Sermon for the High Feast of Pentecost

Beloved brothers and sisters,

Today we celebrate the great Feast of Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. To understand this feast we must begin in Paradise.

When God created Adam, He breathed into him the breath of life — made man in the image of God and called to His likeness. Man is a single being of body, soul, and spirit, and the whole man bears that image; the spirit — the pneuma, or nous— is his highest faculty, by which we know God and commune with Him. Here is our capacity for union with Him; the likeness is the goal: to be so filled with God that His life shines through us. In Paradise Adam was clothed in the grace of the Holy Spirit and led toward that likeness, but through disobedience he lost it: death entered, Paradise was lost, communion broken. Yet God promised through the prophets to put His own Holy Spirit within His people once more.

That promise began to be fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the New Adam. The first Adam stretched out his hand to the tree and brought death; the New Adam, His hands stretched upon the Cross, brought life. By His death and Resurrection, He destroyed death and reopened the gates of Paradise, saying to the thief, “Today you will be with Me in Paradise.”

Yet His work was not complete with the Resurrection alone. Before His Passion He promised to send “another Comforter”; the Cross, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost are one work of salvation.

But we must say clearly who it is that descended upon the Apostles. The Holy Spirit is not a power or a mere gift — He is God: the third Person of the Holy Trinity, a distinct hypostasis, consubstantial with the Father and the Son. As we confess in the Creed, He is “the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who together with Father and Son is worshipped and together glorified.”

So the Holy Trinity, made known by stages, is revealed in fullness at Pentecost: the Father of old, the Son in the flesh, now the Holy Spirit within us. Descending as tongues of fire, it is God Himself who makes His home in man — the Holy Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation now breathing new life into the Church.

Pentecost is therefore the reversal of the Fall: where the fall in Eden drove us from God, now God Himself comes to dwell within us. Through the Holy Spirit we become children of God.

This is our true destiny: not merely to be moral or religious, but to be deified to live in theosis,— to be carried from the image into the likeness of God. We do not become God in His essence, which none can approach; but, as Saint Gregory Palamas teaches, the Holy Spirit unites us to God through His uncreated energies, His grace and His light. He does not become our spirit, but is its very life by sustaining it: Scripture distinguishes “the spirit of man which is in him” beside “the Spirit of God.” The same Holy Spirit now quickens our spirit and raises it into the likeness.

Yet He reposes only in a pure heart, for “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”; as Saint Basil teaches, the Holy Spirit shines in the soul cleansed of passions as sunlight in a clear eye. Sin grieves Him and hides His grace, but repentance, prayer, and Communion cleanse the temple of the heart, so that He may rest there and the soul, deified, become light — god by grace, as the Apostles were transfigured at Pentecost.

So, brothers and sisters, let us cleanse our hearts and keep our whole life fixed upon Christ. When everything we do is offered to Him, the heart is gathered into one and becomes a dwelling for the Holy Spirit; but when we follow our own passions, it is darkened, and He finds no place to rest.

The feast asks each of us: will we give Christ our whole heart for His throne, or keep it for our own passions? Today the gates are open, the New Adam has conquered, and the Holy Spirit has come.

Let us receive this gift with faith and thanksgiving, that what Adam lost may be renewed in Christ, and inherit the Kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world. Amen.