Transcript

We've talked about the trinity and about Jesus, the eternal word sent by the Father to become man, but who is the Holy Spirit?

We profess in the creed, of course, that the Holy Spirit is God whom we adore and glorify just like we adore and glorify the Father and the Son.

That is, the Holy Spirit is fully and truly God, equal to the Father and to the Son, and consubstantial with them.

All three divine persons are fully God.

They're not parts of God.

The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is true God.

But we know the Holy Spirit in a different way than we know the person of Jesus Christ.

Christ is made visible as man, whereas we principally encounter the Holy Spirit as He acts in the church and as He acts in our own lives, in our hearts and minds and souls.

Holy Scripture has a lot to teach us about this.

First of all, the Holy Spirit teaches.

He inspires us.

The Holy Spirit also makes us wise, bringing to us an understanding of the things of God.

Another marvelous way that the Holy Spirit is revealed in Scripture is as water, living water that wells up to eternal life.

The Holy Spirit is the source of life.

Listen to the way that Jesus speaks about this in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John.

He says, Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst.

The water that I give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

And then later we learn in John 7 that Jesus said this about the Spirit, which those who believed in Him were to receive.

We can go further though.

Holy Scripture teaches us that the Holy Spirit actually dwells in us.

He dwells in our hearts, and thus he makes us holy as a temple of the Holy Spirit.

And further, when the Holy Spirit comes to us, He teaches us to pray and He intercedes for us with sighs.

One of the greatest gifts that we can receive, of course, is the forgiveness of our sins, and the power to forgive sins comes from the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church that Jesus makes after His resurrection.

And so, on the evening of Easter Sunday, having raised Himself from the dead, Jesus appears to His disciples and says in John chapter 20, As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.

And then we read that when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit.

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven.

If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

One of the most beautiful truths about the way the Holy Spirit works in us, though, is that the Spirit makes us adopted sons and daughters of God.

And we could add that as we receive the Holy Spirit, He gives us a kind of zeal for the message of salvation transmitted by the Gospel.

He gives us, in a way, the power to become effective witnesses to Christ.

This is, in fact, also the gift that you receive in your confirmation.

In fact, even more than that, Saint Paul says that you can only confess that Jesus is Lord by the Holy Spirit.

As he writes in the first letter to the Corinthians, No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.

And this Spirit is given to you at your baptism.

In other words, if you are in Christ, if you are in a state of sanctifying grace, you have the Holy Spirit in you.

This is a theological truth that we can't directly perceive by our senses or our feelings, but it is a truth of faith.

If you are in communion with God, you have the gift of the Holy Spirit.

And the Church itself, the body of Christ, the Church is united and formed into one body, made spiritually alive by the Spirit of Christ.

That same Spirit that Jesus Himself, as man, received in full and which He breathed out on the Church, that Spirit makes us one in Christ.

So having gone through this wonderful catalog of the ways that the Holy Spirit works in our lives and in the Church, let's now go a little deeper to understand who the Holy Spirit is in Himself.

Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches that above all, there are three proper names revealed in scripture that help us understand what is proper to the Holy Spirit as a divine person.

First of all, He is the Holy Spirit.

Spirit.

This is the most common name for Him in the Bible, and it shows up all over the place in the New Testament.

In Latin, the word is Spiritus, which is another way of speaking about breath.

It gives us some sense of the motion of the life, of the impulse of the Holy Spirit, an impulse that can be powerful but that remains hidden to our senses.

And secondly, scripture associates the Holy Spirit with love.

Think here of what Saint Paul writes in the Letter to the Romans, chapter five: God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.

Now, Saint Thomas Aquinas, following Saint Augustine, thinks that gives us a very important clue to understanding how the Holy Spirit proceeds as a distinct person from the Father and the Son.

So, for a theology of the Trinity then, this title or personal name for the Spirit, that He is love, is extremely important.

How to understand this?

First, a little review.

You've already heard that the eternal Son is generated by the Father as His perfect Word.

We can understand His begetting as a procession by way of intellect, as the Father understands Himself and thus conceives or generates a perfect likeness of Himself, which is His Word.

