On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20.19-22)
Early in Luke Russert’s recent memoir, “Look For Me There: Grieving My Father, Finding Myself,” he writes about the time when he was eight-years-old and making his way through the crowds at Oriole Park, holding tightly unto his father, Tim Russett’s, hand as they work their way to the baseball stands. As they move faster through the crowd, young Luke’s grip slips and his hand disconnects from his dad’s for a moment, resulting in Luke falling a few feet behind.
As Luke tells the story, immediately his dad turns around, his face “concerned and focused.” He runs back and grabs Luke’s hand tight, locking the boy’s thumb and fingers around his own wrist. Tim places his other hand atop Luke’s shoulder, ensuring a protective hold. Tim leans down and says to young Luke, “Buddy, if we’re ever separated, just look for me there,” and Tim points to a hot dog stand with a big, easily recognizable Oriole bird logo.
Then, writes Luke, his dad paused for a moment, looked him up and down, and said to him, “But we won’t ever be separated.” As anyone who is familiar with NBC’s Sunday program “Meet the Press” knows, Tim Russett died suddenly of a heart attack at age 58 in June 2008 while on the job. Young Luke, now twenty-two, would deliver the eulogy for his dad in a nationally televised broadcast.
After joining the NBC news family and working for the network for the next six years, Luke decides it’s time for him to recalibrate, to rethink, and to reconnect with his dad. He needs to find his purpose in life. So, he leaves the network and travels through sixty-seven countries over the next several years, studying, learning, looking. It is at the end of his sojourn, as he kneels at the tomb of the Risen Lord in Jerusalem that he has an out-of-body experience that he describes as feeling “like I’m spinning into another dimension.”
Stepping away from the tomb, he takes a few minutes to contemplate his experience. He describes what happens next, “I begin to walk and to process. I begin to look for a sign.” Recalling his dad’s words from those years before, “Look for me there,” Luke says out loud, “You said that to me, Dad. Show yourself!” Just a few seconds pass and, as Luke says, “It hits hard. My eyes well up.” And it comes to him suddenly, the realization, as he says, that “He’s been here all along, guiding me to it.”
If we want to understand in any real way the meaning of the Feast of Pentecost that we celebrate today and recorded for us by the evangelist John, then a good place to start may very well be with Luke Russert’s journey that led him to find, after years of traveling from country to country, that his father was with him all the while. He didn’t have to go “look for him there” because, in fact, he had his hand clasped around his from start to finish.
In the words of Luke Russert, “There in Old Jerusalem I realize it: “Dad, I’ll never lose you because you’re here no matter what. I don’t have to look for you. Your love is within me.” It is the same thing that the Galilean Rabbi named Jesus promised his followers shortly before his own death when he said to them, “I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth . . . It remains with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans. I will come to you” (John 14.16-18).
And so, on the evening of the first day of the week, hours after his resurrection, he stands before the disciples, showed them his hands and his side, and said to them, “Peace be with you,” his words not so much as greeting as a prayer, wishing them the shalom or peace that comes from inside oneself, not from outside. Again, perhaps Luke Russert describes it for us when he talks of “a sense of comfort within uncertainty.”
For the evangelist John, that moment of the bestowal of the Spirit onto the disciples comes as the Risen Lord stands in the Upper Room with them and, as John says, “he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” And while it is quite different from the description of the event as told by the gospel writer Luke, it makes clear the same message: The Risen Lord gifts his followers with the Holy Spirit, a presence that remains deep within them, leading them, guiding them, giving them shalom in the uncertainty of a world weighed down by cruel wrongs and wearied by ignominious wars.
The way for his followers to survive and to thrive in the midst of the uncertainty is to know that the Spirit is always within them, intangible, but not undetectable. The Risen Lord has not abandoned them, has not lost them in the crowd, but reaches out to them and brings them close to himself through his Spirit now breathing within their chests until the end of the ages.
We are, for the most part, more familiar with Luke’s description of the giving of the Holy Spirit as described in the Acts of the Apostles, a cinematic event with a rush of wind that blows through the Upper Room and dancing flames of fire that descend upon the heads of the disciples. John chooses to portray the gift of the Spirit in a less flamboyant way, but no less meaningful way.
