THIS MORNING, as soon as I woke up and prepared to take a shower, I was surprised to find out when I opened the tap on my sink that there was no water. Good thing we had some drinking water from the water dispenser so I was at least able to make myself a cup of coffee to start my morning coffee with Jesus.
I started by reading the Office of the Readings and I found myself reflecting on one of the less familiar metaphors used to describe the role of the Holy Spirit, whose feast we celebrate today, Pentecost Sunday. We are more familiar with the typical images of the Holy Spirit as a dove, as fire, as wind, as light, as breath, as an advocate, as a guardian, etc. But we are not as familiar with water as metaphor for the Holy Spirit.
Here is what St. Irenaeus says in today’s Office of the Readings in the breviary. In sending us the Holy Spirit, the Lord “was preparing us as an offering to God.” Then he proceeds to describe the Christian community as “a dry mound of flour that cannot become one lump of dough, one loaf of bread, without water, without moisture.” He says, “We who are many could not become one in Christ without the water that comes down from heaven. And like parched land which yields no harvest unless it received moisture, we who once were like a waterless tree could never have lived and borne fruit without this abundant rainfall from above. Through the baptism that liberates us from change and decay, we have become one body. Through the Spirit we have become one ‘in soul’.”
Where is St. Irenaeus getting this from? I suggest that he may have been reflecting on our second reading today from Chapter 12 of the first letter to the Corinthians. Listen to what it says, “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given TO DRINK OF THE ONE SPIRIT.”
Irenaeus must have also had the Eucharist in mind as he was reflecting on the mystery of the Church. Remember, both processes of making bread and wine for the Eucharist are rich symbolisms in themselves. You have to crush and grind many grains of wheat into powder in order to make bread. In the same way, you have to crush many grapes and ferment the juice to make wine. But you cannot make one loaf of bread from the wheat powder, without water.
Think for a while what the earth would have been like if it did not have water. Life would not have materialized. Just as water binds the dust to make clay, which can then be formed into a jar by the potter, so it is also water that binds the powdered wheat together into a mass of dough and makes it into a loaf of bread.
And this loaf of bread is what we consecrate at the Eucharist when we invoke the Holy Spirit to come upon it, so that we can receive it as the Body of Christ and bring about our COMMUNION, our coming together into a COMMUNITY, our INCORPORATION into a new identity, into members of the Church, the BODY OF CHRIST.
The secular world has borrowed this idea of “incorporating” from Christianity, from the Church as the oldest existing corporation in the world. Now we have all sorts of organizations, companies, foundations and other entities having themselves registered with the Securities Exchange Commission, so that they call themselves “INCORPORATED.” Most of these corporations have come and gone. Some were even empires. They appeared and disappeared. What was lacking? The binding agent.
Perhaps they have forgotten that there is only one binding agent that guarantees the creation of a corporation that can truly exist PERPETUALLY: the Holy Spirit, the water of God’s grace.
Now I understand why we have retained water as basic element in the sacrament of Baptism, despite the fact that early Christianity distinguished John’s baptism of repentance from Jesus’ baptism in the Spirit. We have retained the idea of baptism as immersion in water, not just as cleansing from sin, but as rebirthing into Christ. Baptism by Water and the Holy Spirit are not two but one and the same baptism.
The Holy Spirit comes into our lives as refreshing water that brings about life and fruitfulness. If you are traveling in a desert and you have only one little bucket of water left, I wonder if you would use it for washing. I am sure you would rather save it for drinking, in order to survive the journey until you chance upon an oasis.
May we all continue to drink of the one Spirit. May the Spirit continue to fall upon us like rain so that we can be drenched and bound together into one mass of dough, so that we can become bread for the Eucharist, so that we can be incorporated into the one Body of Christ, perpetually.
We cannot have the bread of the Eucharist, the body of Christ, without the Spirit. We cannot become the body of Christ without the Holy Spirit. We are nothing but dust unless we are bound by the Spirit and made into clay that can be moulded by the Potter’s hands. We are nothing but a lifeless desert if the Spirit does not descend on us to make our lives bloom. Let the prayer that we repeated several times in our Responsorial Psalm today be our mantra for Pentecost: “LORD, SEND OUT YOUR SPIRIT AND RENEW THE FACE OF THE EARTH!”
(Homily for Pentecost Sunday, 23 May 2021, John 20:19-23)
