The Lord and Giver of Life

The Orthodox priest Fr. Alexander Schmemann calls the Sacrament of Confirmation “the personal Pentecost of every man,” the effect of which is to consecrate him as a temple of the Holy Spirit to inaugurate his new life as a kind of living liturgy. In the next few posts, I would like to explore what is this new liturgical life we have received through Baptism and Confirmation, and what it means for us, each and all together, to be the living Temple of God.

As Christians, we confess one God in three Persons. What we know about the Persons of the Godhead comes to us from the Lord Jesus, who speaks of God as His Father, with whom He shares everything as His Son. He speaks of the Holy Spirit, who bears all that the Father has to the Son, who bears all the Son has to the Father, and who gives of what is the Son’s to the friends and disciples of Jesus. The Father is God; the Son is God; the Spirit is God. Yet the Father is not the Son or Spirit; neither is the Son the Father or the Spirit, nor the Spirit the Father or the Son. In the Godhead, the Father begets His beloved Son without beginning or end. The Father also breathes the Spirit through the Son. As the Church Fathers summarize these relations: the Spirit is the eternal, personal love between the Father and the Son. We call the Holy Spirit “Lord” because the Spirit is fully God in eternal union with the Father and the Son.

The imagery of the Holy Spirit’s descent on Pentecost recalls and fulfills the imagery of the Tabernacle and Temple of Israel. As we read in Exodus 40: “So Moses finished the work. Then the cloud covered the tabernacle of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the tabernacle of meeting, because the cloud rested above it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Whenever the cloud was taken up from above the tabernacle, the children of Israel would go onward in all their journeys. But if the cloud was not taken up, then they did not journey till the day that it was taken up. For the cloud of the Lord was above the tabernacle by day, and fire was over it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys.” And as we read in 2 Chronicles 7: “When Solomon had finished praying, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices; and the glory of the Lord filled the temple. And the priests could not enter the house of the Lord, because the glory of the Lord had filled the Lord’s house. When all the children of Israel saw how the fire came down, and the glory of the Lord on the temple, they bowed their faces to the ground on the pavement, and worshiped and praised the Lord [...].”

At the Baptism of Christ, the Spirit descends to dwell in bodily form on the Body of Christ. As St. John the Baptist recounts: “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and He remained upon Him. I did not know Him, but He who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘Upon whom you see the Spirit descending, and remaining on Him, this is He who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I have seen and testified that this is the Son of God.” That Jesus equates His Body as a Temple is also attested to by St. John. As we read in the second chapter of his Gospel: “Jesus answered and said to them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Then the Jews said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?” But He was speaking of the temple of His body.” And finally, that Christians are identified in Christ as living members of His temple Body is ratified in the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost. As we read in Acts 2: “When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” As the Spirit descended in the wilderness, and as the Spirit descended in Jerusalem at Solomon’s prayer, so the Spirit descends upon each Christian, making every one of them the temple of Christ’s body marked by the glory of God hovering overhead.

That the Spirit is the Lord and comes to dwell upon and within us means that the Father and the Son dwell with us as well. As the Spirit is in the Father and the Son, so as a gift the Spirit comes to be in us as well. The Spirit brings all that the Father wills to give us in His Son, and the Spirit makes us to share communion with the Father and the Son in their eternal life together. This is what we mean when we confess in the Creed that the Spirit is the Lord and the Giver of life. By the Spirit’s presence we are not simply given mere existence, but a purposefully shaped existence. The life that the Spirit gives is the life that human beings were created to know: a life in communion with God to make them the royal, priestly creature in the Creation. We are redeemed from the corruption of sin and death by the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit, so that we can become again what we were created to be. Put another way, we are not given new life in Christ for ourselves—we are created to become the place where God dwells and from which the light of God shines forth to guide the seeker into the right worship of God.

God is with us and for us to give us life. We are each and together the Temple of God, the place on the earth in and through which the life of heaven is meant to be mediated as a sign of the New Creation in the midst of this dying world. In our next posts, we will discuss how the temple-life of the Christian shows the life of the Kingdom of God through the worship and gifts entrusted to her until the Lord returns. For now, we close with the words of one of my favorite Pentecost hymns: “And so the yearning strong / with which the soul will long / will far outpass the power of human telling. / For none can guess its grace / till he become the place / wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling.”