Christ, the Spirit, the Church

Who reveals Christ? He's hiding behind something: the Holy Spirit. For on the night of the Last Supper our Lord said, “He will glorify me; he will reveal me.” That’s how we know Christ, not just by studying the “motions of credibility”: prophecies and miracles and “the consonance of right reason with the aspirations of the heart”, as Vatican I put it. We know Christ through the Spirit. That is why Paul said that only through the Spirit can we call Jesus Lord. Therefore, through the increase of the Spirit, we deepen our knowledge of the Lord. Who reveals the Spirit? The Church. Too often when people think of the Spirit, they always begin with Pentecost. That was not the beginning of the life of the Spirit.  After the Resurrection, our Blessed Lord breathed upon his apostles. “Receive ye the Holy Spirit; whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven.” First to his Church: this is the beginning of the outpouring of the Spirit. Then at Pentecost there comes another. But see how the Church has grown by this time. The Blessed Mother in the center, the apostles, and then the 120 others. But it is therefore the Spirit that gradually unfolds itself in the Church. That is how we come to a theological knowledge of the three Persons. When we detach the Spirit from the Church, we are apt to go awry.