But if the Holy Spirit is a distinct person, distinct from the Word, He must proceed in a distinct way.

That is, the Holy Spirit is not begotten by way of intellect.

Rather, if we think about the Spirit as love, if we use this proper name for the Holy Spirit, then we can begin to understand that He proceeds from the Father and the Son by way of love.

He is love in person.

Let's go a little deeper with that.

When you truly love someone, you're united by love to the one you love, to your beloved.

And in a sense, we can understand how there is, in your heart, a kind of imprint of the one you love, which your will is attracted to and takes as its object.

The one you love is, in a kind of way, within you, the lover.

But now, if we try to purify and elevate that idea about the way love works in us and think about how it works in God, understand God as knowing Himself, that is generating an image of Himself, and then seeing its goodness, loving this image or Word, loving Himself.

Aquinas thinks that this helps us grasp something of the Holy Spirit's procession.

As the Father conceives His Word, He is in Himself by the way of knowledge.

And as He loves that Word, He is in Himself by way of love, a love which is in fact the mutual love of the Father and the Son, the love that proceeds from them both.

Now, from this proper name of love, a third proper name for the Holy Spirit unfolds.

He is also gift.

He is gift in person.

And why is that?

It's because the only reason one gives a truly gratuitous gift to another, that is a gift expecting absolutely nothing in return, the reason for a gift like that is love.

In fact, this name, Gift, is also a deeply scriptural name for the Holy Spirit, who is the greatest gift we can receive.

Jesus says that the Father will give Him to us, and Jesus also promises Himself to give us the Holy Spirit.

So as a result, Saint Thomas Aquinas says that the Holy Spirit is, in a sense, the divine person closest to us, because every spiritual gift is given to us through the Holy Spirit.

Just as in God, the Son proceeds from the Father as His Word, so the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as their mutual love and gift.

And this pattern of processions, which exists in the eternal now of God, this pattern is reproduced in time in God's wonderful plan of salvation.

So the Father sends the Son into the world as man and endows Jesus as man with the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus, as man, is filled with the Spirit .

and then in the power of the Spirit, Jesus teaches His disciples, He works miracles.

Ultimately, He goes to the cross out of love for sinners, moved, in fact, by the love of the Holy Spirit.

And then after His resurrection, the very first thing Jesus does when He appears to His disciples gathered in the Upper Room, is to give them the Holy Spirit.

And then at Pentecost, the Spirit is poured out in full on the Apostles, and indeed, on the whole church.

Why?

For the evangelization of the whole world, that the whole world would receive this gift of the Spirit.

There's one final, but extremely important point I'd like to make in this session.

When the Holy Spirit is given to you, He really dwells in you in person, and He makes you like Himself.

This is a wonderful theme.

It's something that you can meditate on and pray about, and receive a great deal from God as you probe this mystery.

That is, when you receive the Holy Spirit, which you receive in baptism, you are really made holy, like He is holy.

And what is more, since He is love in person, He imprints in your heart the very personal property that is distinctive about Him.

That is, He is the model or supreme example of the love of God.

And so, He is like a stamp or a seal that impresses the pattern of this divine love on your soul.

So that when you receive the Holy Spirit, you begin to love God above all things, and to love your neighbor for the sake of God in a way like God loves Himself and loves His creatures.

You have the love of God in person in you.

And because the Holy Spirit is also the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of the Son, and because He is given to us through the humanity of Christ, and through the risen Christ, the victor over death, the Holy Spirit also configures us to Christ, even to Christ as man in His life, death, and resurrection.

So the Holy Spirit makes us like Christ and gives us the power to live like Christ.

In fact, we can go even further and say the new life that the Holy Spirit gives to us is the very life of Christ in us.

And this is why it is so important to pray to the Holy Spirit, and to pray that each of us will receive a greater share in the Spirit's gifts.

If you have been baptized, and if you are living in friendship with God in the state of sanctifying grace, you really do have the Spirit dwelling in you with His gifts.

So, you can rely on His gifts.

You can ask Him for His help.

You can depend on the promise of His aid and His strength.

As St. Paul says, If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.

What a great privilege and joy this life in the Spirit is.