Pentecost 2021
Acts 2:1-11; 1Cor 12:3-7, 12-13; John 20: 19-23
I think that you need the gift of tongues to be able to pronounce the various nations who heard the Pentecost proclamation: Medes, Elamites, Phrygians, Cappadocians, Cretans, and so on. I remember at the Diocesan Youth Centre a young man wading valiantly through all the names and being rewarded with a round of applause.
What is the gift of tongues? At Pentecost it was, it seems, a miraculous gift of spontaneous translation, by which the various language groups all heard the preaching of the apostles in their own native tongue. Elsewhere in the New Testament it appears to have a different meaning which I have never been able to fathom, but which has influenced the Charismatic Renewal.
The Charismatic movement has exerted considerable influence within the Church during the last half century or so, though I have to confess that it has never appealed to me. Exuberance is not generally part of my make up unless I am watching football or cricket, and my approach to worship is rather more staid. If I am expected to clap along to a hymn, my response tends to be to thrust my hands into the sleeves of my alb.
Consequently, I am relieved that the Pentecost liturgy always includes the Gospel of Easter Sunday evening, despite the confusion which this sometimes causes. I am more comfortable personally with the gentle Easter Sunday bestowal of the Holy Spirit than with its more spectacular Pentecost manifestation.
What happened on Easter Sunday evening? The risen Christ appeared to the frightened apostles in the Upper Room and breathed the Holy Spirit into them, giving them the power to forgive sins, and preparing them for their mission. Thus their fears were banished; they were made ready for more encounters with the risen Lord; and they were enabled to enter that period of intense prayer, in company with Our Lady, which had its fulfilment in the Pentecost event.
There is more than one way in which the Holy Spirit comes upon us and into us. The apostles encountered the Holy Spirit in these two profoundly different manifestations--in the gentle breathing of Easter, and in the powerful wind and flame of Pentecost—for two different purposes.
We too will receive the Spirit in different ways at different times. Indeed, we have already done so, or we would not be reading the Scriptures and attempting to explore their meaning. As St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “There is a variety of gifts, but always the same Spirit...The particular way in which the Spirit is given to each person is for a good purpose”.
It has sometimes been claimed, often with a degree of cynicism, that the Holy Spirit has been the forgotten member of the Holy Trinity. If there is truth in that statement it is largely because the Holy Spirit is difficult to envisage. We have pictorial minds, with which we can form a limited image of the Father (we know what a father looks like) and of the Son (we know what a son looks like, and we probably have a definite mental picture of THE SON) but the only physical manifestations of the Holy Spirit have been as a dove, a rushing wind, and tongues of flame: it is difficult to relate to a blast of wind.
I believe though that there is more fiction than reality in our alleged neglect of the Holy Spirit. We have always made the Sign of the Cross, invoking all three persons of the Trinity, and we have done the same in the “Glory be...” Meetings and gatherings have always begun with the prayer to the Holy Spirit (“Come Holy Spirit...”) and in the Infants I learned to belt out all the verses of “Come Holy Ghost”, admittedly not always accurately: “Thy sacred wing” became “thy Saint Credwing” and I heard “ne’er decays” as “Mary’s case” fixing in my mind a picture of Our Lady sitting on her suitcase, awaiting the arrival of the taxi which would take her to the station at the beginning of her holiday.
So the Holy Spirit has always been part of our life in Christ. Had that not been so, as St. Paul points out, we would have no such life. Whether spectacularly as at Pentecost, or gently as on Easter Sunday, the Spirit has come and does come to us. Let us pray today for a deeper awareness of the Spirit’s presence.
