Pentecost Sunday – May 11, 2008 – Blessed Sacrament
This wonderful feast brings our fifty-day celebration of Easter to its completion and its climax. The Church which had come to be in and because of its faith in Christ’s resurrection receives now the power from on high that Jesus had promised, the Holy Spirit. Our three NT readings spell out dimensions of that gift to the new People of God.
The description of the first Pentecost is a miniature of the story that the whole of the Acts of the Apostles tells. Tongues of fire descend upon the apostles and enable them to speak in such a way as to be understood in the various languages represented in Jerusalem on that Jewish feast day. Already the Church is catholic: speaking all the earth’s languages. The linguistic chaos that followed the building of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis is overcome, not, however, through the restoration of a single language but rather through the unity of message: “we hear them speaking in our own languages of the mighty acts of God.” It was the single message of the death and resurrection of Christ that now would make one people out of many peoples. This announces from the beginning that the Church’s unity will not be purchased at the price of her diversity, that the Church’s catholic character will be redemptive integration of the diversity of languages, cultures, peoples, nations that make up our human race.
The passage we have heard from St. John’s Gospel describes the same Spirit coming now as the peace which the risen Christ bestows on his disciples. (more…)
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