The Very Breath of God

 

He breathed on them.  When we think about it, nothing is more intimate than sharing someone’s very breath.  To decide if someone is alive or not, we always ask, “Is he or she breathing?”  If someone has stopped breathing, we do what is needed to breathe life into their lungs.  For those who had the experience of saving someone’s life or being saved by someone, there is a certain bond that is created.  In a sense, their lives are joined forever.

It is that relationship that God desires with each and every one of us.  God, who created everything out of nothing, shared his very life with us, by creating human beings in his very image and likeness.  That desire that God has for us to stay in right relationship with him never wanes. He wants to share his very life with us.  He took on our very flesh, so that he could share our humanity, and in so doing allowed us to share his divinity.

We, human beings, his beloved children, seem to turn away from that life.  We often think we have enough to sustain our lives on our own that we don’t need a lifeline, that we don’t need anyone to breathe life into us.  And so we go on with our own projects.  We build up our own egos. 

This is true even, sadly, of those in ministry.  We become obsessed with our own projects, our own creative ways of evangelizing that we make it all about us.  Evangelization, which is the mission of every Baptized person, is about bringing others to Christ, yet we often make it about gathering others to ourselves.  In those moments, it is clear, we are forgetting Pentecost.  The very life of God, the Holy Spirit, was infused, breathed, into the early community, the Church, and ultimately into each of us.  In that life, we share the mission of Christ.

In today’s Gospel, we have the account of Jesus encountering the apostles in the upper room.  They were locked away out of fear.  Fear so often separates us from the life of God.  He doesn’t let locked doors or walls or certainly fear keep him from wanting to be present to them.  He appears in their midst, showing them the length of his love in the wounds of his body.  He offers them the true greeting of God in all things, peace. 

Then he breathes on them, giving them once his very divine life, the Holy Spirit.  The divine life allows them to share what is the very heart of divine love and that is forgiveness.  Forgiveness has the power to transform the world.  We live in a world where true forgiveness often seems elusive.  We clearly cannot achieve it on our own.  We need that divine life in us.

So, this Pentecost, as we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit, the very infusion of life into the Church, let us remember that means the divine life is breathed into each of us.  This happens in a sacramental way in the Church, but we must recognize that divine life and be willing to live it.   We need the breath of God.  It alone can transform the world.

 -          The Servant