house in al-Quds, where they had just come from the Jabal az-Zaytûn in witness of the Ascension. They, too, had just seen brutalised, mocked, humiliated, stripped of His clothes and crucified between two thieves, by two authorities both sæcular and religious, pretending to justice but manifestly unjust, their Saviour and their God. And then they had seen Him rise again from the tomb – and ascend into Heaven.

It is clear from the ending of the Gospel of Saint Luke that many among the Apostles were dismayed, scattered, confused. In the wake of the Crucifixion they were scattered and did not know what to think or to do with themselves. When the Myrrh-bearing Women came from the empty tomb and related what they saw to the male disciples, Luke tells us they dismissed what they had to say as ‘idle tales’. Indeed, Luke says that even when they saw Christ risen from the tomb, in the flesh, the male disciples were ‘terrified and affrighted’. From before His Crucifixion and even after His Resurrection, many among those same Apostles had been expecting Christ to arrive in Jerusalem in glory, to ascend the throne in majesty, retake Judæa and conquer Rome by force for the chosen people of God. Indeed, even as He was about to ascend, the Apostles asked Him: ‘Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?’ And Christ had answered them: ‘ It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judæa, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.’

There was no political programme for the disciples to follow, not even on Pentecost. Yet we cannot ignore the political meaning in these words, which bridge the end of Saint Luke’s Gospel to the beginning of his Book of the Acts. Indeed, we cannot understand Acts without understanding the political implications of these last words of Christ to His disciples. The question of the disciples to their Master was political. Essentially, ‘are you restoring the Kingdom now?’ And His answer back to them was also. As it was not for them, so it is not for us to ‘know the times or the seasons’. But we have been told to be witnesses in the world.

But how is this done? This – being witnesses in the world – is a commandment which poses as much as a challenge to us, as it had to Peter or Andrew or James or John or any of the other disciples. And that, without knowing the times and the seasons. We must therefore understand in the context of the text, how and why this commandment is still enforced upon us, and what it means today to be a witness to Christ in a world that seems on the verge of breaking – because, just like them, neither do we know the times or the seasons which God has in His own power. We must therefore look at the context in which the disciples lived, and attempt to read the political we live in a typological fashion – rather than attempting to project Christian witness into an unknown future through adaptation to modern ‘knowledge’ on the one hand, or pretending to a knowledge we do not have about ‘the times or the seasons’ on the other.

Because, if we are to take the Liturgical theology of the Cross seriously – that is the world-historical moment of Judgement, and all things will be tried at the foot of the Cross: the Cross is the judgement seat before which we shall stand at the end of our lives and at the end of all things. All people and all actions will be tried before the example of Christ. It is not an accident that the Orthodox Church opens the Lenten Triodion and Pentecostarion at the Sunday of the Last Judgement, and closes it two weeks from now on the Sunday of All Saints: this is the procrustean bed of the Church’s own Liturgical wisdom, which bookends the Last Judgement and Holy Pentecost together, around the mystery of the Cross and the Holy Pascha. I’m going to be honest here: I had planned to write much more about the typological ‘landscape’ of Christ’s political context, but I checked myself as soon as I ran up against the awesome and terror-inspiring fact of the Last Judgement in which I am now standing. I wish to tread here with extreme caution, because I know I could get it very badly wrong – many people do get it very badly wrong – and I do not want to mislead people about something so important. I shall refer, then, to authorities beyond me: the late great Fr Thomas Hopko, who writes with reference to the homilies of the wonderful Saint John Chrysostom:

It’s important to see also that the judgment is simply the presence of Christ. Jesus said that already in St. John’s Gospel when he was on the earth when he said, “I didn’t come to condemn the world. I didn’t even come to judge the world.” He said, “My words are a judgment. My presence is a judgment. You are making the judgment, not me. I have come to save you,” but this is the judgment that he said had come. In St. John’s Gospel he says, “The light has shined in the darkness, but some people did not accept it because they loved darkness more than light because their deeds were evil.” And the light of God itself is a judgment. It makes things known. It makes things clear. Things are then seen for what they really are. We Christians believe that that is what happens when we die, and when we die we are somehow projected immediately into the final end of the world, the final coming of Christ.

