Tuesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
I don’t tend to think very much about the Holy Spirit, and it seems that I’m not alone in this. Of the three persons of the Trinity, the Spirit tends to be the one who is discussed the least. Yet, for Christians, the Spirit should be integral to our understanding of who God is. God is indeed one God, but God also consists of three persons. Focusing on the role of the Spirit in our lives also points to a spiritual reality that lies beyond the physical world that we can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear. And it reminds us of our need for help from God to become the kind of people that we are meant to be. The scripture readings for today speak to these themes.
In the first reading, from 1 Corinthians, Paul is explaining that the basis for his teaching to the Corinthians is what has been revealed to him through the Spirit of God. Paul speaks of the work of the Holy Spirit in revealing to him the mind of God. Paul opposes the wisdom of God to the wisdom of the world. He states that a person can only see the truth of Christianity if they judge Christian teachings on the basis of the Spirit. Christianity will not make sense to people if they judge it on the basis of what makes sense to the world. Thus the Spirit helps Christians to understand Jesus’ teachings and to think and see the world as he does. Paul’s suggests that the Spirit helps us to value things as God does. If we pay attention to the Spirit, we will allow ourselves to be formed by the Spirit so that we can begin to show god given wisdom and discernment. In particular, we will come to have the mind of Christ.
The gospel lesson for today recounts the story of how Jesus casts out an unclean spirit from a man in Capernaum. The key thing to see in this passage is the claim that Jesus has divine authority. When Jesus teaches the people in the synagogue, they are astonished to see that he has power and authority. His words have a kind of wisdom and truth that can only come from God. When Jesus drives out the demon, the people are astonished, and they see this as an act of great power. Jesus is shown in this passage to be divine, insofar as he has power over unclean spirits. This power is a sign of his spiritual authority.
The Church teaches that the Spirit lives within anyone who is baptized into Christ and marked in confirmation with the Holy Spirit. One thing that the Spirit does for Christians is to help us to understand Jesus’ teachings and to help us live them out in our daily lives. The Sprit helps us to recognize, as did the people in the gospel reading for today, the power and authority of Jesus’ teachings. Let us pray today that we will be more aware of and open to the work of the Spirit within us. Then, as Paul says, in doing this we will come to have the mind of Christ.
-Joel Schickel