Pentecost

  

Today is Pentecost Sunday, traditionally termed "the birthday of the Church," commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit  on the apostles assembled in Jerusalem after Jesus' ascension.

“I hope for a new Pentecost in the Church by directing her children to the interior direction of the Holy Spirit,“ wrote Isaac Hecker at the time of the First Vatican Council. Almost a century later, in preparation for the Second Vatican Council, Pope Saint John XXIII prayed God to “Renew your wonders in this our day, as by a new Pentecost.”

Until modern times, Pentecost was observed very grandly as one of the greatest festivals of the Church’s calendar, on a par with Easter. It had an octave equal to Easter’s and even had its own Saturday morning vigil (complete with a blessing of baptismal water like at Easter). At one time, Kings and Queens were expected to wear their crowns publicly on Pentecost. About all that’s left of that now in Europe is a 3-day holiday weekend. And here in the U.S. we don’t even have that!

 

The Old Testament antecedent of Pentecost is Shavuot ("Weeks," celebrated seven weeks after Passover). Originally, it was a festival for settled farmers, celebrating the late spring, early summer harvest. Whereas at Passover, seven weeks earlier, only unleavened bread had been used, at Shavuot, 50 days later, ordinary bread was offered in the form of fully leavened loaves. It was to celebrate this 50th-day ("Pentecost") festival that devout Jews from every nation under heaven came as pilgrims to Jerusalem, in the familiar story from the Acts of the Apostles. 

By then, however, the agricultural festival had also been historicized, and Shavuot had become a commemoration of the historical covenant at Mount Sinai, the giving of the 10 commandments, which (according to Exodus) had happened just about seven weeks after the exodus from Egypt.  Just as summer fulfills the promise of spring, the covenant at Mount Sinai fulfilled the promise of Israelite nationhood, of which the exodus had been but the beginning. Likewise, the coming of the Holy Spirit fulfilled the promise of the resurrection, transforming the disciples from fearful followers of a now absent Jesus into faith-filled witnesses empowered to transform the whole world.

The Golden Legend (c. 1260) says that, as Sinai's covenant was given in fire, so was the Holy Spirit, "the law at the top of a high mountain and the Spirit in the upper room. By this it is implied that the Holy Spirit himself is the perfection of the whole law because the fullness of the law is love."

 

In our current calendar, Pentecost marks the transition from Easter to Ordinary Time, the time of fulfillment, the time of the Church, the time when the promise of Christ’s resurrection should be reflected in our ordinary lives. As his Church, we worship the Risen Lord, now ascended to heaven and seated at his Father’s right hand. Meanwhile, as his Church here on earth, we continue Christ’s work in the world.

 

And there remains much work to be done.  At Pentecost the Holy Spirit symbolically repaired the division of the human race, when strangers from every nation heard the apostles speaking in their own tongue.  But division very much remains and rules the world right now - both in politics and religion. Whether recognized in political terms as polarization or otherwise imagined, the challenge to repair the multiple divisions among us remains central to the Church's mission in our present predicament.

 

We will be empowered to do this by the Risen Lord’s parting gift of the Holy Spirit to his Church. In another era when preparing for Confirmation, we memorized the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit – wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and the fear of the Lord. We call them the gifts of the Holy Spirit, because we don’t produce them on our own. They are given to us – to transform us into true children of God and to enable us to live in a new way. The results of that transformation, the visible effects we experience of the Holy Spirit active in our lives are what we call the fruits of the Holy Spirit. We memorized them too - charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity.

 

As a young man growing up in the Jacksonian era, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, the future founder of the Paulist Fathers gravitated first to politics as the obvious vehicle for the renewal of society. By his mid-twenties, however, Hecker had become a Catholic and now envisioned the renewal of society in religious terms - in terms of openness to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and the effects of the Holy Spirit’s gifts in all aspects of life. “The radical and adequate remedy for all the evils of our age, and the source of all true progress,” Hecker confidently claimed, “consist in increased attention and fidelity to the action of the Holy Spirit in the soul.” [The Church and the Age, 1887].

 

That’s how the promise of the resurrection is fulfilled and expresses its effect in our ordinary lives. Pentecost ritualizes annually what happens weekly with the transition from Sunday to Monday. From our Sunday celebration around the unleavened bread which has become the body of our Risen Lord, we are sent forth, filled with the Holy Spirit, to renew the face of the earth as the Risen Christ’s permanent presence in the leavened bread of our daily lives in the world.