The Beloved Disciple &
The Holy Painter

And there appeared to them tongues as of fire.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

While the date for Easter may differ among Catholic Christians — with the ancient Eastern Church remaining faithful to the First Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) — all Christians celebrate Pentecost fifty days after Easter. The Greek root for pentecost means fiftieth. And all Christian groups celebrate this feast to commemorate the giving of the Holy Spirit. Protestants often refer to this day as the Church's "birthday": when the Holy Spirit alights on all people, a kind of universal ordination of a royal priesthood. But as this ordination is not connected to the sacrament of Holy Orders, which Protestants reject, nor to any other sacrament (of course, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are given on sacramental occasions), Catholics East and West do not join them in that "Happy Birthday" celebration. Catholics see that the Church is born in its infancy in Eden, where two people, bound together in a one-of-a-kind love and communion, enter into the most profound communion and unity with God which earth shall ever know:

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Gen 1:27)

The original Hebrew defies translation. What find in the manusscripts is a swirl of subject and object and potential verbs (in that pre-Masoretic text) that we are left only with a indistinct, though sacred, mystery of profound unity.

Later in human history, the family becomes an incarnation of the Church and continues to be described as such in the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church (CCC, 1656).

The universal Church as we know it today develops much later and decisively in a scene described by the Beloved Disciple, St. John:

.... the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again,
"Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you." And 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." (Jn 20:20-23)

It is not often that the same Gospel reading should appear on multiple Sundays only weeks apart. But this repetition of the same Gospel reading has happened this year. On the Sunday After Easter, I offered in my reflection, In Easter Light.

The Ecclesia is gathered.
The Bishops are consecrated.
The Holy Spirit is received.
The Church is sent.

But wait a minute! If the giving of the Holy Spirit happened before the Ascension of the Lord, if the Church is commissioned and sent by the Risen Christ before His departure, and if it happened in a locked room in which the Lord breathes the Spirit from His mouth upon them, then what are we to make of the spectacular pictures painted for us in the Book of Acts involving people (it seems) from every nation gathered in a public square?

Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.
And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each
one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and wondered, saying,
"Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us
in his own native language? Par'thians and Medes and E'lamites and residents of Mesopota'mia,
Judea and Cappado'cia, Pontus and Asia, Phryg'ia and Pamphyl'ia, Egypt and the parts of
Libya belonging to Cyre'ne, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and
Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God." And all were
amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" But others mocking
said, "They are filled with new wine." But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his
voice and addressed [all of] them, ...

Seemingly from an enclosed and locked room, the scene is somehow transformed to the point where St. Peter delivers a great public oration in a public square in Jerusalem, with a suggestion that his audience is the whole world. And, certainly, today he addresses all of us — in worlds unimaginably distant from first-century Palestine! It is as if a transfiguration has taken place. We begin with a simple narrative, which then morphs into ..... the only phrase I can think of is, grand opera. And it certainly functions like opera as the intimate scene within a house suddenly moves out onto the large stage, and Peter sings his great aria, or solo performance. This is not simply my observation, for throughout all history, great painters have depicted this operatic scene in exactly this way (as the oil painting published with this reflection attests).

What is going on here? Did the Risen Christ give the Holy Spirit to the Church by breathing it upon the Apostles? Or was there a universal gift of the Holy Spirit through a great wind and descending tongues of fire? The key to unlocking this apparent contradiction is that the writer of the Book of Acts is the patron saint of painters, St. Luke. Luke the Evangelist is credited with having painted the first icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary. His sacred art, including his Gospel and Book of Acts inspired by the Holy Spirit, is fundamentally pictorial, a series of rich spectacles, which have become permanently painted upon our imaginations and across all the ages since Christ.

Now, it is true that opera is yet to be born and would wait about fifteen hundred years for its birth, but have you read Homer or Virgil? The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid? Think of the great speeches of the Iliad, of Achilles or of Nestor or of Agamemnon. These works, which St. Luke would have known, are nearly operatic, too. Indeed, had Homer been writing opera, these great speeches would have been rendered as great solo pieces — arias soaring in their volume and beauty.

The great impact of the Hellenic world upon the Eastern Mediterranean cannot be underestimated. Greek had been the "common coin" among languages of the Ancient World following the conquests of Alexander the Great three centuries before the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. Judean boys studied a Greek curriculum. They pursued classical athletics. Many even sought to reverse their circumcisions that they might look more like Greeks. And they certainly would have known Homer. Among these young men, a student of ancient medical science with the Greek name Lucas, — and an aspiring writer at that! — surely would have been a careful student of Homer. This is important, for without understanding Lucas' aspiration for his works, we cannot really fully appreciate its inspiration, which means to breathe in the Holy Spirit even as the Holy Spirit is being breathed into you.

If Lucas did not set his arias to musical settings, others were inspired to do so in succeeding generations. The very term Gospel Canticle is equated to St. Luke. Consider the Liturgy of the Hours: the Gospel Canticles are all from the Gospel According to St. Luke — the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), the Nunc Dimittis (2:29-32), the Benedictus (Luke 1:68-79). Any other Canticles used in the Church's liturgical life come to us from the Hebrew Scriptures. And think of St. Luke the icon painter. He stood back, extended his thumb for scale, and then pictured things in broad brush. He saw that Mary's encounter with Elizabeth was a set piece: Ave Maria! He understood that Simeon's encounter with the One-Who-Is-Coming-Into-the-World was a set piece: "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace." And when the Holy Spirit is to be given, proceeding from God, he could see only a big canvas, an epic scale, a painting that might occupy an entire wall, or a whole wing, say, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And on this greatest of all artistic subjects — the divine inspiration of God's own fire — he launches into his highest mode.

Whereas the Beloved Disciple reports the bare facts — Jesus breathed on them, .... receive the Holy Spirit — The great "opera composer" readies his symphonic orchestra, points to his greatest baritone and supporting altos and tenors and directs them onto a stage that is so great, that St. John's narrative version had become nearly eclipsed in the Christian imagination by the soaring music, the gorgeous stage sets, and the cast of thousands, ... all arranged by St. Luke.

By Christian tradition, St. Luke is the first icon painter, the Proto-zographos (a tradition that cannot be traced beyond the eighth century). This term zographos used by the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council means literally "depicter of life," which for them meant "holy life." Gradually, the term evolved into agiographos, "depicter of the holy," for the holy icon is not a painting. It is a theological work, a divine artform, albeit rendered in paint. And this is important, for it must be understood as being well established within the boundaries of sacred Christian literature along with the several other genres of Sacred Scripture, which, by the way, include drama. Otherwise, our reverence for them, — bowing before them, kissing them, — would violate the Decalogue's prohibition on idolatry. Moreover, we must resist the idea that the Holy Spirit was given at a particular and exclusive point in time, for to believe this would be heresy, violating an article of the Nicene Creed: the Holy Spirit "spake by the Prophets."

This morning we celebrate the prismatic richness of God's endlessly varied, endlessly dimensional, endlessly uplifting creative energy. He speaks to us through all the physical senses that He created in us. "How many sacraments are there?" a great Catholic theologian asked. "How many things did God create?" he answered. The Holy Spirit is the burning point of the entire human lifeworld. He fills our senses with apprehensions of the divine, which fairly burns off our dust and clay and reminds us that are our core, in our essence, we are made, not of flesh and blood, nor of decaying matter, but of such stuff as Heaven is made. And today in a sweeping panorama, which speaks to all our senses and to the whole world, the Holy Spirit descends! Veni, Creator Spiritus!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The Beloved Disciple &The Holy Painter

The Beloved Disciple &
The Holy Painter