NOTES for Joh 20:19-23

Appearing to the disciples, Christ enables them to receive the Holy Spirit. But the apostles are still to receive the Spirit at Pentecost, and this will happen not in a locked room but openly before everyone gathered in Jerusalem. How, then, does this gift of the Spirit differ from the one that is yet to take place? After all, the Holy Spirit is one and the same.

It must be that our capacity to receive the Spirit cannot always remain the same. One cannot claim that a believer in Christ can be completely deprived of communion with the Spirit, since “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:3). The Holy Spirit can always give us life, but the degree of our openness to the Spirit sometimes widens and sometimes narrows. That is why Scripture tells of the apostles receiving the Spirit more than once, and also why the Church includes in its daily rule of prayer the invocation of the Holy Spirit: “come and abide in us.”

At Pentecost, however, the descent of the Holy Spirit will take place in fullness and openly before all. For now, Christ has enabled only the disciples gathered together in a closed room to receive the Spirit, and from that room they will go forth into victorious ministry.