The Face of Mercy / Daniel Conway

The Holy Spirit, source of our true freedom

As we celebrate the feast of Pentecost this weekend, it’s good to recall Pope Francis’ teaching about the gifts we receive from the third person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the source of God’s life in us. He is the gift of freedom, the liberty that allows us to come alive in our witness of the Gospel without hesitation or fear, compromise or rigidity.

In a recent homily on the Gospel account of Jesus’ meeting with Nicodemus, the pope commented on Jesus’ statement that he must be “born from above … born of the Holy Spirit” (Jn 3:3, 5).This statement confused Nicodemus, as it probably confuses us.

To understand this better, he described the situation in the Acts of the Apostles where Peter and John have healed a crippled man, and the doctors of the law don’t know what to do, how “to hide” what happened, “because the event was public.”

When they were questioned, Peter and John “answered with simplicity,” and when they were ordered not to speak about what happened, Peter responded, “No! We cannot remain silent about what we have seen and heard. And we will continue to do as we have been doing” (Acts 4:23-31).

These are the same men who cowered with fear behind locked doors immediately after Jesus’ resurrection. Until they received the Holy Spirit, they were incapable of acting with boldness or conviction. The gift of the Holy Spirit freed them from their fear and their rigidity. It awakened them to the truth about themselves, and it empowered them to become new men, “born of the Holy Spirit.”

According to Pope Francis, the gift of freedom that Peter and John received at Pentecost allowed them to “have courage.” He says that they received “frankness, the frankness of the Spirit, which means speaking the truth openly, with courage, without compromises.”

This is an important theme for Pope Francis who detests the tendency some Christians have to be legalistic in their practice of the faith. People who measure every move they make before reaching out to others in faith and charity are like the “doctors of the law,” who ritualize everything and take no risks in their observance of their religion.

“At times, we forget that our faith is concrete,” the pope says. “The Word was made flesh; it was not made an idea. And when we recite the Creed, everything we say is concrete: ‘I believe in God the Father, Who made heaven and Earth; I believe in Jesus Christ who was born, who died…’ These are all concrete things. Our Creed does not say, ‘I have to do this, I have to do that, I have to do something else, or that some things are for these ends.’ No! They are concrete things. [This is] the concreteness of the faith that leads to frankness, to bearing witness even to the point of martyrdom, which is against compromises or the idealization of the faith.”

Does this mean that the pope rejects the Ten Commandments or the Church’s moral teaching? No! But it does mean that the gift we receive from the Holy Spirit is meant to free us from our tendency to negotiate, compromise or cling rigidly to precepts and laws and customs when we are confronted with concrete opportunities to live our faith in the here and now. “[This is] the concreteness of the faith that leads to frankness,” the pope says, “to bearing witness even to the point of martyrdom, which is against compromises or the idealization of the faith.”

“The wind blows where it will and you hear the voice, but you don’t know where it is coming from or where it is going,” the pope says. “So it is for anyone who is born of the Spirit. We hear the voice; we follow the voice of the Spirit without knowing where it will end. Because we have made an option for the concreteness of the faith and the rebirth of the Spirit!”

“May the Lord grant to all of us this paschal Spirit, of going forward along the path of the Spirit without compromises, without rigidity, with the liberty of proclaiming Jesus Christ as he who has come: in the flesh.”

Come, Holy Spirit! Grant to all followers of Jesus Christ the freedom to be bold and uncompromising in our witness to his truth and love!
 

(Daniel Conway is a member of The Criterion’s editorial committee.) †