Pentecost Sunday
Most of you know my story of leaving home when I was barely 17 years old. Even though I felt I felt called to be a priest, there was no way to numb the pain of leaving home. I may or may not have told you this, but part of the reason the pain was so intense was because my next opportunity to see my parents would be after two years. When I look back at those two years I am really not sure how I got through them. e-mails, texting, Skype, and Facebook did not exist then. I ached for ‘closeness’ with my family. I still remember that first awful first Christmas without my family. If God has assigned a time for me in purgatory I will remind God of my first two years away from my family. Gosh! How I longed for ‘closeness.’ And I still do. That is why I go home twice a year. Those of you have lost a loved one or have someone you love live far away will understand what it means to long for closeness.
I would like to reflect upon the feast of the Pentecost from the perspective of closeness. Because we are talking about the Holy Spirit, perhaps, we cannot avoid some abstractness. Christmas, for example, may express closeness to us better than Pentecost. But Pentecost is the feast of God’s desire for closeness with us. At Pentecost God’s closeness to us personally and as a community reaches its climax. Let me use the three readings to reflect upon this theme.
- The ‘closeness’ of the Community.
In the first reading, we heard the actual account of the Pentecost. Apart from the tongues of fire, the other strange phenomenon was that the large gathering of people from the different nations heard the disciples speak in their own native language. We have to reflect on this story in juxtaposition to the story of the tower of Babel. In that story the opposite happened. A single language became a variety of languages so that no body understood each other. The tragedy at Babel was caused by human pride and arrogance. Pentecost reverses babble into meaning. Pentecost makes us realize that pride, arrogance, and self-service only creates confusion. Rather, at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit made everyone understand each other.
The Holy Spirit is teaching us that we are one with every other person on the face of the earth who seeks God. Pentecost teaches us to think as “we” when we are inclined to think of ourselves us “I”. Pentecost teaches us that the Spirit hangs out where there is community. For us in this parish, we have made a deliberate choice to embrace and nourish our diversity. And we do not merely want this superficially but we want to celebrate it in our liturgy, in our school, our parish council and other commissions. We must truly be an expression of Pentecost.
- God’s Desire for Closeness
Our gospel reading today is from the gospel of John. For John, the Holy Spirit was alive and active in the church even before the Pentecost. So if you notice, in the account of the resurrection appearance that we have in today’s gospel, Jesus says to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” But it is the action by which he accomplished this that makes it meaningful for us. He breathes on the disciples. Once again, Jesus action takes us back to Genesis. When God created Adam and Eve he breathed into their nostrils, the breath of life. I interpret this as closeness. In other words, what is in us is God’s. The very breath we breathe is God’s. This is the closeness that God wants with us – to be in every breath we breath, every step we take, every move we make, every thought we think, every word we speak. So, as Jesus breathes into his disciples, it is as if he wants the same closeness that God wanted with Adam and eve.
Those of us who are baptized and confirmed – God seeks closeness with us. What are we doing with the breath of God in us?
- Eucharist – the God’s Closeness in Flesh
I said earlier that there is a certain amount of abstractness when it comes to talking about the Holy Spirit. Yet, it is not as abstract as we think. My first point and my second point come together in the celebration of the Eucharist. Take a look at this community. Each person that you see is the breath of God in flesh. We can say that the Holy Spirit is not just in us but each one of us is the breath of God in Flesh. And we come together as a community to celebrate this Eucharist because we recognize that this gathering is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is the same Spirit who transforms the bread and wine into the real presence of Christ. Here in this bread is Spirit of Christ in flesh. And when we eat this bread and drink this wine, we become part of the divine, in flesh. We are the body of Christ, we are the Holy Spirit. We are now divine. The Eucharist, in the community that gathers and the bread and wine we share is the very closeness of God.
Let us be aware of three things today: the community, the bread and the wine and the Holy Spirit that makes the community and the bread and wine divine.
- Fr. Satish Joseph