Christ completed his work of Salvation on earth when he ascended into heaven. If such was the case, we should ask ourselves a very obvious question: why do we need Pentecost? Or more specifically, why do we need the Holy Spirit dwelling in our souls if Christ has already completed the work of Salvation? The answer, it turns out, is simple. We need the Holy Spirit to become children of God.
During his earthly ministry – and specifically during his Death and Resurrection – Jesus was not only restoring human nature to its pristine original state, but was also elevating human nature above its original state so that it could participate in the blessed life of the Holy Trinity. In other words, Jesus was giving human nature a ‘software update’ so that it could become fully compatible with God. If Jesus’ earthly life, therefore, represents the ‘software development’ stage of this process, Pentecost represents the stage where this divine ‘software’ is downloaded personally.
We, therefore, need the Holy Spirit dwelling in our souls because we need to be personally wired for God. It is not good enough if God has restored and elevated human nature in the abstract. Rather, He must restore your human nature; his Holy Spirit needs to be ‘downloaded’ into your soul. And that is what Pentecost represents: the descent of the Holy Spirit into the soul of the individual believer.
What, then, does the Holy Spirit accomplish once it is dwelling within us? If we think of the natural world, each living thing has a principle of life, or what medieval philosophers called anima – that is, spirit. This anima, then, animates a living thing, gives it life and bestows upon it a nature. On a supernatural level, the situation is similar. The Holy Spirit – the divina anima – enters into our soul, gives us a supernatural principle of life and gives us a supernatural nature. This supernatural nature, of course, is divine sonship. That is, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we become children of God.
Why, then, do we need Pentecost? We need Pentecost so that we might cry out to God, “Abba, Father!” During this Feast of Pentecost, let us pray that the Holy Spirit would descend upon us once again, so that we might call out to God with the renewed love of children.
Ian Mahood – St. Joseph Seminary, Edmonton, Alberta
Fot. Nowshad Arefin/Unsplash.com