Three Births and the Third Person of the Trinity

A Scriptural Reflection on the Readings for Sunday, May 19, 2013, Pentecost Sunday | Carl E. Olson

Readings:
• Acts 2:1-11
• Ps 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34
• 1 Cor 12:3b-7, 12-13 or Rom 8:8-17
• Jn 20:19-23 or Jn 14:15-16, 23b-26

He is silent, yet sounds like rushing wind; he is invisible,
but appears as tongues of fire; he is constantly working and giving, but is
often overlooked and underappreciated.



He is the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of Life, the third Person of the
Trinity. He has many names in Scripture, including Advocate, Comforter, the
Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of adoption, the Spirit of
grace.



In the second chapter of the Acts of Apostle, the coming of the Holy Spirit is
described as “a noise like a strong driving wind” and his presence as “tongues
as of fire.” Notice how elusive the language is: the Holy Spirit is not a
driving wind, but is like such a wind;
he is not a tongue of fire, but appears as one. There is a paradox here, which is so often the case with the
Holy Spirit: he is both very elusive and yet constantly active. It’s as though
you see something or someone out of the corner of your eye, but no matter how
quickly you turn, they are gone.

Isn’t this the sense conveyed by Jesus, who said to
Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but
you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who
is born of the Spirit” (Jn. 3:8)? The word “born” is deeply significant for
there are three very important births, or creations, described in Scripture in
which the Holy Spirit moves and acts, giving life.

These three births are closely connected. First, there is
the birth of the cosmos and the creation of the world: “The earth was without
form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of
God was moving over the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2). There it is again: the
Spirit was moving. Pope John Paul II, in
his encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Dominum et vivificantem (Pentecost, 1986), further notes that the presence
of the Spirit in creation not only pertains, of course, to the cosmos, but also
to “man, who has been created in the image and likeness of God: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness.’” (par. 12).

The second instance is the conception of the God-man, Jesus
Christ. What did the angel say to Mary? “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be
born will be called holy, the Son of God” (Lk. 1:35). Once again, the Holy
Spirit is active; he is coming with power. Once again, he is intimately
involved in bringing about a man. In the first creation it was Adam; now, the
new Adam.

The third birth, or creation, took place at Pentecost, fifty
days after the death and resurrection of Christ. “The time of the Church
began,” wrote John Paul II, “at the moment when the promises and predictions that
so explicitly referred to the Counselor, the Spirit of truth, began to be
fulfilled in complete power and clarity upon the Apostles, thus determining the
birth of the Church” (DV, 25). At Pentecost, the Church—the family of God and
the mystical body of Christ—is birthed by the Holy Spirit. And he is the soul
of the Church. “What the soul is to the human body,” wrote St. Augustine, “the
Holy Spirit is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church” (Catechism of the
Catholic Church, 797).

Emile Mersch, S.J., in The Theology of the Mystical Body (Herder, 1952), wrote: “The Holy Spirit is
continually being sent, and Pentecost never comes to an end.” The Acts of the
Apostles reveals the Holy Spirit “ceaselessly coming down into the world, no
longer under the form of fiery tongues, but through the intermediary of the
apostles and their preaching.”

He is still coming, filling, moving, and giving life. Let’s
pay attention!

(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the May 23, 2010, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)