Monday, March 23, 2009

Father Cantalamessa's 2nd Lenten Sermon

"The Law Is at the Service of Love and Defends It"

VATICAN CITY, MARCH 22, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is the second Lenten sermon Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the Pontifical Household, gave Friday at the Vatican in the presence of the Curia.

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"The Law of The Spirit That Gives Life"

The Holy Spirit, the new law of Christians

1. The law of the Spirit and Pentecost

The way in which the Apostle begins his discussion of the Holy Spirit in Chapter 8 of the letter to the Romans is truly surprising: "Thus, condemnation will never come to those who are in Christ Jesus, because the law of the Spirit which gives life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death." He spent the entire preceding chapter using positive and uplifting words in describing the law. "The law of the Spirit" means the law that is the Spirit; the term is a genitive of apposition, or of definition; such as the phrase the flower of the rose refers to the flower that is itself a rose.

In order to understand what Paul means through this brief expression we need to refer to the event of Pentecost. In the Acts of the Apostles the story about the coming of the Holy Spirit begins with the words: "When Pentecost day came round, they had all met together" (Acts 2: 1). We deduce from these words that Pentecost predated... Pentecost. In other words, there already was a Pentecost feast day within Judaism and that was the feast day when the Holy Spirit descended.

There were fundamentally two different interpretations of the feast of Pentecost in the Old Testament. In the beginning Pentecost was the feast of the seven weeks (ref. Tobit 2:1), the feast of the harvest (ref. Numbers 28:26), when the first fruits were offered to God (ref. Exodus 23:16; Deuteronomy 16:9). Then afterward, in the time of Jesus, the feast was enriched with a new meaning: it was the feast of the giving of the law on Mount Sinai and of the covenant; in essence, the feast that celebrated the events described in Exodus chapters 19 and 20. (In fact, according to calculations based on the bible text, the law as given on Sinai fifty days after Passover).

Pentecost was transformed from being a feast tied to nature's cycles (the harvest) into a feast tied to salvation history: "This day of the feast of the weeks is the time of the gift of our Torah" says a text from the current Jewish liturgy. When they left Egypt the people walked for fifty days in the desert and, at the end of these, God gave Moses the law. Based on the law he established a covenant with the people and made them "a kingdom of priests and a holy people." (Ref. Exodus 19:4-6)

It seems like Luke purposefully described the descent of the Holy Spirit using terms that characterized the theophany of Sinai. In fact he used images that call to mind earthquakes and fire. The Church's liturgy confirms this interpretation by putting Exodus 19 among the readings of the Pentecost vigil.

What does this juxtaposition tell us about our Pentecost? In other words, what is meant by the fact that the Holy Spirit descends on the Church on the very day when Israel commemorated the gift of the law and the covenant? Even St. Augustine asked himself this question: "Why do even the Jews celebrate Pentecost? This is a great and marvelous mystery brothers: if you realize, on the day of Pentecost they received the law written by God's hand and on the same day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit came."[1]

Another Father of the Church, this time from the East, helps us see that this interpretation of Pentecost was a common patrimony of the whole Church during the first centuries: "The law was given on the day of Pentecost; it was appropriate then that on the day when the old law was given, the same day the grace of the Spirit be also given."[2]
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