Pentecost Acts 2:1-21; 1 Corinthians 12:1-13; John 7:37-39 St Ursula’s, Bern; 28 May 2023 Our Bible readings today, for Pentecost, speak of God’s gift to us of the Holy Spirit. I’m going to focus mainly on the short reading from John’s Gospel but first I’ll make a few comments on the two other readings. The theme that has struck me in these readings, taken together, is that the Holy Spirit is given to us as individuals, but the purpose of this gift to each of us, which means nothing less than the presence of God in our lives, is to turn us outwards, to connect us more deeply to each other, and to make us channels of the life and love of God to the world around us. The story we heard in our first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, takes place on the day of Pentecost, just a few weeks after the crucifixion of Jesus. Pentecost means fifty. It was a Jewish festival held fifty days after another great festival, Passover. Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem at Passover; but God raised him from the dead and he appeared to his disciples many times in the following days. However, that phase of the presence of the risen Jesus ends when he ascends to heaven, after promising that he will soon send his Spirit upon the disciples, the Spirit who will enable them to be witnesses to Jesus and do his work throughout the world. A few days after the ascension, on the day of Pentecost, the disciples are together in Jerusalem. That’s the background to this story. Now, after the days of waiting, the promise of Jesus is fulfilled: the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples, with wind and fire, and they receive a miraculous gift enabling them to speak to people of many lands and different languages about the great things God has done. Pentecost is a key moment in the Bible. Here the story of Jesus moves into a new phase. The ascended Jesus is no longer present in the world as he was, but now his presence and action in the world continue through the empowering presence of his Spirit among the disciples. For now, let’s note just one point about this episode: the Holy Spirit turns the disciples outwards, enabling them to reach outwards to the crowds of people in Jerusalem that day. The Spirit is not given to the disciples to provide a fulfilling spiritual experience to keep to themselves. Sure, what happened that Pentecost morning was something that the disciples would never forget, but it was not an end in itself. The Spirit was given to them, as the Spirit is given to us today, to turn them, to turn us, outwards toward other people, communicating the love of God for the world, revealed in Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection. In today’s second reading Paul expresses another aspect of this movement outwards that the Holy Spirit inspires. Paul is writing to the Christians at Corinth. We are now about twenty-five years on from the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. Continuing what began that day, Christians have followed the Spirit’s prompting to take the message about Jesus to many different lands. Wherever people have believed, they have gathered together and become the first churches. One of these early churches is in the Greek city Corinth. The apostle Paul knows this community well, and one of his concerns about them is that in their thinking about the Holy Spirit they fail to see the big picture. The Christians at Corinth are excited about certain dramatic, supernatural manifestations of the Spirit’s presence, but they tend to forget what the Spirit ultimately seeks to do among them. The purpose of the Spirit, Paul says, is to create a community of diverse people united in their faith in Jesus Christ. Paul says to the Corinthian Christians – and he would say the same to us today – that the Holy Spirit is at work in each one of them and gives gifts to each of them. Each of them matters, every single one of them, and because the Spirit has given gifts to each of them they all have something to contribute to the life and work of the Church. So these Christians should not turn inwards, each focusing only on their individual spiritual experience and their own special contribution. No, Paul insists, each of you has been given gifts by the Spirit, but for the good of everyone else. The Spirit seeks to turn each of you outwards with a concern for the common good, the flourishing of the whole community. And the outward movement doesn’t stop there, because we are all called to make our contribution to the flourishing of the Church so that the Church will become more fully what God calls it to be – the Body of Christ, the embodied presence of Christ, existing to make Christ known in the world. So we come to today’s short reading from John’s Gospel, where we also find the theme of the Spirit turning us outwards. But first we hear about our own need to receive. Standing in the temple courts in Jerusalem during another festival, addressing crowds of pilgrims, Jesus cries out: ‘If you are thirsty, come to me and drink.’ Thirsty pilgrims would surely have welcomed a drink, as we may have experienced if we’ve ever forgotten to take enough water on a long walk on a hot day. Thirst is a universal human experience, pointing to a basic need. Thirst is uncomfortable, it can be agonizing, and it tells us that we need something. If we are to live, we need water. But Jesus wasn’t handing out bottles of cold water. He isn’t speaking of physical thirst and water but of spiritual thirst and the water of life. He makes the contrast clear in an earlier conversation, when he asks someone for a drink of water, and then the talk goes deeper and Jesus says: ‘Whoever drinks this [ordinary, physical] water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give will never thirst. Indeed the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ (John 4:13-14) When Jesus says in today’s Gospel ‘If you are thirsty, come to me and drink’, he takes words spoken by God in earlier scriptures and re-uses them in his own right. In the Book of Isaiah, God says: ‘Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters . . . Come, buy wine and milk without money . . .’ (Isaiah 55:1) Jesus now echoes this earlier scripture, taking on his own lips God’s invitation, and says ‘If you are thirsty, come to me and drink.’ Jesus is God coming among us and giving us what only God can give: the water of life that satisfies our most fundamental needs: our need for love, for community, for purpose. But what does this have to do with our theme at Pentecost of the Holy Spirit? Well, this passage is read at Pentecost because John the Gospel-writer adds a very interesting comment on these words of Jesus about the water he offers, as follows: ‘Now Jesus said this about the Spirit, whom believers in him were [later] to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.’ John’s Gospel, which is looking back on the ministry of Jesus from years later, includes this invitation of Jesus to come to him to receive the water of life and comments that Jesus is speaking of the Spirit. But then comes this rather strange comment that at this stage there was no Spirit. What does that mean? Well, since the very first chapter of John Gospel speaks of the Holy Spirit coming upon Jesus, this passage cannot mean that the Spirit did not yet exist. It seems to be a short-hand way of saying that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that rested upon Jesus, had not yet been given more widely, had not yet been poured out as would happen later, on the Day of Pentecost. At this stage of the story, in the middle of his ministry, there still lies ahead of Jesus the culmination of everything he came to do, the full revelation of the glory of God’s love that will only come when Jesus has been lifted up on the cross to draw all people to himself. It is only then, on the far side of the death and resurrection of Jesus and his ascension beyond this world to fill all things, it is only then that the Spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, can be poured out in the world. The Holy Spirit flows from the Cross. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the crucified and risen Jesus. The Holy Spirit is not some other aspect of God, more spiritual, more ethereal than the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit is the presence among us of the God we know through the crucified and risen Jesus. The Holy Spirit connects us to Jesus and makes real today, in our lives, the same Jesus who is described in the Gospels. Jesus said ‘If you are thirsty, come to me and drink’. Maybe a few hundred people saw and heard him that day two thousand years ago in Jerusalem, but today the Holy Spirit brings that invitation from Jesus to us and to any who will listen, and makes it possible for us to enter into the reality that Jesus speaks of. There’s one more vital point to note in this Gospel-reading, taking us back to what I said earlier about how the Spirit turns us outwards from ourselves to contribute to the flourishing of the Church so that the Church can be the Body of Christ in and for the world. After that wonderful invitation to come to him and drink, Jesus goes on: ‘Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within him.’ Rivers of living water will flow out from those who believe in Jesus. Jesus seems to be saying here: you all need the living water, the spiritual life, that I bring. But I’m giving it to you so that you in your turn will become givers of life to others. I will satisfy your thirst with living water, and that same living water will flow through you and from you and on to others who are also thirsty for it. Freely you have received; freely give. The Church is a place of abundance. We know that through Christ God has blessed us abundantly, giving us more than we could ever deserve or imagine. The knowledge of that abundance that surrounds us unlocks our hearts, our imaginations, even our wallets, so that we want more and more to imitate the abundant generosity of God by becoming generous givers of ourselves in all kinds of ways. What we are really thirsty for is to become givers, givers in the way of Jesus, givers who are being shaped by the Spirit to become like Jesus. It’s only when our lives are truly turned over to self-giving in his way that our inner thirst will be satisfied. The life of God will be flowing through us and that will be enough for us; then we will thirst no more.