Scott Hahn with David Scott
The giving of the Spirit to the new people of God crowns the mighty acts of the Father in salvation history.
The Jewish feast of Pentecost called all devout Jews to Jerusalem to celebrate their birth as God’s chosen people, in the covenant Law given to Moses at Sinai (see Leviticus 23:15-21; Deuteronomy 16:9-11).
In today’s First Reading the mysteries prefigured in that feast are fulfilled in the pouring out of the Spirit on Mary and the Apostles (see Acts 1:14).
The Spirit seals the new law and new covenant brought by Jesus, written not on stone tablets but on the hearts of believers, as the prophets promised (see 2 Corinthians 3:2-8; Romans 8:2).
The Spirit is revealed as the life-giving breath of the Father, the Wisdom by which He made all things, as we sing in today’s Psalm.
In the beginning, the Spirit came as a “mighty wind” sweeping over the face of the earth (see Genesis 1:2). And in the new creation of Pentecost, the Spirit again comes as “a strong, driving wind” to renew the face of the earth.
As God fashioned the first man out of dust and filled him with His Spirit (see Genesis 2:7), in today’s Gospel we see the New Adam become a life-giving Spirit, breathing new life into the Apostles (see 1 Corinthians 15:45, 47).
Like a river of living water, for all ages He will pour out His Spirit on His body, the Church, as we hear in today’s Epistle (see also John 7:37-39).
We receive that Spirit in the sacraments, being made a “new creation” in Baptism (see 2 Corinthians 5:17;Galatians 6:15).
Drinking of the one Spirit in the Eucharist (see 1 Corinthians 10:4), we are the first fruits of a new humanity—fashioned from out of every nation under heaven, with no distinctions of wealth or language or race, a people born of the Spirit.
Pope Benedict XVI
Regina Caeli Address, May 27, 2007
Today, we celebrate the great feast of Pentecost, in which the liturgy has us relive the birth of the Church, according to what St Luke narrates in the book of the Acts of the Apostles (2: 1-13).
Fifty days after Easter, the Holy Spirit descended on the community of disciples – “with one accord devoted themselves to prayer” – gathered with “Mary, the mother of Jesus” and with the Twelve Apostles (cf. Acts 1: 14; 2: 1). We can therefore say that the Church had its solemn beginning with the descent of the Holy Spirit.
In this extraordinary event we find the essential and qualifying characteristics of the Church: the Church is one, like the community at Pentecost, who were united in prayer and “concordant”: “were of one heart and soul” (Acts 4: 32).
The Church is holy, not by her own merits, but because, animated by the Holy Spirit, she keeps her gaze on Christ, to become conformed to him and to his love.
The Church is catholic, because the Gospel is destined for all peoples, and for this, already at the beginning, the Holy Spirit made her speak all languages.
The Church is apostolic, because, built upon the foundation of the Apostles, she faithfully keeps their teaching through the uninterrupted chain of episcopal succession.
What is more, the Church by her nature is missionary, and from the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit does not cease to move her along the ways of the world to the ends of the earth and to the end of time.
This reality, which we can verify in every epoch, is already anticipated in the Book of Acts, where the Gospel passage from the Hebrews to the pagans, from Jerusalem to Rome, is described. Rome represents the pagan world, and hence, all people who are outside of the ancient People of God. Actually, Acts concludes with the arrival of the Gospel to Rome.
It can be said, then, that Rome is the concrete name of catholicity and missionary spirit, it expresses fidelity to the origins, to the Church of all times, to a Church that speaks all languages and extends herself to all cultures.
Dear brothers and sisters, the first Pentecost took place when Mary Most Holy was present amid the disciples in the Upper Room in Jerusalem and prayed. Today, too, let us entrust ourselves to her maternal intercession, so that the Holy Spirit may descend in abundance upon the Church in our day, fill the hearts of all the faithful and enkindle in them the fire of his love.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger [Pope Benedict XVI] Vatican retreat 1983
The day of Pentecost reveals to us the catholicity and universality of the Church. The Holy Spirit makes his presence known by the gift of tongues. Thus he renews, while reversing, the incident at Babel (Gn 11), that outward expression of the pride of those who want to be as God is and who, by their own strength – that is to say, without God – build a bridge to heaven, the tower of Babel. Such pride stirs up divisions in the world and sets up walls of separation. Because of pride, man acknowledges his own intelligence alone, his own will, his own heart. As a result, he is no longer able either to understand the speech of others nor hear the voice of God.
