Today’s daily gospel reading ended with the Lord saying, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” What does it mean that he will give us the Holy Spirit? Some leftover influence from our Protestant past made this line stick out to my wife and me, which, in turn, started a conversation about what Christ means here.
Yesterday, in the daily gospel reading from Luke 11, in response to the question of how to pray, the Lord shared “Our Father…” and then some direction to remain persistent in prayer: Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.
Then, in today’s reading, our Lord continues, saying that a father is not going to give a serpent when asked for a fish, or a scorpion instead of an egg. He will give us what we ask if that is to our benefit. …And if you do not like that last “IF to our benefit” part, that is kind of embedded in what Christ says: if we are asking for a scorpion, he is not going to give us that, because it would be harmful. The assumption is that we are asking for something which is beneficial to us.
As for the last line of today’s reading, “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him”, that Holy Spirit part is often interpreted far too narrowly. Some read that as “the gift of the Holy Spirit” or the “baptism of the Holy Spirit”, as in, the gift of tongues. The pursuit for such is really just seeking an emotional, spiritual, and supernatural experience. Yes, receiving the Holy Spirit is an experience, but you cannot limit the coming of the Holy Spirit to a mere experience.
Some may also see this giving of the Holy Spirit that our Lord mentions, as something to do with salvation. Back in the Protestant years for my wife, when people, or she herself, would ask how we know that we are Christians, how do we know that we are saved, or in essence, how do I know that saving-prayer-thing worked, answers like this verse were mentioned. You know God has “come into your life” because you have been given the Holy Spirit. Though true, this is still an incredibly limited perspective on the work of the Holy Spirit, partially because it is limiting the work or indwelling of the Spirit as a point in time, as a mere confirmation of being saved.
The Holy Spirit is not just a good feeling. He is not just some unseen “force” of God…that is, in a weak and impersonal Star Wars kind of way.
To understand what happens when we are given the Holy Spirit, how that is connected to the answer to our prayers, we need only look back up a few verses. What were the prayers he just taught us? How is the Holy Spirit the answer?
Look to the Lord’s Prayer, mentioned just a few verses before. The coming of the Holy Spirit is the very hallowing of the Name of God, for the Spirit is God. When he comes and transfigures and deifies a situation, a moment, or a heart, that is the very rule, dominion, and kingdom of God coming and being established. The Holy Spirit is the very daily bread which sustains us, the heavenly bread that the disciples did not know about yet, the sustenance of the Trinity from which Christ was never separated. The coming of the Holy Spirit works on our hearts to bring about contrition for our sins and to soften and enable us to forgive the sins of others which are committed against us. The gift of the Holy Spirit quells the passions and not only delivers us from temptation, but also transfigures each and every temptation to bring about the “tested genuineness” of which St. Peter speaks.
In short, the gift of the Holy Spirit is the in-dwelling of God in us. Christ our God has “tabernacled in us”, and God the Holy Spirit is the very life which enlivens us.
So, to bring it all back around to prayer and God’s answers to our prayers, the giving and coming of the Holy Spirit is at the heart of what St. John Climacus means when he says, “Prayer is converse and union with God.” Through prayer—through God’s answer to our prayers in the giving of the Holy Spirit—we strive toward this exchange with God himself (converse) and a communion in him (union). Prayer is not only our interaction with God, but is our communion in him.