The fire that fell at Pentecost did not stay in the upper room. By the Monday of Whitsun Week the Church's lessons have already carried us into the house of Cornelius, a Roman centurion, where Peter stands among Gentiles and says the thing that grace has at last wrung out of him: Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons. It is a small sentence with a long shadow. The Spirit who descended in tongues of flame now descends in tongues of welcome, falling upon the very people Peter had once thought himself forbidden even to visit.
This is the steady, expanding work of Whitsuntide. The Holy Ghost widens the heart faster than the heart expects to be widened. Notice the haste of it: Peter is still speaking when the gift is given — while Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word — before the sermon is finished, before the water is poured, before anyone present has had time to decide whether the newcomers are ready. Grace runs ahead of our permission. It does not wait for the Church's committees to ratify it. It arrives, and leaves us scrambling to catch up with what God has already done.
The Gospel appointed for the day completes the thought. God so loved the world — not a nation, not a party, not the deserving, but the world — that he gave his only begotten Son. The Son was sent, St. John insists, not to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved. The only darkness with power to keep a soul outside that love is the darkness the soul itself prefers: men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. The door is not bolted from the outside. It is, if it is shut at all, held shut from within.
Grace runs ahead
of our permission.
There is a searching application here for any of us who keep, however quietly, our private lists of the acceptable and the unacceptable. Peter kept such a list, and it was a devout list, sanctioned by long custom and sincere conviction. The Spirit did not consult it. The same Spirit who makes the Church one makes the Church catholic — which is only the Greek word for the heart that has stopped drawing the boundary an inch short of where God draws it. To be filled with the Holy Ghost is, among other things, to find one's circle of welcome enlarged against one's own first instinct.
So the Monday in Whitsun Week sets before us two questions, gently but without flinching. Whom have we quietly excluded from the love we ourselves received so freely and so undeservingly? And where have we come to love the shadows — the comfortable, self-justifying dark — because the light, if we let it in, would ask more of us than we have yet been willing to give? The feast does not scold; it invites. It bids us come to the light, that our deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
The witnesses in that house heard the Gentiles speak with tongues, and magnify God, and could only ask, Can any man forbid water? It is the right question for the day. When the Spirit has plainly gone before us, what is left for us but to follow, to consent, to widen the welcome and pour the water? Pentecost is still spreading. The fire that began in one room is still looking for the next threshold to cross — and very often that threshold runs straight through the middle of our own reluctant hearts.