God’s Promise

The Descent of the Holy Spirit is the fulfillment of a promise that Christ made to His disciples. Isn’t that an amazing thought: that God would promise something to us! What have we ever done to deserve anything from Him? And yet, it pleases Him to bestow gifts on us.

This is what it means to trust God: that He, who is trustworthy, fulfills His promises. The Christian virtue of Hope is looking to the future expecting the fulfillment of a promise made to us by God in the past. So with every fulfilled promise our trust in God deepens.

Christ also promised hardship would befall us: “They will persecute you.” Or even His own rejections and departure: “They will hand me over.” But He would often add something like, “I’m telling you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will remember that I told you." Even when He promises trials, we are encouraged by His foresight.

Recall how Peter was given the opportunity to repent for having denied Jesus on the night of His arrest. He remembered that Jesus foretold that he would deny Him, “Before the cock crows you will deny Me,” and therefore could say, “Lord, You know everything. You know that I love You.” It was the promise that he would deny Him that later encouraged Peter to return to Jesus with confidence, saying, “Since you knew I would deny You, then You must also know that underneath my fear, there is love for You.”

Something similar is happening when Jesus promises the Holy Spirit to us. He is promising that there will be times when we will need the Advocate to defend us, the Paraclete to fight for us. So when we find ourselves defenseless or powerless in the world, we should take courage, remembering that Christ promised there would be such times, and that in such times we need only call upon on the Holy Spirit.

I think this is where peace comes from. I think it comes from knowing that God foresees, and that He promises to be with us in all things. Even when we’re angry at ourselves for making bad decisions in the past, and at God for allowing us to, the Holy Spirit descends to comfort us, and He does so by assuring us that the Father and the Son knew we were going to make those decisions, which is why He promised to send the Holy Spirit.

This is why the greatest comfort comes from the words of Absolution, which we hear in the confessional: “God, the Father of Mercies, through the death and resurrection of His Son, has reconciled the world to Himself, and poured out the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins. Through the ministry of the Church, may God grant you pardon and peace.”

You see how He knew we would need the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins. That means He knew we would fall at times. But, like Peter, we can say, “Well if you know that about me, Lord, then you must also know that I love you!”

It may seem insignificant, but I think that because God does make promises, and therefore knows what will come, He means to encourage us to trust that He’s been blessing us for a reason, and is hopeful Himself that we will stay faithful to Him until the end. +