St. John Chrysostom, whom we often refer to, said, “What a strange kind of a judgment it is. In fact, there’s no judge. There’s no defense lawyer. There’s no prosecuting attorney. There’s even no jury. There’s just Christ and us. That’s it.” And we pronounce the judgment on ourselves. How do we do it? The Lord tells us in this parable. He said when all the nations and all the people are gathered before him, he will separate them. By the way, that verb, “separate,” that’s where you get the verb “judge, krisis.” It means to kind of set a line down the middle to show how things actually are. In fact, you might say even judging means to make that decision: where do you stand? Where do you put yourself at this judgment?

Then in the parable—it’s very interesting how the Lord says that he will sit there as the King, and he will say to some on his right hand, “Come, blessed of my Father; inherit the kingdom prepared [for] you from before the foundation of the world.” Then he says the reason that they are inheriting the kingdom that is prepared for them is because, “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty; you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in, you welcomed me. I was naked; you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison; you came to me.” Amazingly, the righteous, the just, those who will be saved, those who will stand the judgment, they ask him, “When did we see you? When did we actually see you hungry or thirsty or homeless or naked or sick or imprisoned?” Then the King, the Lord, Christ, will answer, “Truly, I say to you: as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

Sadly, we do not live in a time or in a place in which ‘the least of these my brethren’ are valued. We live in a coarse, callous time that has come to view the vulnerable as a nuisance, as a pestilence, as disposable. Christ spoke to a ‘wicked and adulterous generation’ which ‘seeketh after a sign’; and we live in an age where one ‘side’ burns a church to seek after a sign, while the other ‘side’ seeks after a president through a cloud of tear gas, holding up a Bible and making a speech as a sign. (But no sign is given except the sign of Jonah – and of course that story has to be read as a type, too!) If we want a sign in these times, we need to look for it among those who lack bread, those who lack water, those who have lost their homes, those who have lost their clothes, those who have lost their health and those who have lost their freedom. If this was the standard spoken of at the Last Judgement, this is also the work of Pentecost.

And the least of these our brethren – they simply do not line up neatly on one ‘side’ or other of our culture wars. On the world stage, among those who stand in judgement of us will be: the starving infants of Yemen, the thirsty children of Gaza, the homeless people of the Donetsk Basin, the displaced people of Iraq, the jobless young men of Greece, the elderly and the uninsured, the incarcerated people within our borders – as well as the migrants in detention, the targets of racial prejudice and the vulnerable unborn already mentioned. It is our obligation to love them no matter how inconvenient it may be. On the present question, we are challenged to love both the protesters, and those who have lost their homes and businesses to rioting. God knows I have been found wanting enough, with some of these who will judge me.

Once again: I had planned to write a whole long exposition that tried to superimpose the politics of Christ’s time on our own – as I have done before as a blogger much younger and much less wise. Instead, I’m letting Fr Thomas Hopko do most of that work for me, because he does it better than I could. But really, the material fact is this. On Golgotha, Christ was crucified – a punishment broadly but not exclusively reserved for slaves and rebels and lower-class criminals – by the powers of Cæsar and of the Sanhedrin. And he died between two robbers or lēstas, the same word lēstēs which is used to describe the Sicarius Barabbas whose place on the Cross Christ took. Christ our God chose to die surrounded by men who rebelled against the worldly order, against an unrighteous imperium mundi – though we are told that even among these men there were those (like Dismas) who were saved even as they were killed, and those (like Gestas) who were not. The Judgement does not cut along neat lines such as those that the world likes to impose on us.

And yet at Pentecost we are called to remember the descent of the Holy Spirit. This is also a ‘moment of judgement’ in that it is the first moment in the works of Saint Luke since the Crucifixion that the Apostles are moved to take action for themselves: to go forth into the streets, and to speak to the peoples of the world – even to the forgotten and crucified peoples – in their own tongues. Holy Pentecost is where we take the mystery of Pascha, the moment of joyous revelation of a transfigured life in God, and translate it into action in our communities. The opening of the book on the Last Judgement, and the closing of the book on our temporal judgement, are bound together through the work of the Holy Spirit.

The icon of the Last Judgement