Jesus promises the sending of the Holy Spirit: “Stay in the
city, until you are clothed with power from on high.” This staying and
waiting is to give them a full sense of human impotence, the permanent
condition of human beings until God bestows something of his own Being on us.
The image of being “clothed with power” is eloquent. It hearkens back to
Genesis and the human sense of nakedness and shame because of sin, and it
evokes God’s clothing of Adam and Eve with leather garments out of compassion,
in order to conceal his creatures’ shame for the time being. But this promised
clothing now is different, since it implies an imparting of God’s own power and
life. Nor is this just any kind of concealing, but rather, paradoxically, a
very radical revealing. After the Father has raised Jesus from the dead and
created a new Adam in Christ, that re-creation through grace is extended step
by step to all believers, so that whatever has happened to Christ is now going
to happen to us.
Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, The Way of the Disciple
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