The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Holy Trinity, is destined to reveal God in history and in the Church, to reveal Him in His eternal kingdom, and at the same time to reveal the mystery of man, the image of God to man.
So the reason the Lord sends us the Holy Spirit is so that we too can experience our own transformation and the manifestation of our own person, and thus change the way we see God and the world.
In the Bible there are three very impressive transformations of persons. One is the transformation of the Lord on Mount Tabor, where, as described by the three evangelists, the image that the disciples had of the face of Christ, a completely human image, a completely sensible image, was changed and transformed and the radiance of His divinity was revealed for a moment.
In the Old Testament there is another facial transformation. It is mentioned at the end of the book of Exodus. Moses, after receiving the Ten Commandments, after he proclaimed from afar to the people what the Lord had proclaimed to him, coming down from the Mount, his facial features were glorified, brightened, because God had spoken to him. Such was the change in his face from the glow and glory, that the Jews saw him from afar and could not bear to look upon him, much less approach him.
And the third transformation of the face is the alteration which even unclean eyes saw in the face of Deacon Stephen when he stood before the conference. His face lightened and it was not the human face they were used to seeing, but it was an angelic face.
And our own face can change. And not just can, but must. We must undergo this transformation so that we can see God differently, resurrected, not with human eyes. Likewise, we must see events outside of time, outside of our senses, outside of our egoism, outside of our narrowness. We must see life beyond its impermanence and its beyond its smallness. And finally we must see ourselves, not as we are, but as we will be to the glory of God.
These are great truths. Many times we go to our spiritual directors and we talk to them so humanly and we want them to talk to us humanly. We do our prayer and it is prosaic, tedious, defiantly poor and human. And God answers us spiritually and we do not acknowledge Him. We want Him to be the servant of this life. We want the Church for the cobblestone of our emotions, of our small and narrow understanding, and we cannot make that opening. To open our eyes from this world to the next, from a little time to eternity. To open our hearts and taste the light of Christ, to receive the grace of the Holy Spirit.
These days are days that call us to transformation like the transformation of the apostles. And these were cowardly people not only cowardly before the resurrection, but also after the resurrection. And yet they were all transformed and led to martyrdom, with the exception of the apostle John. Those whose tongues were tied preached to the whole world. They were fishermen and spoke as wise men. Those who could not even confess Christ at the most critical moment of life, at the most critical moment of grace, these same ones opened their mouths and confessed Him to the whole world. Those who could not understand His word revealed to the world and to history His mystery.
This is the miracle of the Church, the mystery of the Church, Pentecost. Let us not celebrate it as an event that once happened, but let us transform it into a personal experience for each of us. Without this inner transformation we cannot live spiritually, that is, in the Holy Spirit. Our life can have a moral signature, it can have the quality of a good person, it can have the struggle for happiness or success in this world. But the sight of heaven, of the other life, of eternity, and much more of the face of God, and the taste of the grace of the Holy Spirit we shall not have. Our Church reiterates its invitation. It repeats it to us.
May God grant this to happen, not as a result of any effort on our part, but mainly as a fruit of the humbling of our own will and the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in our humble hearts. Amen.
Metropolitan Nicholas of Messogaia and Lavreotiki
