Pentecost Sunday
June 8, 2014
4 PM & 12 Noon Liturgies
J.A. Loftus, S.J.
Today we celebrate the third act in the great drama of our
salvation. The church has followed liturgically St. Luke’s division
of the Great Mystery into three separate feasts: Easter itself; 40
days later, the ascension; and then ten days later, today, the feast
that for us celebrates the sending of the Holy Spirit into our world.
It is the Great Mystery that will remain for all time just that,
the Great Mystery. The questions raised throughout these fifty
days remain very much alive and well thousands of years later.
What exactly does resurrection mean? How can Jesus be with us
until the end of time, and yet leave us in an ascension moment?
And what does the Holy Spirit mean or actually do? Prayerful
ponderings are in order. But don’t feel too bad if you don’t think
you have finally understood it all. No one ever has. There are just
“stabs” at comprehension down through the ages.
Stanley Morrow, S.J. was one of the Jesuits’ most gracious, oldworld, iconoclasts. He taught New Testament at Weston College
and then at Boston College for most of his life. He once said it was
his mission to minimize the damage his students were going to do
to God’s people.
It was recently related to me that one day in class explaining
Pentecost he was asked what exactly the Holy Spirit was. His
answer: The Holy Spirit is the personification of the absence of
Jesus.
There! That should make it all clearer for us. No? If you
think about it a while, it actually might seem to grow on you as a
brilliant insight. Then again, it might make you even more
confused. I use it today to re-assure us all of the baldly
incomprehensible nature of the Mystery we celebrate.
But then again, maybe it has never been a question of
understanding. Maybe it’s just about realizing something as if for
the first time, and then just celebrating it.
Did the first followers of Jesus understand any more than we
what was really happening? I doubt it. In John’s gospel today,
when the Holy Spirit is given to them, they delight and are touched
almost magically. But do they understand something? If they do,
why does John have them one week later cowering behind closed
and locked doors again in fear? (Remember St. John does not
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divide the Great Mystery into three temporally distinct events. It
all happens on one day, the first day of the week, on Easter
Sunday.)
The disciples are delighted and imbued with power; they sing
and dance and bless God; they forgive each other’s weakness and
sin; then they get afraid again. Sound familiar?
What makes them so bold? Surely not that they understand.
Rather, it is that they let themselves for at least a moment, be
captured by a God beyond imagining who says repeatedly to them:
I love you.
Distinguished theologian Karl Rahner put it this way (and I
have updated some of the masculine language here). What
Pentecost is really about is this: “God is [now] ours. God has not
merely given us a gift, a gift created and finite like ourselves. No,
God has given us his whole being without reserve; God has given us
the clarity of God’s knowledge, the freedom of God’s love, and the
bliss of God’s Trinitarian life. God has given us himself. And God’s
name is Holy Spirit.”
That’s what those first disciples are celebrating. That’s what
we are invited again to celebrate today. But remember, no one
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really understands what is happening or how it is happening. It is
just reality. Dance with it!
I came across an image last week on the Internet. I hope
some of you may have seen it. It spoke to me of just a small part of
what today, Pentecost, is about. It is a picture from the Hubble
telescope high above the earth. NASA calls it the most colorful and
revealing image ever taken by the Hubble.
Just last week, for the first time, an image was revealed from
the Hubble’s ultra violet coverage of distant galaxies. NASA called
it part of its Ultra Deep Field project. It shows ten thousand
galaxies beyond ours; some are just forming, some are dying, some
are spinning out hundreds of new stars; still others are faint. The
colors of the dance are spectacular. There are red galaxies, the
most distant; there are big blue galaxies, those spewing out new
stars by the minute, it seems. And there are all the other colors of
our rainbow. The universe is celebrating with us this Pentecost.
And the universe has been celebrating for thousands of light years
before us.
We just sing an ancient prayer again today and rejoice: Come
Holy Spirit. Renew the face of the earth. Renew the face of the
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universe. Renew our joy, in Pope Francis’ words, the Evangelii
Gaudium, the joy of the Good News. We sing despite our lack of
understanding.
Forgive our continuing fears. Be with us, and around us, and
in us as we dance with you. Happy Easter! Happy Ascension!
Happy Pentecost! Peace!
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