The texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary today invite us to contemplate how the Love between the Father and the Son becomes active in our lives through the Holy Spirit.
Come Holy Spirit
The reading from the Acts of the Apostles describes the coming of the Holy Spirit.
* [2:3] Tongues as of fire: see Ex 19:18 where fire symbolizes the presence of God to initiate the covenant on Sinai. Here the holy Spirit acts upon the apostles, preparing them to proclaim the new covenant with its unique gift of the Spirit (Acts 2:38).1
Psalm 104 praises God as the Creator and Provider.
* [104:29–30] On one level, the spirit (or wind) of God is the fall and winter rains that provide food for all creatures. On another, it is the breath (or spirit) of God that makes beings live.2
The reading from the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians describes One Body with many members.
* [12:12–26] The image of a body is introduced to explain Christ’s relationship with believers (1 Cor 12:12). 1 Cor 12:13 applies this model to the church: by baptism all, despite diversity of ethnic or social origins, are integrated into one organism. 1 Cor 12:14–26 then develop the need for diversity of function among the parts of a body without threat to its unity.3
In the Gospel of John, Jesus proclaims peace as He appears to the Disciples.
* [20:19] The disciples: by implication from Jn 20:24 this means ten of the Twelve, presumably in Jerusalem. Peace be with you: although this could be an ordinary greeting, John intends here to echo Jn 14:27. The theme of rejoicing in Jn 20:20 echoes Jn 16:22.4
Rev. Richard Gabuzda comments that to speak about what one has seen and heard, to testify and to give witness. This is the fire that lies at the heart of all the gifts the Spirit lavishes on the Church. The gifts themselves, the ordinary as well as the more extraordinary, testify to the Risen Jesus who lives through the Church, in the lives of those who “have seen and heard,” who have experienced his presence.
On this Pentecost Sunday, let us implore the Holy Spirit to awaken our slumbering hearts and remove the blindness from our eyes, so that we may see and hear Jesus, Risen Lord, and that we might be given, through the Spirit’s manifold gifts, the grace to more boldly proclaim him.5
Don Schwager quotes “The Holy Spirit at Pentecost,” by Leo the Great, 400-461 A.D.
"To the Hebrew people, now freed from Egypt, the law was given on Mount Sinai fifty days after the immolation of the paschal lamb. Similarly, after the passion of Christ in which the true Lamb of God was killed, just fifty days after his resurrection, the Holy Spirit fell upon the apostles and the whole group of believers. Thus the earnest Christian may easily perceive that the beginnings of the Old Covenant were at the service of the beginnings of the gospel and that the same Spirit who instituted the first established the Second Covenant." (excerpt from Sermon 75.1)6
The Word Among Us Meditation on Acts 2:1-11 notes that Luke tells us that they all received the same gift of the Holy Spirit. They all began speaking in tongues. And they all found new courage and boldness to speak “of the mighty acts of God” (Acts 2:11).
You know where this is going, right? God gives the same Spirit that filled Peter and the apostles to everyone who asks. That includes you, your family, your friends, even your enemies. God doesn’t restrict his blessings to a chosen few. He wants to fill everyone! Try something different at Mass today. Whether you’re gathered with fellow parishioners in your church or joining others online, imagine what it would be like if the Spirit fell on all of you during the liturgy. What would it look like for all of those present—including you—to experience the Holy Spirit in the same way the disciples did? Or to be so filled with joy that all burst out in praise of the Lord? Or to experience God’s love in a deep, intimate way? In fact, don’t just imagine it. Pray for it! “Come, Holy Spirit, and fill the hearts of your people!”7
Nicky Gumbel speaks about the Holy Spirit in a You Tube ( https://youtu.be/qsSc2qljZSU ) portion of the Alpha Course.
James Hanvey SJ, Secretary for the Service of the Faith for the Society of Jesus, comments that Covid-19 has exposed the fragilities and the illusions, the inequalities and the failures of our systems. It has also revealed the many faces of generosity; humble and heroic faces of service and self-sacrifice even to the point of death. Lives put at the service of others barely known except in their desperation and need. The forgotten, the aging, the disabled and marginalised, those who are exposed to violence whether domestic or state, those who have no ‘place to shelter’. Every day they appear in the statistics and in the news. But in Christ anonymous numbers become faces. In them He shows His face.
Our work is to look upon the faces of sorrow and hope, and to make them even more visible. So that the faces to which we have become blind shine more urgently and radiantly. They are Christ’s testimony to us and to our world of another way of being: to see each other again through His eyes in compassion and in service; in communion beyond division. With simple faith we ask that the life of the Holy Spirit will carry us beyond the virus to the communion, the koinonia, in which we celebrate the sharing of our goods for the good of these vulnerable ones who have nothing to give us in return but their blessing.8
Friar Jude Winkler looks at the Jewish agricultural feast of Pentecost and the “fifties” wind in Jerusalem. Paul confronted Gnostic rejection of the material in the relationship between the Spirit and the Body of Christ. Friar Jude reminds us of the connection in the Gospel between receiving the Holy Spirit and renewing Creation.
Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, comments that unity is not the same as uniformity. Unity, in fact, is the reconciliation of differences, and those differences must be maintained. We must actually distinguish things and separate them, usually at a cost to ourselves, before we can spiritually unite them (Ephesians 2:14‒16). Perhaps if we had made that simple distinction between uniformity and true unity, many of our problems, especially those of overemphasized, separate identities, could have been overcome. The great wisdom of Pentecost is the recognition through the Spirit of an underlying unity amidst the many differences!
What has been “unveiled,” especially this past year with the pandemic, is that we really are one. We are one in both suffering and resurrection. Jesus’ final prayer is that we can consciously perceive and live this radical union now (John 17:21‒26). Our job is not to discover or even prove this, but only to retrieve what has already been discovered—and rediscovered—again and again, by the mystics, prophets, and saints of all religions. Until then we are all lost in separation—while grace and necessary suffering gradually “fill in every valley and level every mountain” to make a “straight highway to God” (Isaiah 40:3–4).9
We pray today “Come Holy Spirit and fill the hearts of your faithful.”
References
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