The Holy Spirit, divine love, both understands and effects an understanding of other tongues. It creates unity in diversity. Thus, the Church speaks all languages from its first inception. From the start she is catholic and universal. The bridge between heaven and earth truly exists: this bridge is the cross and our Lord’s love has created this bridge. The construction of this bridge exceeds technology’s capability: Babel’s aim must and does fail. Only God’s incarnate love could answer to such an aim…
The Church is catholic from the first moment of her existence; she embraces all tongues. The sign of tongues expresses a very important aspect of an ecclesiology that is faithful to Scripture: the universal Church precedes any particular church; unity comes before the different parts. The universal Church does not consist in a secondary fusion of local churches. It is a Church that is universal and catholic which gives rise to particular churches and these latter can only remain churches so long as they are in communion with catholicity. Moreover, catholicity demands the multiplicity of languages, sharing in common, and the bringing into harmony of humanity’s riches in the love of the Crucified.
Pope Benedict XVI
Homily, May 23, 2010
In the solemn celebration of Pentecost we are invited to profess our faith in the presence and in the action of the Holy Spirit and to invoke his outpouring upon us, upon the Church and upon the whole world.
With special intensity, let us make our own the Church’s invocation: Veni, Sancte Spiritus! It is such a simple and spontaneous invocation, yet also extraordinarily profound, which came first of all from the heart of Christ. The Spirit is indeed the gift that Jesus asked and continues to ask of his Father for his friends; the first and principal gift that he obtained for us through his Resurrection and Ascension into heaven.
Today’s Gospel passage, which has the Last Supper as its context, speaks to us of this prayer of Christ. The Lord Jesus said to his disciples: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor, to be with you for ever” (Jn 14: 15-16).
Here the praying heart of Jesus is revealed to us, his filial and fraternal heart. This prayer reaches its apex and its fulfilment on the Cross, where Christ’s invocation is one with the total gift that he makes of himself, and thus his prayer becomes, so to speak, the very seal of his self-gift out of love of the Father and humanity. Invocation and donation of the Holy Spirit meet, they permeate each other, they become one reality.
“And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor, to be with you for ever”. In reality, Jesus’ prayers that of the Last Supper and that on the Cross form a single prayer that continues even in heaven, where Christ sits at the right hand of the Father. Jesus, in fact, always lives his intercessional priesthood on behalf of the people of God and humanity and so prays for all of us, asking the Father for the gift of the Holy Spirit.
The account of Pentecost in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles we listened to it in the First Reading (cf. Acts 2: 1-11) presents the “new course” of the work that God began with Christ’s Resurrection, a work that involves mankind, history and the cosmos.
The Son of God, dead and Risen and returned to the Father, now breathes with untold energy the divine breath upon humanity, the Holy Spirit. And what does this new and powerful self-communication of God produce? Where there are divisions and estrangement the Paraclete creates unity and understanding.
The Spirit triggers a process of reunification of the divided and dispersed parts of the human family. People, often reduced to individuals in competition or in conflict with each other, when touched by the Spirit of Christ open themselves to the experience of communion, which can involve them to such an extent as to make of them a new body, a new subject: the Church.
This is the effect of God’s work: unity; thus unity is the sign of recognition, the “business card” of the Church throughout her universal history. From the very beginning, from the Day of Pentecost, she speaks all languages.
The universal Church precedes the particular Churches, and the latter must always conform to the former according to a criterion of unity and universality. The Church never remains a prisoner within political, racial and cultural confines; she cannot be confused with States nor with Federations of States, because her unity is of a different type and aspires to transcend every human frontier.
From this, dear brothers, derives a practical criterion for discerning Christian life: when a person or a community limits itself to its own way of thinking and acting, it is a sign that it has distanced itself from the Holy Spirit.
The path of Christians and of the particular Churches must always coincide with the path of the one, catholic Church, and harmonize with it. This does not mean that the unity created by the Holy Spirit is a kind of egalitarianism. On the contrary, that is rather the model of Babel, or in other words, the imposition of a culture characterized by what we could define as “technical” unity. In fact, the Bible tells us (cf. Gen 11: 1-9) that in Babel everyone spoke the same language.
At Pentecost, however, the Apostles speak different languages in such a way that everyone understands the message in his own tongue. The unity of the Spirit is manifest in the plurality of understanding.
The Church is one and multiple by her nature, destined as she is to live among all nations, all peoples, and in the most diverse social contexts. She responds to her vocation to be a sign and instrument of unity of the human race (cf. Lumen gentium, n. 1) only if she remains autonomous from every State and every specific culture. Always and everywhere the Church must truly be catholic and universal, the house of all in which each one can find a place.
