Acts 2:1-11 | Ps 104 | 1 Cor 12:3b-7, 12-13 (or) Rom 8:8-17 | Sequence | Jn 20:19-23 (or) Jn 14:15-16, 23b-26
With the feast of Pentecost, the wonderful season of Easter—the Great Fifty Days—comes to an end, and the Church gives us two accounts of this great event we celebrate today. Both accounts are filled with emotions and drama in symbols that attempt to grasp the magnitude of this holy reality in our lives.
Our gospel reading from St. John takes us back to that glorious and confusing day: Easter Sunday when the unimaginable happened! Christ rose from the dead! We find the apostles hiding, locked away in a dark room, fearing for their lives, and still grieving about the torture and death of Jesus. Then, in the midst of these stifling emotions, Jesus appears whole and real and alive! And he delivers a greeting of peace, and then he breaths on them. Like the creation story in Genesis that tells us that God breathed life into man at his creation, so Jesus breathes new life into the apostles. He transforms and recreates those who are huddled in fear, and gives them new life and a commission to go out and proclaim the Good News.
The fruit of this outpouring of God’s Spirit is the birth of the Church. With the day of Pentecost, the continuation of Christ’s ministry and mission was secured. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ is present and active in the world through the life and the works of the Church: hopefully, that’s you and me! We are the Body of Christ. We have been breathed upon by God and given God’s Spirit. How easy it is to lose sight of this.
Maybe it’s easy to lose sight of this reality, because how gently God comes to us, how gently God makes God’s Self known to us. In 1 Kings, with Elijah, the Lord was not in the wind, or the fire, or the earthquake, but rather in a tiny whispering sound. God comes to us in the silence (and we are so uncomfortable with silence). In the fullness of time, God didn’t send His Son to us by some spectacle on a mountain or thundering storm; but rather, in the form of a defenseless infant. What is more non-threatening than a baby?
In Eucharistic Prayer II, the celebrant says: “Make holy, therefore these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall.” At the time of the new translation of the Roman Missal, I remember priests saying, “I’m not saying that word, ‘dewfall.’” Why not? It’s, in fact, the perfect word! We don’t say, “rainfall.” We know how torrential rain can be. But even a “soft day,” as they say in Ireland, the weight of the drops still hit in some manner. Nor do we say, “snowfall.” My dad still has water in a film capsule, marked: Blizzard of ’78. So, we know the havoc snow can produce. Even the gentlest snowfall can still collect and cover. But the dewfall … dew just kind of invisibly appears in silence. We’ve all heard rain hit our roofs and window panes (same with a hard snowfall in the wind). But dew, dew just materializes in a non-threatening way.
The cover of the bulletin, some of you may have read, is what occurs every Pentecost Sunday at the Patheon in Rome. Following Mass, after firefighters have climbed the 13 stories upon the dome, they drop thousands of red rose petals through the open oculus upon the faithful, representing tongues of fire. Those who have been present report: “You can’t know what the sound of thousands of rose petals hitting marble sounds like until you experience it.”
It amazes me: a building built before Christ with an intentional hole in the ceiling is still standing, and we struggle with a 39-year-old modern structure!
How gentle, and tender, and non-threatening, and invitational our God is! Made in His image and likeness, how gentle, tender, non-threatening, and invitational are we? For me, it all goes back to that image on the Sistine Chapel ceiling: God stretching forth that mighty digit to breath life into Adam, and Adam responds. Are we responding? Or how well are we responding? Do we offer our index finger to God’s touch, or do we retract it; or worse perhaps, tuck it into a closed fist?
On this feast of Pentecost, we are invited by the Church to reflect upon how the Holy Spirit is alive in us. We do well to give thanks to God for so great a gift and to explore with all humility how much we allow that Spirit to enter ourselves and how much more we can do to put the gift of God’s Spirit into action within our lives.
“Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and who sins you retain are retained.”
That statement from Scripture doesn’t only institute the Sacrament of Reconciliation but at the same time encourages each of us to let go of all we might be holding on to. None of us knows when our lives will be asked of us; therefore, bring nothing “retained” into eternity; except perhaps, the knowledge that our God is forever breathing new life into us, delighting our senses just as petals descending upon cold marble.