Vigils Reading

A COMMUNITY OF THE SPIRIT

By Fr Bede Griffiths

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The Church is the communion of those who are united by the love of the

Spirit in the knowledge of the Word of God, the Eternal Truth, and through him

return to the Father, the Source, the Origin and the Ground of all creation. But

the Church has also a beginning in time as a historical institution. When the

Holy Spirit descended on the disciples at Pentecost, the power of the Spirit

which had transformed the body and soul of Christ at the Resurrection was

communicated to his disciples. A new consciousness dawned, a consciousness

beyond the ordinary rational consciousness, which set the disciples free from

the limitations of our present mode of existence and consciousness and opened

to them the new world of the Resurrection.

The Church is the community of those who experienced this new birth ‘in

the Spirit’ and whose lives were transformed by the experience. The effect of this

was seen in the fact that they were ‘all of one heart and mind‘, and that they sold

all that they possessed and ‘had everything in common’. The new life in the

Spirit thus penetrated the economic and social order and brought a power to

transform human society, but it remained essentially beyond our present

human limitations. The Church was from the beginning a ‘charismatic‘

community, a community of the Spirit.

Yet it had also an elementary organization. Jesus left behind him twelve

‘apostles‘, whom he clearly intended to be the nucleus of the new Israel, a new

‘People of God’. There was also a ceremony of initiation into the new life and a

meal in common, in which the new life with Christ was shared. This was

apparently all that he left by way of organization. In the course of time other

ceremonies were added and ‘elders‘ and ‘overseers‘ were appointed in the

different Churches, but these seem to have been appointed as the need arose.

There was a reason for this. Jesus left his disciples with the expectation that he

would return again in their own lifetime and bring about the final ‘restoration

of all things‘. This is the perspective of the New Testament.

Jesus was not concerned with the ‘history‘ of the Church as an institution,

but with its transcendent Reality. Jesus himself enjoyed the new life of the

Resurrection, and his disciples were called to share this new life with him. The

historical development of the Church is secondary to this great reality of the

experience of the Spirit in the new life of the Resurrection. In this perspective

the time of the second coming is of little importance. As the second letter of

Peter was to say, when the time of his coming was questioned: ‘A thousand

years in his sight are but a day.’

It would seem that the Christian Churches have to recover this

perspective, which is that of the New Testament, if they are to recover their

meaning in the world today. The Church has its place in human history, but for

the Church, as for Christ himself, history is subordinate to the transcendent

reality of life in the Spirit.