Tuesday, 6th Week of Ordinary Time

Acts 1:1-14

Yes, we’ve heard this reading a lot in the last few weeks, between Ascension and Pentecost. But in the Daily Office lectionary, this week begins a journey through the entire book of Acts, the subject of which is the Church. It’s helpful, I think, for the Church of today to look back to the Church of the beginning as a trustworthy and relevant guide.

“In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach.” So Luke begins. What Jesus began to do and teach, Luke wrote in his Gospel. Usually, if we speak of beginning something, that is followed by its ending. But nowhere in Acts is any reference ever made to the ending of Jesus’s teaching. But surely Jesus’s teaching ended after he left this earth and ascended to heaven, didn’t it?

No. If Luke’s Gospel focuses on the words and acts of the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, the Acts can be called the “Gospel of the Holy Spirit.” And since Jesus and the Holy Spirit are one being, just as Jesus and the Father are one being, then what the Spirit does and says, Jesus does and says, through the Spirit. So in truth, Jesus is teaching his Church in spirit, just as he taught them in the flesh.

We will see the Apostles continue to receive this teaching and accept it, even when the Holy Spirit takes them in directions they never anticipated while following Jesus of Nazareth. We will see the Apostles continue to receive and accept this teaching, even when they must decide questions that Jesus of Nazareth himself never asked. But Jesus is the Word of God. And while the Word of God speaks through the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, he cannot be captured by, or contained in, human words. Through His Holy Spirit, the Church learns new truth, then and always.