Daily Reading for May 16
Luke has a great sense of symmetry, and his traditions are organized in orderly patterns of time and space. The ministry of Jesus began with the descending of the Spirit, and so Jesus progresses from the provinces to the city of Jerusalem. Now the life of the church begins in Jerusalem, in the Temple, with the descending of the Spirit on the disciples, and in the power of that Spirit they will bear witness in words and actions and through martyrdom far beyond the lands traversed by Jesus. The Book of Acts itself brings the witness all the way to Rome, the capital of the world that Luke knew.
Now the Spirit is the energy and the guide engineering the life and expansion of the church in the world of the Jewish diaspora and through it to the Gentile world. . . .The Acts of the Apostles could just as well, or even better, be called “the Acts of the Holy Spirit,” and there are indeed few chapters in the book without specific references to such acts. . . . It is striking that the followers of Jesus did not dream themselves back to the time when he had walked with them and talked with them. It is astonishing how small a role the words of Jesus, which were later made part of our Gospels, play in the early Christian writings, the letters of Paul and of others, and even in Luke’s account of the first decades of the church. . . .They did not look back in nostalgia. They looked forward and they lived powerfully in the now of the Holy Spirit. One really feels the truth of Jesus’ words of farewell in the Gospel of John: . . . “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, it will guide you into all truth.”
Thus, when we pray: Come, Holy Spirit, our prayer is well in keeping with the mode and mood of faith which was tried and tested as the church began to understand itself, its promises, and its identity.
From “Come, Holy Spirit—Renew the Whole Creation” by Krister Stendahl, in The Best Christian Writing 2000, John Wilson, series editor (Harper SanFrancisco, 2000).