There are two very different themes set for the Day of Pentecost. One
is joy in the coming of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1-21), so uninhibited
that its witnesses mistook it for inebriation. The other is broken
hearted despair on the night before Jesus died (Jn. 15:26-27;
16:4b-15). In truth, they go together.
We do not associate broken hearts with the good news of Easter or with
the giving of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, but I think we should.
Broken hearts, if the Gospel is true, are the guarantee both of our
resurrection and the life of the Spirit of Christ. And broken hearts
are something we have some experience of when resurrection is something
we do not, at least not fully. If Christ went not up to glory but first
he suffered pain, we will not go to glory either without suffering the
pain of a broken heart. There is no other way.
It is into the broken heartedness that Christ promises the Holy
Spirit. It is also into the scene of ecstatic joy that the Holy Spirit
descends on the first Pentecost. In our broken heartedness, the Spirit
of God is present. In our ecstasy, the Spirit of God is present there,
too. And in both, the Spirit calls us forth, forth from our broken
heartedness and forth from our joy into the reality that marked Christ’s
life, which is love. Love, with all its attendant risks, with all its
possibility of hurt, with all of its possibility of disappointment, with
all of its possibility of happiness—with all that the Spirit calls us
to be on about the work of Christ in the world, which is to love. And
it is especially to love one another.
If it is in the brokenness of heart that we feel love most acutely,
then all of us know something of the fullness of love, even if only a
glimpse. It is our broken heartedness that is the sign of our risen
life because our risen life will be dominated by love and our broken
heartedness is the sign of our submission to love, of our willingness to
risk love, of our surrender to love, which of course, is to surrender
to God. And in that is our only life. We have seen in that brokenness
of heart a glimpse of God’s broken heart for us. And in that we see the
tiniest glimpse of what the love of God has planned for us. It is that
brokenness of heart that allows us to know in our hearts that Christ is
risen. And so shall we be. And the Spirit is come to call us into
that very life.
Peace,
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