🕀 Holy and Glorious Pentecost.
Acts 2:1-11; John 7:37-52; 8:12.
Read John 7:37-52; 8:12
We are pulled in different directions by the groups we are a part of—family, friends, church, work, society—and within each are groups that also pull us. By temperament or experience, we may be inclined to pull away instead. What to do?
Jesus said, “He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water,’” and John explains, “Now this he said about the Spirit.” Where does the Old Testament scripture say this? Ezekiel 47 and Zechariah 14 envision the coming of “the Lord your God…and all the holy ones with him” and “living water” flowing from the temple and Jerusalem.
The manifestation of the Holy Spirit coming upon the Church at Pentecost in Acts 2 was as the glory of the Lord filling the temple in 1 Kings 8. 1 Peter 2 makes it explicit that, together with Christ, we are “living stones” being built into the new temple from which the “living water” of the Holy Spirit issues. “Living water” flowing out of the temple/Jerusalem = “Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.”
The call of God begins with each of us individually—“He who believes in me…out of his heart shall flow…”—but the call is to participate in being built together with others as God’s temple and to participate in flowing out from there to all the others in the world. We will sometimes experience that as a tension pulling us in two directions. God will resolve that in the end. Now we are called to live in the tension, discerning the flow of the Holy Spirit by following Christ, “the light of the world.”