Saint Nicholas Cathedral
June 8, 2025
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Finally, we have reached “the last day, that great day of the feast,” the Fiftieth Day which we have awaited, the holy Pentecost. In the Gospel, we hear of words that Our Lord once spoke in Jerusalem, when he “was not yet glorified.”
But now, today, he has been glorified on the Cross with the glory he had with the Father since from before the beginning. Now we have beheld his glorious Resurrection. Now he has ascended in glory with a festal shout, returning to the right hand of the Father, where he never left.
Today, therefore, when the Lord addresses us with those same words he used two thousand years ago, he speaks as the Glorified One. Through his Passion and Resurrection, he has opened for us the meaning of the words that were veiled when he spoke them of old in Jerusalem. More than this, he has opened unto us the reality, the fulfillment, of these words.
“If anyone thirst,” he says, “let him come to me and drink.” Throughout the Paschal season, water has been a motif of our liturgical services, and we understand that this living water flowing through these Sundays has been the water that flowed from Christ’s side on the Cross. This is the water of baptism—and the water of the Spirit, as St. John the Theologian informs us in today’s Gospel.
We know that baptism and the gift the Spirit are inseparable; baptism and chrismation are usually performed at the same time, and chrismation, regardless of when it is administered, always seals and completes the grace of baptism.
Thus, we know that the Spirit is given to believers once and definitively through the sacraments of baptism and chrismation. However, there is another sense in which we may receive the gift of the Holy Spirit throughout our lives: we receive the Spirit again and again through the second baptism of confession and repentance.
Christ gives us everything through his Passion and Resurrection, but we neglect these gifts. Though the Spirit never leaves us, we leave the Spirit. To paraphrase St. Simeon the New Theologian, the Spirit is present with us always, but we hide ourselves from him, as did Adam in the garden.
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” So wrote the Psalmist, and so we constantly pray in the Church, many times a day in the full cycle of the services. Pentecost calls us precisely to this renewal, to this washing clean. For forty-nine days we have celebrated the gift that we receive through Christ’s Pascha; today, we are called to renew our lives so that we actually experience that gift and make it real.
“Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.” Our sins are countless, “numberless as the grains of sand upon the seashore,” as we hear in the prayer of the penitent king Manasseh. We do not deserve the gift of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, we repent, confess, and pray that God take not his Spirit from us. We pray that he bear with us, not because of our deeds, but solely for the sake of his grace and love, revealed by Christ on the Cross.
Pentecost is one of the greatest feasts of the year: as with Our Lord’s Nativity and Pascha, it is followed by a week free from fasting. At the same time, it is a day of penitence: at Vespers, right after liturgy, we begin kneeling and prostrating once again. We will read three sets of long penitential prayers on our knees, a penitential act unlike any other service we celebrate in Church.
In this way, Pentecost establishes the pattern for most of the Church year, the long season after Pentecost. We will measure time “after Pentecost” until we reach Lent once again, and this long season is a season of ever-mingled penitence and celebration, of feast days and weekly fasts, of great celebrations and lesser Lents.
As such, Pentecost establishes the pattern, not just for most of the Church year, but for the entire Christian life. We have beheld the Resurrection; we have seen the true light; we have received the heavenly Spirit. Yet we constantly fall away from this vision, distracted once more by our passions, by the world’s dark charms and the fleeting pleasures of sin. So, again and again, we repeat those prayers that have marked our celebration last night and today: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.”
May we who have been born of water and the Spirit, who have become sons of the Church during this present age, constantly seek the renewal of that Spirit. May we constantly seek to uncover once more the grace and joy of the gift of baptism by repenting and confessing our sins. May we celebrate Pentecost, not just once a year, but all throughout our lives, going into the upper room of our hearts with prayers of repentance and anticipation, waiting on the cleansing and renewing power of the grace of the Spirit.
And to that selfsame Spirit, who is God from all eternity, be all glory and adoration, together with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who is the light and life of the world, and the Father of lights, from whom the Spirit proceeds, always, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.