Pentecost Sunday May 31, 2009

The Unity of His Presence

Scripture Readings
First Acts 2:1-11
Second 1 Cor 12:3b-7, 12 -13 or Gal 5:16-25
Gospel John 20:19-23 or John 15:26-27; 16:12-15

Prepared by: Fr. Jonathan Kalisch, OP

1. Subject Matter
• “Come Holy Spirit”: The Church’s celebration of Pentecost – through the Word which is “alive
and efficacious” – aims to renew, make present and operative again in the church what was
accomplished at that time.
• By the power of the Holy Spirit, the disciples are made into a new creation, with God (and no
longer themselves) as the center of their unity.
• The grace of the Holy Spirit works in two ways: urges the Church outwards to embrace in its
unity an ever greater number (universality) and impels it inwards to consolidate the unity
attained (collect itself in unity).
2. Exegetical Note
• Day of Pentecost – Jewish Feast of Weeks – 50 days after Passover – celebrates the giving
of the Torah on Mt. Siani (Widespread use in Judiasm of fire as a symbol of the Torah –
Exodus 19:16 – emphasis on the Sound – and the “descending of God upon it in fire”.)
• Philo Judaeus explicitly attaches the giving of the Law by God to the communication of
speech by flame: “Then from the midst of the fire that streamed from heaven there sounded
forth to their utter amazement a voice, for the flame became articulate speech in the
language familiar to the audience, and so clearly and distinctly were the words formed by it
that they seemed to see rather then hear them” (On the Decalogue 46).
• Pentecost was one of 3 great pilgrimage feasts of ancient Israel (Paul was eager to be there
in Acts 20:16) Exodus 23:16 and 34:12, Lev 23:15-21 and Deut 16:9-12 Had agricultural and
nomadic roots in Judiasm in offering of first fruits and lambs. Later it was given the additional
dimension of commemorating the promulgation of the Law given by God to Moses on MT.
Siani. Held 50 days after Passover – the material harvest which the Jews so joyously
 celebrated became the symbol of the spiritual harvest the Apostles began to reap on this
day.
• Holy Spirit is not wind or fire, but compared to the sound wind makes (Gen 1:2) and to flames
fire produces (Ex 3:2, Ps 104:4)
• Sound from heaven: recalls Mt. Siani (Exodus 19:16-19) also strong wind associated with
Elijah’s ascension (2 Kings 2:11) but in this case the sound is compared to that of a blowing
wind, it is the sound that fills the house, not a wind.
• Individual tongues as of fire” – literally “divided” cf LK 11:17-18; 12:52-53, 22:17 and 23:34)
“Individual” is used b/c tongues are separated from each other, rather than divided within –
they are distributed, shows that they all came from the same source – the Paraclete.
• Fire – symbolizes the action of the HS – who by enlightening the minds of the disciples –
enables them to understand Jesus’ teachings as Jesus promised at the Last Supper (John
16:4-14). By enflaming their hearts with love, HS dispels their fear and moves them to
preach boldly.
• The Crowd of “devout Jews” hears “this sound” whose source is “Galileans” – notorious for
their lack of linguistic talent – “speaking in the native language of each” about “God’s deeds
of power”.
• In the Gentile world, at oracle shrines like Delphi, revelations of the gods took place in kind of
ecstatic utterance and were rendered intelligible by the shrine official or prophet who
translated these. But, this is not what Peter does. The speech is already intelligible to the
listeners – Peter interprets the event, not the speech – speech of the disciples does not
derive from drunkenness, but from the gift of the Spirit
• List of nations – cf Gen 10:2-31 The giving of the HS at Pentecost took place in the
presence of Jews from all over the world, and through Peter’s speech (2:38) the invitation to
share in this gift will be made. The 12 represent the nucleus of the people that is being
restored, and the audience of nations represent all the lands to which the Jews had been
dispersed.
• Compare to Gen 11:1-9 Contrast the confusion of Language at Babel (God’s punishment for
pride and infidelity ) and the reversal of this confusion on day of Pentecost that to the grace
of the HS –
• Filled with new wine – new wine is usually sweet, and so a quick stimulus to drunkenness
• “When the day of Pentecost had come” – the Spirit arrives in Jerusalem on the day of
Pentecost as the fulfillment of prophecy and the answer to the community’s expectant
prayers; it is a clear sign of God’s faithfulness. Earlier, Jesus told the Apostles that God had
“marked” the crucial dates of slavation’s history (1:7). The entire household of Israel had
gathered in the holy city to celebrate God’s provident care. The gift of the HS is another
concrete example of God’s goodness to Israel and of his faithfulness in keeping divine
promises.
3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church
• CCC #691: “The term ‘Spirit’ translates the Hebrew word ruah, which, in its primary sense,
means breath, air, wind. Jesus indeed uses the sensory image of the wind to suggest to
Nicodemus the transcendent newness of him who is personally God's breath, the divine
 Spirit. On the other hand, ‘Spirit’ and ‘Holy’ are divine attributes common to the three divine
persons. By joining the two terms, Scripture, liturgy, and theological language designate the
inexpressible person of the Holy Spirit, without any possible equivocation with other uses of
the terms ‘spirit’ and ‘holy.’”
• CCC # 696: “Fire. While water signifies birth and the fruitfulness of life given in the Holy
Spirit, fire symbolizes the transforming energy of the Holy Spirit's actions. The prayer of the
prophet Elijah, who ‘arose like fire’ and whose ‘word burned like a torch,’ brought down fire
from heaven on the sacrifice on Mount Carmel. This event was a ‘figure’ of the fire of the
Holy Spirit, who transforms what he touches. John the Baptist, who goes ‘before (the Lord) in
the spirit and power of Elijah,’ proclaims Christ as the one who ‘will baptize you with the Holy
Spirit and with fire.’ Jesus will say of the Spirit: ‘I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would
that it were already kindled!’ In the form of tongues ‘as of fire,’ the Holy Spirit rests on the
disciples on the morning of Pentecost and fills them with himself. The spiritual tradition has
retained this symbolism of fire as one of the most expressive images of the Holy Spirit's
actions. ‘Do not quench the Spirit.’"
• CCC #701 “The dove. At the end of the flood, whose symbolism refers to Baptism, a dove
released by Noah returns with a fresh olive-tree branch in its beak as a sign that the earth
was again habitable. When Christ comes up from the water of his baptism, the Holy Spirit, in
the form of a dove, comes down upon him and remains with him. The Spirit comes down and
remains in the purified hearts of the baptized. In certain churches, the Eucharist is reserved
in a metal receptacle in the form of a dove Columbarium) suspended above the altar.
Christian iconography traditionally uses a dove to suggest the Spirit.”
• CCC # 734: “Because we are dead or at least wounded through sin, the first effect of the gift
of love is the forgiveness of our sins. The communion of the Holy Spirit in the Church
restores to the baptized the divine likeness lost through sin.”
• CCC # 735: “He, then, gives us the ‘pledge’ or ‘first fruits’ of our inheritance: the very life of
the Holy Trinity, which is to love as ‘God (has) loved us.’ This love (the ‘charity’ of 1 Cor 13)
is the source of the new life in Christ, made possible because we have received ‘power’ from
the Holy Spirit.”
• CCC # 736: “By this power of the Spirit, God's children can bear much fruit. He who has
grafted us onto the true vine will make us bear ‘the fruit of the Spirit: . . . love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.’ ‘We live by the Spirit’;
the more we renounce ourselves, the more we ‘walk by the Spirit.’ Through the Holy Spirit we
are restored to paradise, led back to the Kingdom of heaven, and adopted as children, given
confidence to call God ‘Father’ and to share in Christ's grace, called children of light and
given a share in eternal glory.”
• CCC # 739: “Because the Holy Spirit is the anointing of Christ, it is Christ who, as the head of
the Body, pours out the Spirit among his members to nourish, heal, and organize them in
their mutual functions, to give them life, send them to bear witness, and associate them to his
self-offering to the Father and to his intercession for the whole world. Through the Church's
sacraments, Christ communicates his Holy and sanctifying Spirit to the members of his
Body.”

