As a newbie twenty-something Christian
I was taught that the Holy Spirit first showed up at Pentecost when the disciples were in the upper room following the resurrection of Jesus. There they awaited "power" from on high. The Spirit arrived like "flames of fire" and empowered the disciples to bravely proclaim the Good News about Jesus. It was a great story and made quite an impression. My Christian friends went on to explain that one of the great differences between Jews and Christians was that Christians had the Spirit of God and Jews did not. Jews only had the Law, the Torah. It came then as quite a surprise to me when I actually read the Bible and discovered that the Spirit of God had been around a bit longer than a month or so after Jesus' resurrection. So I wondered what was this Spirit thing, how long had it been around and why would Christians want to claim the Jews never had it? Here is what I discovered.
First I learned that the Spirit of God is personal; that the Spirit is not "The Force." Even though the Hebrew (ruach) and Greek ( pneuma) terms for Spirit also refer to breath and wind the Spirit is more than a mere force. We see this in the opening words of the scripture (Genesis 1:2) in which we read about the Spirit of God hovering over the pre-creation chaos as God prepares to bring order to creation. This sense of the "personhood" of the Spirit can also be glimpsed in Job 33:4 where Job says, "The Spirit of God has made me and the breath of the Almighty gives me life." The Spirit is also connected to the image of Wisdom which has a life of its own.
The second thing I learned was that the Spirit of God is not only personal but that it has been around as long as God has been around (again note that it was present at creation and that if is identical to Wisdom, that Wisdom is part of God's essence). In some of the most ancient books of the Old Testament we read of God's Spirit being at work, giving people gifts to use, causing them to have ecstatic experiences, encouraging people to rebuild the Temple, calling men and women to prophesy and then telling them what to say.
Those stories led me to my third discovery, that the Spirit is God's agent of both creation and renewal. One of the most profound uses of this imagery is in Isaiah 42:1 where we hear God say, "Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen in whom I delights; I have put my Spirit within him; he will bring forth justice to the nations." The reference is to the suffering servant whom God has called to take on the sins of the world in order that the world might be made new. In a sense anywhere the world or the church is being made new, God's Spirit is there.
I even learned why the church taught that only Christians had the Spirit. The reasoning is in some ways complex, yet at the same time rather straight forward. When the church and the synagogue split apart (somewhere between 40-70 years after Jesus' death and resurrection) the church adopted a very strong anti-Jewish bias. This bias was based partially on the persecution of Christians by the Jews because the Jews saw the Christians as heretics. We can read of this anti-Jewish bias in the Gospel of John and in Revelation. This bias slowly but surely influenced every aspect of Christian doctrine, including that of the Spirit. The Jews, along with every other non-Christian group, were seen as outsiders who were not entitled to God's Spirit. The Spirit became a possession of the church.
Unfortunately for the church, scripture tells us that the Spirit "blows where it wills." In other words God's Spirit is not a possession of the church. The Spirit of God is as free as God to go wherever it wishes and do whatever it pleases…including impacting non-Christians (there are Biblical warrants for this). Our challenge then is to be open to the Spirit when it comes that we might be renewed and empowered for ministry and mission.
No comments:
Post a Comment