OPTION 1: You a letter to someone you love. He left for another place and is very far away. You are waiting for an answer: two days, three days and weeks and no response from him. You start to worry about the letter you wrote. Did you write anything wrong? Did you write anything that could lead to misunderstanding? Sometimes you curse yourself and you hardly sleep anymore. The worry shows in your face. People around you start to ask what happen. Then one day the telephone rings and there is your friend and says: “Hi! How are you? Glad to hear your voice….peace….peace.” your mind shifts: from fear to joy and from worry to gladness.
We are celebrating today the Pentecost Sunday or the Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and the Blessed Virgin Mary by the Father through the Son. The apostles received the Holy Spirit in a special way. The gift that Christ had promised, after he was raised from the dead and even during His ministry, was given. Christ fulfilled His promise He did not fail His disciples. When he said it He really mean it. He is really faithful. His fidelity to His disciples is evident. He did not go to a court or lawyers in order to write and enforce contract. For us, it is the opposite. We promise but we have to put it into writing. We need a written document like land titles or deed of donation/sell and others. But Jesus is different. He gave us the Spirit of life without any written contract signed by Him and us.
Some of you may ask yourselves: “What is the origin of Pentecost in the Catholic Church?” According to the New Catholic Dictionary of 1929, the word Pentecost is from the Greek word ‘pentecostes’ which means “fiftieth.” This feast “commemorates, as what I have said awhile ago, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles and takes its name from the fact that it comes nearly fifty days after Easter. It was a Jewish festival and has been observed in the Catholic Church since the days of the apostles. It is often called Whitsunday (White Sunday) from the practice of giving solemn Baptism on that day in early centuries, the candidates being attired in white baptismal robes.”
Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC no 731) too said something about the Pentecost: “On the day of Pentecost when the seven weeks of Easter had come to an end, Christ’s Passover was fulfilled in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, manifested, given and communicated as a divine person: of His fullness, Christ the Lord, poured out the Holy Spirit in abundance (Acts 2:33-36).
The word ‘Spirit’ is coming from the Hebrew word ruah and Greek pneuma which means “breath.” Breath is like an air or a wind that without it we are dead and we could not live. In the Old Testament, the spirit is described as like the wind which is mysterious and wonderful. Nobody knows how the wind comes about and how it originates. But nobody could doubt its existence when it is there. Nobody can ignore its effect and force. It can break, uproot, propels clouds and seeds and dusts, devastates and fertilizes soil. The Holy Spirit is even more mysterious. Often enough we do not realize that He is there but He is at works in our hearts and sooner or later we will notice His effects in us. He is the breath of life that without whom we cannot live. How important breathing is we realize when we, for the first time, how real breathing problems. Like a heavy bronchitis that without the air we get so many problems, the same with the Holy Spirit that without Him our life has no direction. We have to know that the person who works and helps us in the Church is the Holy Spirit but we don’t recognize Him in the Church and in our Christian life.
But not only apostles received the Holy Spirit. You and I did receive too. Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians says clearly: “Do you know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? (3:16). Our problem is that we are not aware to the fact that the Holy Spirit is right inside us now. So nothing changes in our lives. Unlike the apostles, when they received the Holy Spirit, after 50 days, the Holy Spirit greatly changed all of them.
Therefore, we have to look for the Holy Spirit within us, discover and find Him. We are like a torch or a cassette recorder or radio. Inside the radio are batteries which are full of power. But if we do not know what batteries are and we never turn on the switch off the torch or radio and then we never get light or music.
If we need the Holy Spirit in us, the Spirit of God needs us too. According to Fr. Vima Dasan, SJ in his homily book, His Word Lives, that the Holy Spirit of God needs us, His Church, to cooperate with Him in the transformation of the world. It is not enough to have faith in the power of the Spirit, wherever there is genuine faith, it must blossom into works. We must first work to transform our own churches into united, loving, forgiving and sharing communities. Our parishes must become truly the Body of Christ in which all our individual gifts are put at the service of the community. Having set out own house in order, we then reached out beyond the narrow confines of our particular churches.
Make sure that the grace of the Holy Spirit is always burning within us.