Our Lord spent most of His ministry before His crucifixion in public. He worked His miracles openly. He delivered His teaching to crowds assembled to hear Him, although He sometimes called His disciples aside for further explanations. He reminded His accusers of this candor at His trial: “I have spoken openly to the world. I have always taught in the synagogue and in the temple, where all the Jews assemble, and I have spoken nothing in secret. Why do you question Me? Question those who have heard what I said to them” (John 18:20).
After His Resurrection, however, our Lord appears only to His disciples and followers, albeit to a great number of the latter: Saint Paul records an appearance to over 500 brethren (I Cor. 15: 6). Saint Luke summarizes the risen Lord’s teaching during that period in Acts 1: 3: “He … spoke to them concerning the Kingdom of God.” Christ first admonishes them to stay in Jerusalem until their baptism by the Holy Spirit and counsels them that the Spirit’s presence will empower them to be His “witnesses … to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1: 4 – 5). Thus Christ spends the forty days between His rising and His ascension with His disciples, in intimate conversation and instruction, preparing them to receive the Holy Spirit and, then, to embark on their great work of gathering His Church. As members of the one apostolic Church we are heirs to this apostolic ministry. Those forty days and their fulfillment in Pentecost provide our blueprint for Church life.
Just after His rising, the glorified Savior gathered the apostles around Him, deepening their understanding of who He was and sharpening their experience of His glory and power. At His Ascension the Lord left this world physically, but He did not abandon His work. Rather, He changed the way in which He carries out His ministry. Christ is still present with us. Through the mediation of the Holy Spirit, He gathers us into His Church. He has placed in our hands the joyful duty of continuing His work. Saint John Chrysostom asserts that “the charge entrusted to the apostles” was no less than “the salvation of the world.” By His death and Resurrection Christ has accomplished redemption for the human race. Through sending the Holy Spirit He has appointed for us, however, the task of proclaiming His salvation and of gathering those who respond to that message into the community where His saving grace and power are found vital and active.
We must, therefore, join with the Apostles in our common task. We must reject the debris of our past association with the fallen world, as well as spurn its ongoing efforts to accommodate us to its ways. The consequences of past sins cling to us and weigh us down unless we cast them away. The Apostles too had to shed a lot of baggage from their past. Even the most trusted had serious flaws. Peter tended to overestimate himself and to strike out in well-intentioned but ill-considered bluster rather than act with prudence and true courage. James and John were intimated with status, too enthusiastic for the privileges accruing from their relationship to Jesus, and too little aware of His demand for service (see Mark 10: 35 – 45). Yet, under the Lord’s direction and through the Spirit’s renewal, these three and all their brethren became worthy messengers and bearers of grace. Being part of Christ’s Church means shedding our weakness, pride, and self-conceit, as the apostles did. Being Orthodox Christians means enjoying Christ’s blessings, but it also means serving Him in humility and faith.
The Spirit created the church and, through her, He instructs us, kindles faith and love in our hearts, and encourages us in our spiritual struggle. The focus of our parish life, therefore, must be experiencing, understanding, and growing in the Resurrection through the Spirit’s grace and under His discipline. We must follow the Apostle’s admonition: “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may determine God’s will, what is good and appropriate, and perfect” (Romans 12: 2). We must seek our true selves, “likening ourselves to the image of His glory” through prayer, study, and the pursuit of the virtues. We must grow, as Jesus did, “in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2: 52). We must manifest in our daily lives “the fruit of the Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5: 22 – 23). These blessings penetrate into the world in a meaningful, powerful, transfiguring way only through us, His Church, whom He has gathered to do this work. But, as Saint Seraphim of Sarov affirms, we can share with the world only what we have first acquired ourselves, in the Holy Spirit.
The Church continues the intimate contact with Christ which His apostles enjoyed just after the Resurrection. She also lives in the Pentecost age, however, and she calls her members to proclaim to the world the grace which they experience. As our Lord said, the Spirit’s grace certainly moves within us, “a spring welling up to eternal life” (John 4: 14). We cannot dam up this stream for our personal pleasure. It must fill every aspect of both our personal life and the life of our parish. It must overflow from us and our parish into a world which thirsts for its refreshing and life-restoring grace. We can become so rapt in the contemplation of our beautiful tradition of prayer and worship and in the depth of our spirituality that we forget that we are not given these things for ourselves alone. We are also called to multiply them in the world. We do this through our explicit witness to the truth of the Faith, through our words and works of Christ-like charity and compassion, through our patience and love, our hope and joy.
Christ did not move about openly after His Resurrection, but He did not thereby intend to hide Himself from the world or separate Himself from it. Rather, He manifests Himself first through the apostles and now through us. He has affirmed this by endowing the apostles and us with the grace of His Spirit. Like the apostles we are to allow the risen Christ to transform us by the power of His death and Resurrection, and then to manifest the fruits of the Spirit openly and powerfully in our families, our jobs, our private and public lives. Let us fulfill both our vocations: let us grow in Christ by the grace of His Spirit, and let us spread abroad His redeeming love in the world.
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