Right now though, we are in transition, preparing for the Ascension as well as Pentecost. During the Last Supper, Jesus gave the assurance that He would never leave the Apostles alone. This was by no means the only time He assured them. It was the same promise given to Peter when He said, “Upon you, I shall build my Church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it”. And just before He ascended, He instructed them to spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth and to baptise all nations. Within this Great Commission there was also a pledge that He would be with them till the end of time. This commitment is fulfilled through the Holy Spirit.
As Jesus withdraws, the Spirit will become the animating force in the Body of Christ. He plays the role of reminding and teaching the Church everything that Jesus had taught. Through the Holy Spirit, Christ is present to the world through His Church.
How should one think of the Holy Spirit with regard to this promise and what is His relation to the Church?
What comes to mind with regard to the Holy Spirit’s presence is “Zeitgeist”. It is a Germanic word which expresses the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as illustrated by the ideas and beliefs of the time. A good example would be “gender identity”. Who you are is not determined biologically but psychologically. It has not arrived here yet but it will via social media influence. “Zeitgeist” is also identified by relevance in which it expects everyone or even the Holy Spirit to submit to its dictate. Along with the confusion of the Holy Spirit with “Zeitgeist”, there is also an implied bias which relegates the “old” to the “useless” and at the same time elevates the “new” to the forefront of “relevance”. “Reading the signs of the times” is “almost” equivalent to capitulating to the changed circumstances of the present. Celebrities and corporations live in fear of the mob of “cancel culture” so much so that they have to “virtue signal” that they are in step with the prevailing thinking. For example, Calvin Klein newest advertisement features a pregnant transgendered man.
The sobering fact is that Spirit is more like the Church than we realise. Christ is the founder of the Church. The Spirit sustains His Church to shape and prepare her for His 2nd Coming. However, when Jesus asked Peter “Do you ‘love’ me?” three times, the Greek words used were twice “agape” and once “phileo”. The change in word usage signified Jesus’ acceptance of Peter’s “limited” capacity to love, not of the highest sacrificial type but one of natural affection. In this exchange between Jesus and Peter, we catch a glimpse of the Church in the making and the role of the Holy Spirit would play in the Church in moulding the Church into the instrument that she is supposed to be. Just like Jesus, the Spirit accepts our frailty in the sense that He works with us according to our fallen nature. It is not easy.
The Holy Spirit is a less a spirit of spontaneity and more a spirit of stability. But ours is a generation that does not like constraints. We chafe at limits because we have deified personal autonomy and as such, there is a tendency to conscript the Holy Spirit into our service. For example, when Pope Francis was elected, a Jesuit was hear proclaiming proudly that that the Holy Spirit has returned to the Church.
This exuberance runs counter to the “specific” role of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit leads us recognise and prompts us to profess the faith of the Church that “Jesus is Lord” (cf. 1 Cor 12:3b). He directs us to Christ who saves us through His Church. As the Gospel of John reminds us, the Holy Spirit acts for Christ because He is the breath of the Risen Christ. Thus, through the Sacrament of Baptism, He breathes new life into us.
It is a banal idea which can make the Holy Spirit sound “boring” because we are more at home with a “Spirit that blows where it wills” (John 3: 8). Furthermore, in the last 70 years as the world shrivels into a global village, given our fondness of diversity, pluralism and equal respect, we have had to account for the multiplicity of religious beliefs. Could an insistence on Jesus Christ as the ONLY Saviour and the necessity of the Church for salvation “cramp” or limit the movement of the Holy Spirit when it comes to the redemption of those who are not Christians? Not to mention the whole idea of “superiority” inherent in the ONLY Saviour claim.
In the past, we could not conceive of salvation outside the Church but we have come to accept theologically that the mystery of God’s salvation cannot be constrained by the “institutional Church”. However we want to play out the “respect” and “equality” game, what the Church as Church cannot hide from is her own credal conviction that Jesus Christ is the ONLY Saviour. Without reducing Jesus to a saviour amongst saviours, this begs the question of the role the Holy Spirit has in terms of salvation of those who do not know Christ.
Today the confession of Jesus as the ONLY Saviour is expressed as “All salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is His Body”. Lumen gentium, the Church in the Modern World, in relation to all the other religions, points out that “the Church considers all goodness and truth found in these (other) religions as a preparation for the Gospel” (LG 16) showing us that the Holy Spirit could be at work in the religions of the world. Nevertheless, God “the Father willed to call the whole of humanity together into his Son’s Church. The Church is the place where humanity must rediscover its unity and salvation… She is that bark which in the full sail of the Lord’s cross, by the breath of the Holy Spirit, navigates safely in this world” (CCC 845).
If we accept that Christ is the ONLY Saviour of the world, then the Holy Spirit has an unenviable role of leading us to recognise where He blows in the other religions. However, the more difficult task is to convince Catholics that the Church is the barque intended by God for salvation. Why? So that we can take our membership in the Church seriously, meaning that we appreciate our baptism deeply and live in such a manner that we can be attractive. Otherwise, it is definitely easier to buy into the idea that multi-religiosity is an expression of the Spirit blowing where He wills than to admit that we have failed in convincing others that Jesus is truly the Saviour of the world. The history of salvation is also a history of our poor cooperation with the Holy Spirit in the personal conversion of our lives. We easily concede pluralism as the “zeitgeist” but the scenario as the Apostles broke out of their prison of fear is the same as what we have today. They did not proclaim Christ as Saviour to a homogenous crowd. Every known nation of the world was present then. 3000 were convinced solely by the proclamation of Peter to embrace the Gospel. Today, it is not enough just to proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord. Personal conversion is the only message credible enough to convince others that Jesus is the Risen Lord. He is alive in His Church through the Spirit that animates Christian lives. In other words, our lives reflect the active presence of the Spirit of Christ at work in our salvation.
