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Pentecost: A Mission of Peace and Forgiveness

(El Greco)

"Receive the Holy Spirit"

The Word: http://usccb.org/bible/readings/051913-pentecost-mass-during-day.cfm

Acts 2: 1-11
1 Cor 12: 3b – 7, 1
Jn 20: 19-23

Come, Holy Spirit, come!
And from your celestial home
Shed a ray of light divine!

Everything that is big begins very small. Everything from mountains, to plants, to animals, to a distant sound that grows in intensity as it approaches, to we humans. Trees begins as seeds, animals and humans begin as a very tiny cluster of living cells that grow exponentially over time into a small baby that will continue its growth towards maturity. Even ideas often begin very simple and once implemented they become far more complex.

So the same principal is true with the Church. Before Pentecost, the most loyal followers of Jesus could fit inside one room. Today, Christians count in the billions and the Catholic Church alone is about 1.5 billion members across the globe. Anywhere you go in the world today, you will find a Catholic Church and other sects of Christians established worldwide. But the explosion of worldwide Christianity over the last twenty centuries has been born of what the world would not consider the formula for success.

Unlike what we hear from our culture as the sign of a successful life: a life filled with no pain, with material comfort, with physical beauty, with no sadness or challenges, the message of the Gospel through the words of Jesus call us to: take up our cross, to accept some level of persecution for what we believe, to control our desires and impulses, to serve our neighbor with a generous heart, to forgive our enemies, to gather regularly with our fellow brothers and sisters in the faith, and to follow Christ up a steep and narrow path. Did you ever hear this coming from a New York advertising agency?

If we relied merely on human intellect and ability alone, trusting in our own talent and genius, the Christian message would have disappeared centuries ago. We would be reading about the Christian faith in history books as a well-intentioned but failed effort to bring goodness to humanity. So, we might safely say that something more could be attributed to the endurance of the Christian faith. That could only be because of the Feast we celebrate today – that constant abiding and living presence of the Holy Spirit which gives the Church its life and preserves it in truth and charity. This faith is of divine origin and the gift of the Holy Spirit is that of God himself, which sustains this life and preserves it from age to age.

The Holy Spirit reveals the constant intent of Jesus for the world and in particular for those who claim to follow him. The Church has become the way in which the message of salvation is always made present for each generation. This faith has become not just another philosophy to follow or a moral code to be formed by. This faith has become a way to live based upon the message of a person who is recognized as the Word of God among us. So, today we mark the birthday of the Church born from the Spirit in our time and space.

We see in this “birth” the very mission of the Church. The Apostles were changed by that Spirit, which also has the power to reform every one of us who are called to be loyal followers of Jesus in this time we find ourselves.

Before that first Pentecost, the Apostles were fearful, confused, disorganized, and in hiding. After the Spirit came with wind, fire and language (Acts 2: 1-11), they became bold, courageous, and on fire for the Lord and his message. Like an electric cable joined to a battery waiting to be recharged, the Spirit gave this power boost to the beginning age of Christianity. The Apostles needed that surge of courage and conviction to go out and share the good news as Jesus had commissioned them.

Peace and forgiveness is the gift Jesus gave in the Gospel today: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. And when he said this, he breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” (Jn 20: 21-23). The mission of reconciliation with God and others given to a broken world is the gift of the Holy Spirit which Jesus has breathed upon us.

Where can we find this gift? In sacraments of healing and reconciliation but where else have you seen it? What can we do to bring that healing to others and how courageous can we be in the face of contrary messages today?

O most blessed light divine,
Shine within these hearts of yours,
And our inmost being fill! . . .
Heal our wounds, our strength renew;
On our dryness pour your dew . . .
Guide the steps that go astray . . .

(From the Sequence for Pentecost)

Fr. Tim

A Scriptural Reflection on the Readings for Sunday, May 19, 2013, Pentecost Sunday | Carl E. Olson

Readings:
• Acts 2:1-11
• Ps 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34
• 1 Cor 12:3b-7, 12-13 or Rom 8:8-17
• Jn 20:19-23 or Jn 14:15-16, 23b-26

He is silent, yet sounds like rushing wind; he is invisible, but appears as tongues of fire; he is constantly working and giving, but is often overlooked and underappreciated.

He is the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of Life, the third Person of the Trinity. He has many names in Scripture, including Advocate, Comforter, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of adoption, the Spirit of grace.

In the second chapter of the Acts of Apostle, the coming of the Holy Spirit is described as “a noise like a strong driving wind” and his presence as “tongues as of fire.” Notice how elusive the language is: the Holy Spirit is not a driving wind, but is like such a wind; he is not a tongue of fire, but appears as one. There is a paradox here, which is so often the case with the Holy Spirit: he is both very elusive and yet constantly active. It’s as though you see something or someone out of the corner of your eye, but no matter how quickly you turn, they are gone.

Isn’t this the sense conveyed by Jesus, who said to Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit” (Jn. 3:8)? The word “born” is deeply significant for there are three very important births, or creations, described in Scripture in which the Holy Spirit moves and acts, giving life.

These three births are closely connected. First, there is the birth of the cosmos and the creation of the world: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2). There it is again: the Spirit was moving. Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Dominum et vivificantem (Pentecost, 1986), further notes that the presence of the Spirit in creation not only pertains, of course, to the cosmos, but also to “man, who has been created in the image and likeness of God: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’” (par. 12).

The second instance is the conception of the God-man, Jesus Christ. What did the angel say to Mary? “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God” (Lk. 1:35). Once again, the Holy Spirit is active; he is coming with power. Once again, he is intimately involved in bringing about a man. In the first creation it was Adam; now, the new Adam.

The third birth, or creation, took place at Pentecost, fifty days after the death and resurrection of Christ. “The time of the Church began,” wrote John Paul II, “at the moment when the promises and predictions that so explicitly referred to the Counselor, the Spirit of truth, began to be fulfilled in complete power and clarity upon the Apostles, thus determining the birth of the Church” (DV, 25). At Pentecost, the Church—the family of God and the mystical body of Christ—is birthed by the Holy Spirit. And he is the soul of the Church. “What the soul is to the human body,” wrote St. Augustine, “the Holy Spirit is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 797).

Emile Mersch, S.J., in The Theology of the Mystical Body (Herder, 1952), wrote: “The Holy Spirit is continually being sent, and Pentecost never comes to an end.” The Acts of the Apostles reveals the Holy Spirit “ceaselessly coming down into the world, no longer under the form of fiery tongues, but through the intermediary of the apostles and their preaching.”

He is still coming, filling, moving, and giving life. Let’s pay attention!

(This "Opening the Word" column originally appeared in the May 23, 2010, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)

Three Births and the Third Person of the Trinity