For John, the gift of the Spirit is symbolized by breath, not by fire, an image that fits perfectly within his plan. As we know, he begins his gospel with the words, “In the beginning,” a clear reference to the Book of Genesis and to the creation of the world. Here, at the end of the gospel, he has the Risen Lord breath into the disciples (the text is often translated as “on,” but the word also can and should be translated as “into”), another reference to the Book of Genesis when the Lord God brings to life the first man and the first woman by breathing into them his spirit.
Here, the evangelist wants to borrow the image to make the same message. Just as the “ruah” of God, the Hebrew word for spirit, breath, or wind, was put within the first man and woman at creation, giving them a share in his life, so now the Risen Lord offers his breath or “ruah” to the disciples, giving them a share in his life. His “ruah” or breath becomes his continued presence in their lives just as the breath of the Most High God became the continued divine presence in the man and in the woman in the Garden. The symmetry is breathtaking, no pun intended.
The meaning of Pentecost for us modern-day disciples is no different than it was for those first disciples who received the gift of the Spirit when the Risen Lord breathed into them on that Easter evening in Jerusalem. The same Lord stays with us in this time and in this place, his Spirit breathed into us in the waters of baptism, each of us claimed in that moment as one with Christ, redeemed by him and promised a new life with him.
In this way, he fulfills his promise to his followers that we will not be orphans. He remains with us, his presence in our lungs every time we take a breath, that deep breath a continual reminder that he is never far from us, but always within us. And while we cannot see him with our eyes, we can feel his spirit at work within us, strengthening us, assuring us, saving us.
Of course, it would be negligent on our part if we were to think that Pentecost is only about the Risen Lord gifting his disciples with the Holy Spirit. While that is at the heart of the feast, there is a reciprocal gift that we are to give to the Risen Lord. He promises us the Spirit and we promise him that we will live as he lived, continuing his mission in the world, bringing the good news to the far corners of the globe, allowing others to see a glimpse of light in an often dark landscape.
So, it may be more correct to think of the Spirit, not as given to us, but given for us. The Spirit of the Risen Lord within us is there for us to preach, to practice, and to proselytize the ways of the Galilean Teacher who came into the world, not to be served, but to serve. It is noteworthy that as soon as the Risen Lord breathes into the eleven, he tells them, “If you forgive anyone’s sins, they have been forgiven them. If you retain anyone’s sins, they have been retained.”
A lot of ink has been spilled in an effort to explain what the Risen Lord means by the statement. The quandary posed often feels like quicksand. Again, were it mine to explain, I think it simply means the life of the faithful follower of the Risen Lord brings judgment onto the world. I say this because the evangelist John regularly presents a contrast between the way of Rabbi Jesus and the ways of the world, his favorite image being that of light and darkness.
If and when we are able to live a life in faithful imitation of the life of Rabbi Jesus, following the guidance of the Spirit that stays within us, energizing us, galvanizing us, and utilizing us to do the mighty works that the Galilean Teacher did, then the light that we bring into the world will render judgment upon the world, a world darkened by inequity, by envy, by exploitation.
This then becomes our purpose, defined, demarcated, and determined by the Spirit at work within us, a Spirit that is restless, restorative, and resurrecting. The Spirit has but one purpose–to return the world to God and to godliness as it was in the beginning when the Most High God wrestled the forces of darkness and commanded the sun to shine in the day and the stars to shine in the night so that darkness would never overpower the world again.
Pentecost, then, may be seen as the second part of the commissioning of the disciples that the Risen Lord does at the end of this gospel. He tells the disciples to go into the world and gives them the tools they will need to do his works in the world. Those tools are the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
At the end of Luke Russert’s book, having traveled the world over in search of answers, he comes to a stark insight, finally finding his purpose in life. He says it this way: “I want to tell the world’s stories like I have in this book. Do my best to make the world a little smaller, a little more understood, a little more unified. I think that will be my good, decent, and meaningful life.”
That, in my opinion, is a fine purpose in life and, were I to sum up the meaning of Pentecost, I think I would say his words are about as good a place to begin as any.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 