The Acts of the Holy Spirit – Joel’s Prophesy Sunday, April 29, 2018

            This seemed to the early Christians to be the completely apposite image of their corporate life. The Church was the Mystical Body of Christ. Mystical in this usage meant supernatural and mysterious, but in no sense did it mean unreal. The human form of Christ had left the earth, but as his work on earth was incomplete he was continuing it, his physical body being now replaced by his mystical body of which he was the head. This Mystical Body was brought into life in the Upper Room in Jerusalem at Pentecost by the power of the Holy Spirit which was its animating force. For “what the soul is to the body of man,” writes Saint Augustine, “that the Holy Ghost is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church.”

            If Christ was the head of this body and the Holy Spirit its soul, individual Christians were its cells, few at first but increasing as the body came of age. The cells of a physical body do not live unrelated; a single life vivifies the whole with each cell sharing in it. Similarly, the Holy Spirit was flowing through and vivifying each Christian, all of whom together constituted the Church’s natural form. As man lives through each of his individual cells, so Christ was living in each member of his Mystical Body. The entire aim of Christian worship was to say those words and to do those things that, in helping Christians to realize their inclusion in the Body of Christ, would enable his life to course through their own more potently.

            In describing themselves as Christ’s body, then, these Christians were not using metaphor loosely, as we do when we speak of a crowd as a “body” of people. They believed themselves to be genuinely “incorporated” into Christ’s person.                                   

Huston Smith, The Religions of Man, p. 320f (1958)

This was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost when the 120 were filled with the Holy Spirit and the 3000 responded in repentance and faith, were baptized, and received the gift of the Spirit.

            Peter, however, went beyond the present moment and held out the gift of the Spirit both to Jews and Gentiles who would hear the gospel and turn to Christ in faith. No matter how Peter may have understood Joel’s prophecy that in the last days God would pour out his Spirit upon “all flesh,” he was convinced that the gift of the Spirit was not restricted to the 120 or even to the 3000 Pentecostal coverts. Peter went on to say: “For the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off, every one whom the Lord our God calls to him.”

            The “gifts” of the Spirit must not be confused with the “gifts” of the Spirit. There were gifts as well, to be sure, but that is not what Peter meant when he offered the gift of the Spirit to all those who would believe. And this gift was made available not only to those who waited in the upper room, nor only to the Pentecostal visitors, but “to your children,” says Peter. The “children” are the descendants, the future generations.                                                                     David Ewert, The Holy Spirit in the New Testament, p. 113 (1983)

            And just as the Gospel had concentrated on Jerusalem, the location of God’s great exodus for man, so the Acts shows the mission spreading out from that centre in ever widening circles. As Jesus insisted in Luke 24: 47, it was all to begin in Jerusalem: hence the emphasis on Jerusalem as the place where the Pentecostal gift arrived. It was never to lose touch with Jerusalem: hence the repeated journeys of Paul back to the metropolis and the supervisory visits of Jerusalem leaders to various parts of the expanding Christian arena. But it was to move out from Jerusalem. The Acts is the story of that moving out. First within Jerusalem, where three thousand are converted on the day of Pentecost itself; it would be hard to stress more emphatically the link between the Spirit and mission than by showing such effective evangelism as the result of the reception of the Holy Spirit on that notable day! Then the good news spreads out in the pattern outlined in Acts 1:8. At every point in the advance, it is the Holy Spirit of God who takes the initiative.

            Now all this emphasis on the Spirit as the author, the controller and the energiser of the Church’s mission is highly significant. It reminds us that mission did not originate, in the earliest days, in the leadership of the Church. It was not a matter of Peter and subsequently Paul saying “What about a bit of evangelism?” Luke does not teach us that the apostles initiated mission. They sat quietly in Jerusalem until the Spirit came upon them at Pentecost; then they could not keep quiet about the mighty deeds of God.

            But at the beginning of Acts, volume two in the drama, we find the story of the ascension related again, and from a very different point of view. This time the ascension does not bring down the curtain on the life of Jesus; instead, the curtain goes up on the life of the Church. The exaltation of Jesus to the Father’s right hand is not only God’s vindication of his person and his achievement; it is the precondition of the coming of his Spirit upon the witnesses who are to carry on his mission. Volume one tells of what Jesus began to do and to teach until his ascension to the right hand of God; volume two tells of what Jesus continued to do and to teach through the apostolic Church after his ascension, through the gift of the Holy Spirit which he shed upon it.