4. Patristic Commentary
• St Augustine: “In fact, what the soul is to the human body, the Holy Spirit is to the body of
Christ which is the Church. The Holy Spirit does in the whole Church what the soul does in
all the parts of one body…When it was in the body, it was alive, cut off, it loses life. IN the
same way, too, Christian men and women are Catholic while they are alive in the body; cut
off, they have become heretics; the Spirit does not follow the amputated part. So if you wish
to be alive with the Holy Spirit, hold on to loving-kindness, love truthfulness, long for
oneness, that you may attain to everlastingness.”
• St. Augustine: “The Holy Spirit makes us remain in God and God in us; yet it is love that
effects this. The Spirit therefore is God as love!”
• St. Thomas Aquinas: “Since the one (unum) is a principle of being like the good (bonum), it
follows that everyone naturally desires unity as he desires the good. For this reason, just as
the love or desire of the good causes suffering, so also does the love or desire for unity.”
• St. Thomas Aquinas: “The love of God is aggregative inasmuch as it brings human desire
back from multiplicity to a single thing; self-love, on the other hand, disperses (disgregat)
human desire in the multiplicity of things. In fact, a human being loves himself by desiring for
themselves temporal goods that are many and diverse.”
• St. Cyril of Alexandria: “The Spirit is one and indivisible. By means of his presence and his
action he reunites in unity spirits that among themselves are distinct and separate. He
makes of all, in himself, one and the same thing.”
• St. Augustine: “If you love, you do not have nothing; for if you love unity, whoever in it has
anything has it also for you. Take away envy, and what I have is yours; let me take away
envy, and what you have is mine.”
5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars
• “If the saints became what they were, it was above all through submission to this secret
guide that moment by moment suggested to them what was most pleasing to God and
conformed best to the Spirit of Christ.” (Cantalamessa)
• Saint Ignatius of Antioch, who died a martyr in Rome at the beginning of the second
century, has left us a splendid description of the Spirit’s power dwelling within us. He spoke
of the Spirit as a fountain of living water springing up within his heart and whispering: “Come,
come to the Father” (cf. Ad Rom., 6:1-9).
• St. Joan of Arc: “It is better to be alone with God. His friendship will not fail me, nor his
counsel, nor his love. In his strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die.”
• Pope Benedict XVI invited the participants of World Youth Day Sydney to follow the example
of Blessed Mary MacKillop who, “when she was just twenty six years old said: ‘Believe in
the whisperings of God to your heart!’. Believe in him! Believe in the power of the Spirit of
Love!”
6. Quotes

