Pentecost 2022
Acts 2:1-11; 1Cor 12:3-7,12-13; John 20:19-23
Last Monday, if you happened to be at Mass, you would have heard how St. Paul asked the Ephesian converts whether they received the Holy Spirit when they were baptised, and how they replied, in effect, “Eh? You what? Never heard of a Holy Spirit.”
It would not be a huge exaggeration to say that, today, many Christians are in a similar situation. Everyone has heard of the Holy Spirit, but how many are conscious of having received the Holy Spirit? Yet each one of us who has been baptised received the Holy Spirit at our Baptism, and most of us again at our Confirmation, a reality which can be obscured by the semi-heretical practice of delaying Confirmation until the teenage years, and treating it as a sort of Catholic bar-mitzvah, or even a passing out parade. It cannot be emphasised enough that Confirmation is NOT something that we do for God—re-affirming our faith—but something which God does for us, renewing His gift of the Holy Spirit.
In fact, the Holy Spirit is constantly coming upon us. If that were not the case then, as St. Paul points out to the Christians of Corinth, we wouldn’t even be able to say “Jesus is Lord”. The Holy Spirit is the driving force of our Christian lives, without whom those lives would not exist. The Spirit is literally our inspiration, our inbreathing of God. All our faith, our prayer, our good works are the work of the Holy Spirit, and it is important that we be aware of that.
The outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was accompanied by spectacular signs, the wind and the flame, and followed by spectacular results, as the preaching of the Gospel was understood by people of every language. This was the kick-start given to the Church by the Holy Spirit, and it would be wrong to expect similar signs, similar results today; though I can’t help feeling tht anyone who can read that list of nations without stumbling must have the gift of tongues.
And yet in one way, those spectacular results do continue to arise, for the Gospel has indeed been preached in every language and to very nation under heaven. Not every nation has accepted it, and we may feel that the West, having once accepted it, is now busily engaged in throwing it off. Nonetheless, it would be true to say that, in every nation, there are some who, having heard the Gospel, have been so filled by the Holy Spirit as to live by it. Enver Hoxha, for instance, the Albanian dictator, once claimed that he would make his country the first fully atheistic nation. Hoxha is long dead, the Church survives, and the most famous and honoured Albanian is not Enver Hoxha but St. Mother Teresa.
Futhermore, the faith survives often in the face of bitter persecution. I correspond with a young man in Pakistan, who often confirms (if you will pardon the pun) the suffering of Christians there, and particularly of Christian girls, who are regularly kidnapped and forced into conversion to Islam and into marriage to elderly men. In recent weeks, the media have reported the arrest of the 90 year old Cardinal Zen for his support of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, whilst a bishop in mainland China has disappeared, presumably into detention.
It is the Holy Spirit, poured out upon the apostles at Pentecost, and upon us at Baptism and Confirmation, who enables people of every tongue to hold firm under imprisonment and torture. It is the same Holy Spirit who inspires tiny groups of Christians to remain faithful in the midst of unpromising surroundings. The Pope has recently welcomed a delegation from Mongolia, where Christians are numbered only in thousands, and has named their bishop as a cardinal.
Finally, let us not forget that, even at the birth of the Church, the outpouring of the Spirit was not always spectacular. Today’s Gospel records an earlier, much gentler giving of the Holy Spirit, as the risen Christ literally breathes the Spirit into the apostles on Easter Sunday evening. What matters to us, as to the apostles, is not signs and wonders but the presence and bestowal of the Spirit, whose presence we celebrate and desire today, but also every day of our lives.
