By Fr. George Dorbarakis
"Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, You are everywhere present and fill all things. Treasury of blessings and Giver of Life, come and dwell within in us and cleanse us from every stain and save our souls, O Good One."
The sticheron of the apostichon of Vespers and the doxastikon of the praises of Pentecost, but also of the feast of the Holy Spirit, in plagal of the second tone, constitutes, after the “Our Father”, the most well-known prayer of the Orthodox Christian and of the Church. In fact, every service begins with this prayer, just as the Orthodox Christian begins every prayer with it. It is addressed to the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the source of the Godhead, the Father, just as Jesus Christ, the Son and Word of God, is begotten of Him, which means that we certainly do not have three Gods, which constitutes a condemned heresy by our Church, but another way of existing of the One according to the nature and essence of God.
That is, our Triune God, according to the revelation of our Lord (who also appears in shadow in the Old Testament: let us recall for example the hospitality of Abraham), is One, but also Three; One according to His nature, Three according to His hypostases. Our God has the ability to live as Father and as Son and as Holy Spirit, or according to the so-called idioms that we mentioned, as unbegotten, as begotten and as proceeding. And this is not by chance, that is, sometimes as Father or sometimes as Son and sometimes as Holy Spirit, as if He had three “masks”, which He uses as He sees fit, but thus Triune He lives eternally, one within the other, without ever losing what is His own. As the only one who could reveal Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ as God, revealed “I am in the Father and the Father in me.” For this reason, the Holy Spirit, as God and Lord, is the Heavenly King; He is the Comforter and strengthener of men, as is the Lord Jesus Christ Himself; He is the omnipresent and the fulfiller of all things; He is the treasure of faithful and gives life to all and to all things, as are the other persons of the Holy Trinity.
And it would be good to remind ourselves that according to our faith, founded on Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition, our God is Trinitarian, but with a common energy of the Three Divine Persons - wherever God acts, He always acts triunely: "The Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit does all things." The uniqueness of the action of each Divine Person lies, as Saint Gregory the Theologian explains, in the fact that in each “era” (where by era is meant each intervention of God for the plan of salvation of the world: Old Testament, New Testament, era of the Church), we have each Person of the Triune Godhead ministering to the common energy of the entire Godhead, which means that in the Old Testament God the Father was the One who ministered to the common energy of all the Persons; in the New Testament God the Son in the person of Jesus Christ; in the era of the Church God the Holy Spirit.
With Pentecost, therefore, we have the beginning of the action of the Holy Spirit, Who, sent by Jesus Christ, has as His work to make the work of salvation accomplished by Him, Jesus Christ, familiar and internal to man. From this point of view, without this action of the Holy Spirit, we would have been saved by Christ, but this salvation would remain foreign and “unknown” to us, which would mean that our God today, indeed our Comforter and Strengthener, is the Paraclete Spirit. And as a modern theologian notes on this, “when we today cry out 'Our God,' we are actually referring to this Spirit, the third person of the Holy Trinity.” Even the Apostle Paul, and not only him, pointed this out with intensity: “No one can say that Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit,” i.e. no one can confess Jesus Christ as Lord and God except by the illumination and power of the Holy Spirit. The Lord had implied this when He said that He would not leave us orphans. "I will come again to you," He said to His sorrowful disciples, meaning precisely His coming in the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, and not His Second Coming.
Therefore, with this Spirit we are not orphans. Because He comes and dwells in our hearts, especially from the hour of our holy baptism, during which we become members of Christ, and cleanses us from all spiritual filth that constitutes a barrier and a brake on the “resting” of God in our existence. And this indwelling of the Paraclete Spirit, which activates Christ and the presence of God the Father within us, is not easily lost. We may sin miserably even after our baptism, but this Spirit of God constantly urges us to repentance, which becomes an act and a fact when our own will responds, resulting in the Spirit of God once again "reappearing" in an active and perceptible way. And it is important to emphasize that ultimately only the Holy Spirit can cleanse our souls from everything sinful – “To cleanse the nous belongs to the Holy Spirit alone” (Saint Diadochos of Photiki) – that is why those voices that speak from time to time about “cleansing” the Church, meaning it in an external way according to human standards, is not the only type of cleansing. Cleansing yes, but an inner and spiritual cleansing, which alone illuminates and sanctifies man, because it expresses the humble and pure ethos of our God. Such a process that permanently leads to repentance is what the Church characterizes as salvation, and this should be the permanent choice of our lives.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