• Pope Benedict XVI: “Spirit…is not the object of calculation and computer storage; it is
correlated precisely with what is incalculable. It is a name for an attitude ‘which brings
happiness to the self by bursting through the limitations of self-centeredness’; an attitude, in
other words, that requires a decision of the heart, or whole person…World history is a
 struggle between two kinds of love: self-love to the point of hatred for God, and love of God
to the point of self-renunciation.”
• Pope Benedict XVI: “A further characteristic of the Spirit is listening: he does not speak in
his own name, he listens, and teaches how to listen. In other words, he does not add
anything but rather acts as a guide into the heart of the Word, which becomes light in the act
of listening. The Spirit does not employ violence; his method is simply to allow what stands
before me to enter into me…the Spirit effects a space of listening and remembering…”
• Pope Benedict XVI: “By dying on the Cross—as Saint John tells us—Jesus ‘gave up his
Spirit’, anticipating the gift of the Holy Spirit that he would make after his Resurrection. This
was to fulfill the promise of ‘rivers of living water’ that would flow out of the hearts of
believers, through the outpouring of the Spirit. The Spirit, in fact, is that interior power which
harmonizes their hearts with Christ's heart and moves them to love their brethren as Christ
loved them, when he bent down to wash the feet of the disciples and above all when he gave
his life for us. The Spirit is also the energy which transforms the heart of the ecclesial
community, so that it becomes a witness before the world to the love of the Father, who
wishes to make humanity a single family in his Son.”
• Pope Benedict XVI: “At that extraordinary moment, which gave birth to the Church, the
confusion and fear that had gripped Christ’s disciples were transformed into a vigorous
conviction and sense of purpose. They felt impelled to speak of their encounter with the risen
Jesus whom they had come to call affectionately, the Lord. In many ways, the Apostles were
ordinary. None could claim to be the perfect disciple. They failed to recognize Christ (cf. Lk
24:13-32), felt ashamed of their own ambition (cf. Lk 22:24-27), and had even denied him (cf.
Lk 22:54-62). Yet, when empowered by the Holy Spirit, they were transfixed by the truth of
Christ’s Gospel and inspired to proclaim it fearlessly. Emboldened, they exclaimed: repent,
be baptized, receive the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 2:37-38)! Grounded in the Apostles’ teaching, in
fellowship, and in the breaking of the bread and prayer (cf. Acts 2:42), the young Christian
community moved forward to oppose the perversity in the culture around them (cf. Acts
2:40), to care for one another (cf. Acts 2:44-47), to defend their belief in Jesus in the face of
hostility (cf Acts 4:33), and to heal the sick (cf. Acts 5:12-16). And in obedience to Christ’s
own command, they set forth, bearing witness to the greatest story ever told.”
• Pope Benedict XVI: “God shares himself as love in the Holy Spirit. What further
understanding might we gain from this insight? Love is the sign of the presence of the Holy
Spirit! Ideas or voices which lack love – even if they seem sophisticated or knowledgeable –
cannot be ‘of the Spirit’. Furthermore, love has a particular trait: far from being indulgent or
fickle, it has a task or purpose to fulfill: to abide. By its nature love is enduring. Again, dear
friends, we catch a further glimpse of how much the Holy Spirit offers our world: love which
dispels uncertainty; love which overcomes the fear of betrayal; love which carries eternity
within; the true love which draws us into a unity that abides!”
• Pope Benedict XVI: “These gifts of the Spirit – each of which, as Saint Francis de Sales
reminds us, is a way to participate in the one love of God – are neither prizes nor rewards.
They are freely given (cf. 1 Cor 12:11). And they require only one response on the part of the
receiver: I accept! Here we sense something of the deep mystery of being Christian. What
constitutes our faith is not primarily what we do but what we receive. After all, many generous
people who are not Christian may well achieve far more than we do. Friends, do you accept
being drawn into God’s Trinitarian life? Do you accept being drawn into his communion of
love?... In the end, life is not about accumulation. It is much more than success. To be truly
alive is to be transformed from within, open to the energy of God’s love.”
• Pope Benedict XVI: “This power, the grace of the Spirit, is not something we can merit or
achieve, but only receive as pure gift. God’s love can only unleash its power when it is
allowed to change us from within. We have to let it break through the hard crust of our
indifference, our spiritual weariness, our blind conformity to the spirit of this age. Only then
can we let it ignite our imagination and shape our deepest desires.”
• Pope Benedict XVI: “What does it mean to receive the ‘seal’ of the Holy Spirit? It means
being indelibly marked, inalterably changed, a new creation. For those who have received
this gift, nothing can ever be the same! Being ‘baptized’ in the one Spirit (cf. 1 Cor 12:13)
means being set on fire with the love of God. Being ‘given to drink’ of the Spirit means being
refreshed by the beauty of the Lord’s plan for us and for the world, and becoming in turn a
source of spiritual refreshment for others. Being ‘sealed with the Spirit’ means not being
afraid to stand up for Christ, letting the truth of the Gospel permeate the way we see, think
and act, as we work for the triumph of the civilization of love.”