Michael Green, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, p. 61f, 64 (1975)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Acts of the Holy Spirit – Joel’s Prophesy Sunday, April 29, 2018

            This seemed to the early Christians to be the completely apposite image of their corporate life. The Church was the Mystical Body of Christ. Mystical in this usage meant supernatural and mysterious, but in no sense did it mean unreal. The human form of Christ had left the earth, but as his work on earth was incomplete he was continuing it, his physical body being now replaced by his mystical body of which he was the head. This Mystical Body was brought into life in the Upper Room in Jerusalem at Pentecost by the power of the Holy Spirit which was its animating force. For “what the soul is to the body of man,” writes Saint Augustine, “that the Holy Ghost is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church.”

            If Christ was the head of this body and the Holy Spirit its soul, individual Christians were its cells, few at first but increasing as the body came of age. The cells of a physical body do not live unrelated; a single life vivifies the whole with each cell sharing in it. Similarly, the Holy Spirit was flowing through and vivifying each Christian, all of whom together constituted the Church’s natural form. As man lives through each of his individual cells, so Christ was living in each member of his Mystical Body. The entire aim of Christian worship was to say those words and to do those things that, in helping Christians to realize their inclusion in the Body of Christ, would enable his life to course through their own more potently.

            In describing themselves as Christ’s body, then, these Christians were not using metaphor loosely, as we do when we speak of a crowd as a “body” of people. They believed themselves to be genuinely “incorporated” into Christ’s person.                                   

Huston Smith, The Religions of Man, p. 320f (1958)

This was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost when the 120 were filled with the Holy Spirit and the 3000 responded in repentance and faith, were baptized, and received the gift of the Spirit.

            Peter, however, went beyond the present moment and held out the gift of the Spirit both to Jews and Gentiles who would hear the gospel and turn to Christ in faith. No matter how Peter may have understood Joel’s prophecy that in the last days God would pour out his Spirit upon “all flesh,” he was convinced that the gift of the Spirit was not restricted to the 120 or even to the 3000 Pentecostal coverts. Peter went on to say: “For the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off, every one whom the Lord our God calls to him.”

            The “gifts” of the Spirit must not be confused with the “gifts” of the Spirit. There were gifts as well, to be sure, but that is not what Peter meant when he offered the gift of the Spirit to all those who would believe. And this gift was made available not only to those who waited in the upper room, nor only to the Pentecostal visitors, but “to your children,” says Peter. The “children” are the descendants, the future generations.                                                                     David Ewert, The Holy Spirit in the New Testament, p. 113 (1983)

            And just as the Gospel had concentrated on Jerusalem, the location of God’s great exodus for man, so the Acts shows the mission spreading out from that centre in ever widening circles. As Jesus insisted in Luke 24: 47, it was all to begin in Jerusalem: hence the emphasis on Jerusalem as the place where the Pentecostal gift arrived. It was never to lose touch with Jerusalem: hence the repeated journeys of Paul back to the metropolis and the supervisory visits of Jerusalem leaders to various parts of the expanding Christian arena. But it was to move out from Jerusalem. The Acts is the story of that moving out. First within Jerusalem, where three thousand are converted on the day of Pentecost itself; it would be hard to stress more emphatically the link between the Spirit and mission than by showing such effective evangelism as the result of the reception of the Holy Spirit on that notable day! Then the good news spreads out in the pattern outlined in Acts 1:8. At every point in the advance, it is the Holy Spirit of God who takes the initiative.

            Now all this emphasis on the Spirit as the author, the controller and the energiser of the Church’s mission is highly significant. It reminds us that mission did not originate, in the earliest days, in the leadership of the Church. It was not a matter of Peter and subsequently Paul saying “What about a bit of evangelism?” Luke does not teach us that the apostles initiated mission. They sat quietly in Jerusalem until the Spirit came upon them at Pentecost; then they could not keep quiet about the mighty deeds of God.

            But at the beginning of Acts, volume two in the drama, we find the story of the ascension related again, and from a very different point of view. This time the ascension does not bring down the curtain on the life of Jesus; instead, the curtain goes up on the life of the Church. The exaltation of Jesus to the Father’s right hand is not only God’s vindication of his person and his achievement; it is the precondition of the coming of his Spirit upon the witnesses who are to carry on his mission. Volume one tells of what Jesus began to do and to teach until his ascension to the right hand of God; volume two tells of what Jesus continued to do and to teach through the apostolic Church after his ascension, through the gift of the Holy Spirit which he shed upon it.

Michael Green, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, p. 61f, 64 (1975)

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