Pentecost Sunday, Year B
First Reading: Acts 2:1-11
Second Reading: Gal 5:16-25
Gospel Reading: Jn 15:26-27; 16:12-15
Forty days after his resurrection, Jesus ascended to heaven. Ten days later, the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles, as Jesus had promised.
Pentecost is called the Church’s birthday because, as we hear in the Gospel Reading, Christ told the Church’s first bishops, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”
St. Leo the Great, Pope from 440 to 461, called the Holy Spirit “the inspirer of the faith, the teacher of knowledge, the fount of love, the seal of chastity, and the cause of all power.” Through him “the whole Catholic Church is sanctified;” he makes the Church, “the house of his glory, shine with the brightness of his light,” and he “will have nothing dark or lukewarm in his temple.”
The descent of the Holy Spirit in the new covenant was foreshadowed in the old covenant, the Pope noted. Fifty days after the Hebrews escaped from Egypt through the sacrificing of the paschal lambs, the Law was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Similarly, 50 days after humanity was released from sin and death by the sacrificing of Jesus, the Lamb of God, the Holy Spirit was given to the apostles.
“The second covenant was founded by the same Spirit who had instituted the first,” Pope Leo said. Accordingly, St. Paul compares the Law with the Spirit.
If we are “led by the Spirit,” he says, we are not “subject to the law.”
He does not mean that if we are led by the Spirit, we can break the law, for he warns that those who break the Law – those who live lives of “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these” – will not “inherit the kingdom of God.”
He means that if we live according to the Spirit, we will no longer see the law as something alien, arbitrary, or artificial: something imposed on us by a tyrant against our will.
Because our human nature is fallen, “what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh, St. Paul notes, so “the flesh” prevents us from doing what we truly want.
However, speaking of his new covenant with us, God promised, “I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts.” No longer will we have to be taught God’s law, for we will all know him.
After Adam and Eve fell, we had to be commanded to keep the law; to love God with our whole being for his own sake and our neighbours as ourselves for love of him. However, “the love-story between God and man consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a communion of thought and [feeling],” Pope Benedict XVI said. “Thus our will and God’s will increasingly coincide”; we “want the same thing” and “reject the same thing.”
No longer is God’s will something “imposed on me by the commandments,” the Pope said; “it is now my own will,” based on the realization that God is “more deeply present to me than I am to myself. Then self-abandonment to God increases and God becomes our joy.”
When we love God, the love of neighbour commanded by Jesus becomes possible, the Pope said. “In God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know.” I learn to look at others “not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend.”
“Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful,” we pray this Sunday. “Light most blessed, shine with grace, in our heart’s most secret place; fill Your faithful through and through.”
Then, “if we live by the Spirit,” we will also “be guided by the Spirit,” as St. Paul said.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English.” All the materials (video and print) are available online free of charge at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 36, “The Question of Suffering," will be available May 23. This session marks the end of the course for 2020-2021, but all the materials will remain available until the end of August.