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The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes,
but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes;
so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
From an external, non-Christian perspective, the power motivating Christian life is hidden and mysterious. Christians born of the Spirit in Acts, for instance, were so united as to be of one heart and mind, so concerned for the poor that they sold their own excess until there was no needy person among them. The world, looking at Christians, would imagine that putting such emphasis on the good of their neighbor and the mission of witness to the resurrection of the Lord would be immensely burdensome. The expectation of the world is usually that if one is not responsible for one's own happiness, if she does not pursue it as her chief goal, she will be miserably enslaved to the wants and whims of others. Yet the Spirit blowing through the Christian community reveals something quite different. People are mysteriously free to give of themselves, to forgive their enemies, and welcome others even very different from themselves, free to reach out even to those with nothing to offer in return. The Spirit makes joy and peace manifest in the Christian community even when, from a worldly perspective, there are no grounds for either one. And is it not the saints of such communities, those who are most entirely committed to living for the Lord and for others, who seem to be the most full of joy?
‘You must be born from above.’
We will never make sense of the Christian life from the outside looking in. We will see all the signs of joy and peace, love and gentleness, and to those of us still on the outside these serve as an invitation. Are we willing to believe there is something real underlying what we seem to see, or will we rather dismiss it as fabrication and pretense? If we choose to hope in the truth what we see, we too can receive the Spirit in baptism, or open ourselves to more of him by expectant prayer. When the wind of the Spirit catches our own sail only then will we understand how the Christians we have seen are propelled and moved by a power beyond themselves, the very power that moves the sun and the other stars.
If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe,
how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?
We are meant to pass from the sign to the thing signified. Parables point us to the Spirit, and the water of baptism is an efficacious sign that makes him truly present within our souls. If we refuse to acknowledge that there is something deeply spiritual at play we will not be able to correctly interpret the more difficult signs that are to come, chief among them, the cross, the sign of contradiction. Only by trusting in the one who has come down from heaven are we ever going to perceive the deeper meaning of this sign. To those who are earthly minded the cross can only appear as a failure. The ego, in a fear induced panic, can only reject any value therein. But the same sign which appears to be death, not only to Christ, but to our egos, is revealed by the Son of Man to be the only true path to life.
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.
The blowing of the Spirit hints to us that something is happening at a deeper level than our understanding, something worthy of trust. It implies that we too can be like the centurion at the cross, who perceived in Jesus something more than a condemned criminal. We can then more and more come to trust Jesus as the one who can reveal his exulted identity even as he breathes his last breath in love for the Father and for us. The heavenly meaning even of the crucifixion itself is finally revealed when eyes of faith see that the wind of the Spirit was precisely the wind that moved through Jesus even as he breathed his last.
Thus Joseph, also named by the Apostles Barnabas
(which is translated son of encouragement”)
When the Spirit catches our sails we too are meant to become sons and daughters of encouragement. Encouragement here is related to the word Paraclete (see John 14:16) because it is precisely this Spirit within Barnabas that made him such a force for positivity. It is not a matter of wearing rose tinted glasses or of ignore the deeply problematic things happening in the world around us. It is rather the communication of the experience of being moved by a power within us that is greater than the power at work in the world (see First John 4:4).
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