Homily for Pentecost Sunday, the Vigil Mass, 8 June 2019

 

              Fresco at the Karlskirche in Vienna (by Johann Michael Rottmayr)     

Homily for Pentecost Sunday, 

the Vigil Mass, 8 June 2019

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful,

and kindle in them the fire of your love.

Send forth your spirit, and they shall be created,

and you shall renew the face of the earth.

The first two lines are the verses that were sung with the Alleluia before the Gospel. The third and fourth lines are from Psalm 104, verse 30. This is a prayer that is usually recited before reading Holy Scripture.

Pentecost is the Church’s great feast of the Holy Spirit. The name comes from the Greek and means fiftieth, and signifies the number of days after Passover when the Jews celebrated Succoth, the festival of first fruits, similar to our Thanksgiving. Today’s Gospel reading takes place around this time of Succoth. Our passage ends with the curious line, “There was, of course, no Spirit yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.”

What does this mean? In the Old Testament, the word for “spirit” is the Hebrew word ruah. The word is sometimes translated as “wind” or “breath” as in Genesis 1:2: “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” and Genesis 2:7: “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” In both cases, God’s ruah, God’s spirit, is a creative, dynamic force. And in both cases, God’s ruah is interacting with the world and ultimately, with people. (Ekeh). In the time of Christ, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell with the person, even while the mind and heart and actions continue to be one’s own.  The result of this kind of giving of the Spirit is not a superhuman strength. The result is the fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, and more.

So this is what the Gospel means. Before Christ, the Holy Spirit animates all creation. But in the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was given to Christ’s people, to dwell with them always, in loving peaceful union with Christ, available to anyone who will come to Christ to drink. (Stump)

So how and where do we find the Holy Spirit in our life? The Spirit is not something to be pinned down. The very nature of the Spirit is to be on the move, but in an unexpected moment, if we are attentive we will be aware of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the love of God—unbridled, unbound, totally free, entirely present—creating, revealing, enlivening, breathing—among us, through us, and within us. This is what the Scriptures tell us. This is what our hearts know. (Ekeh)

How can we be attentive to the spirit? Theologian Dietriech Bonhoffer wrote, “We are so afraid of silence that we chase ourselves from one event to the next in order not to have to spend a moment alone with ourselves, in order not to have to look at ourselves in the mirror.” Our day to day lives are filled with all kinds of distractions. Sometimes we deliberately keep ourselves so preoccupied that we never give the Spirit a moment’s notice.

Father Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk, based a technique called Centering Prayer on the words of Jesus, “When you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret”(Mt 7:6). Jesus by his own example would go off by himself to pray. Keating writes,” The grace of Pentecost affirms that the risen Jesus is among us as the glorified Christ. Christ lives in each of us as the Enlightened One, present everywhere and at all times. He is the living Master who continuously sends the Holy Spirit to dwell within us and to bear witness to his resurrection by empowering us to experience and manifest the fruits of the Spirit and the Beatitudes both in prayer and action.”

 With centering prayer a person sets aside a time and place every day for quieting the body and mind so the “voice of the Spirit” can be heard. No technique or practice can bring the Holy Spirit on demand, and the presence of the Spirit may not even be sensed during the period of centering prayer. It may, in fact, be sensed at another moment when circumstances come together. The point is, if we never open ourselves to the Spirit, we will be depriving ourselves of all the Spirit’s wonderful fruits:  charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, and chastity.

In this celebration of the Eucharist today let us ask Christ to fill us with “rivers of living water” so that we may experience the Holy Spirit working in our life.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful,

and kindle in them the fire of your love.

Send forth your spirit, and they shall be created,

and you shall renew the face of the earth.