The account of the Acts of the Apostles offers us another very concrete indication. The universality of the Church is expressed by the list of peoples according to the ancient tradition: We are “Parthians, Medes, Elamites”, etc.
Here one may observe that St Luke goes beyond the number 12, which itself always expresses a universality. He looks beyond the horizons of Asia and northwest Africa, and adds three other elements: the “Romans”, that is, the Western world; the “Jews and proselytes”, encompassing in a new way the unity between Israel and the world; and finally “Cretans and Arabians”, who represent the West and the East, islands and land.
This opening of horizons subsequently confirms the newness of Christ in the dimension of human space, in the history of the nations. The Holy Spirit involves individuals and peoples and, through them, overcomes walls and barriers.
At Pentecost the Holy Spirit is manifest as fire. The Spirit’s flame descended upon the assembled disciples, it was kindled in them and gave them the new ardour of God. Thus what Jesus had previously said was fulfilled: “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” (Lk 12: 49).
The Apostles, together with diverse communities of the faithful, carried this divine flame to the far corners of the earth. In this way they opened a path for humanity, a luminous path, and they collaborated with God, who wants to renew the face of the earth with his fire. How different is this fire from that of war and bombing! How different is the fire of Christ, spread by the Church, compared with those lit by the dictators of every epoch of the last century too who leave scorched earth behind them.
The fire of God, the fire of the Holy Spirit, is that of the bush that burned but was not consumed (cf. Ex 3: 2). It is a flame that blazes but does not destroy, on the contrary, that, in burning, brings out the better and truer part of man, as in a fusion it elicits his interior form, his vocation to truth and to love.
A Father of the Church, Origen, in one of his Homilies on Jeremiah, cites a saying attributed to Jesus, not contained in the sacred Scriptures but perhaps authentic, which reads: “Whoever is near to me, is near to the fire” (Homily on Jeremiah, L. I [III]).
In Christ, in fact, there is the fullness of God, who in the Bible is compared to fire. We just observed that the flame of the Holy Spirit blazes but does not burn. And nevertheless it enacts a transformation, and thus must also consume something in man, the waste that corrupts him and hinders his relations with God and neighbour.
This effect of the divine fire, however, frightens us; we are afraid of being “scorched” and prefer to stay just as we are. This is because our life is often based on the logic of having, of possessing and not the logic of self-gift. Many people believe in God and admire the person of Jesus Christ, but when they are asked to lose something of themselves, then they retreat; they are afraid of the demands of faith.
There is the fear of giving up something pleasant to which we are attached; the fear that following Christ deprives us of freedom, of certain experiences, of a part of ourselves. On the one hand, we want to be with Jesus, follow him closely, and, on the other, we are afraid of the consequences entailed.
Dear brothers and sisters, we are always in need of hearing the Lord Jesus tell us what he often repeated to his friends: “Be not afraid”.
Like Simon Peter and the others we must allow his presence and his grace to transform our heart, which is always subject to human weakness. We must know how to recognize that losing something indeed, losing ourselves for the true God, the God of love and of life is actually gaining ourselves, finding ourselves more fully.
Whoever entrusts himself to Jesus already experiences in this life the peace and joy of heart that the world cannot give, and that it cannot even take away once God has given it to us. So it is worthwhile to let ourselves be touched by the fire of the Holy Spirit!
The suffering that it causes us is necessary for our transformation. It is the reality of the Cross. It is not without reason that in the language of Jesus “fire” is above all a representation of the mystery of the Cross, without which Christianity does not exist.
Thus enlightened and comforted by these words of life, let us lift up our invocation: Come, Holy Spirit! Enkindle in us the fire of your love! We know that this is a bold prayer, with which we ask to be touched by God’s flame; but above all we know that this flame and it alone has the power to save us. We do not want, in defending our life, to lose eternal life that God wants to give us. We need the fire of the Holy Spirit, because only Love redeems. Amen.
Saint John-Mary Vianney
The spirit of the Cure d’Ars in his Instructions, Sermons and Conversations
The Holy Spirit, the Paraclete
We are nothing of ourselves but we are a great deal with the Holy Spirit. The human person is all earthly, wholly animal, only the Holy Spirit can raise the soul and elevate it on high.
Like those kinds of spectacles which magnify things, the Holy Spirit makes us see both the good and the bad enlarged. With the Holy Spirit one sees everything enlarged: the greatness of the least action done for God and the greatness of the least fault. As a clockmaker can distinguish with his spectacles the smallest parts of a watch so, with the light of the Holy Spirit, we can see every detail of our poor lives.
Everything is cold without the Holy Spirit and so, whenever we feel our fervor fading, we should make a novena to the Holy Spirit to ask for faith and love!