7. Other Considerations
• The Fruit of Unity: The difference between Babal and Pentecost is as Teilhard de Chardin
says: “To be decentered from ourselves and recentered on God.” While a philosopher has
famously said that “Hell is other people,” the Christian filled with the Holy Spirit disagrees.
Rather, “in a certain sense they are my paradise because they permit me to be what alone I
could never be without becoming God myself.” As Cantalamessa writes, with the Holy Spirit,
“we no longer need to look at one another with envy and suspicion. Whatever I do not have
and others instead do have is also mine…in the body of Christ that which every member is
and does, he is and does it for everyone!”
• The Need to Thirst for the Spirit: “Are we thirsty for the Holy Spirit of do we have instead
an unacknowledged fear of him? We intuit that is if the Holy Spirit comes he cannot leave
everything in our existence as he finds it. He could even make us do ‘strange’ things that we
are not ready to accept. He has never left those upon whom he has come sedentary and
inactive. Whoever the Holy Spirit touches, the Holy Spirit changes!” (Cantalamessa)
• At Pentecost, the language of the Spirit – was not communicated with perfect diction – free
from the marks of human identity – but spoken in the familiar Galilean accent. God works in
collaboration with real people – who are filled with the Spirit to work on God’s behalf in their
own world.
• The outpouring of the HS is the connection to the dynamic power that enables the Church to
give effective witness to the living Jesus.
• “Often we look for extraordinary and emotional encounters with the Holy Spirit. Sometimes
we think that unless we experience a special feeling or perceive a supernatural phenomenon,
the Holy Spirit is not at work. Yet, Jesus shows us that the primary mode of operation
followed by the Holy Spirit is the same one he followed in his Incarnation: he turns normal
realities into vehicles of grace. The Holy Spirit acts in our lives powerfully through the
sacraments of the Church, through the preaching and teaching of the Church’s ministers, and
through our own prayer and reflection on the Scriptures. If we are to find the Holy Spirit in
these ordinary channels that Christ has established, he will readily fill our lives with the
extraordinary fruits of his action.” (Bartunek)
Recommended Resources
Benedictus: Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI, ed. by Peter John Cameron, OP. Magnificat,
2006.
John Bartunek, The Better Part: A Christ-Centered Resource for Personal Prayer, Hamden, CT:
Circle Press, 2007.
Raymond E. Brown, A Once-and-Coming Spirit at Pentecost, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,
1994.
Raniero Cantalamessa, The Mystery of Pentecost, trans. Glen S. Davis, Collegeville, MN:
Liturgical Press, 2001.
http://www.clerus.org/bibliaclerus/index_fra.html