Pentecost Sunday - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2014

Pope Francis will be praying today with President Simon Peres of Israel and President Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine. Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople will be there with them. The Bishops have asked the Catholics of Australia to join them in their earnest prayer for a just peace between the two nations. Throughout the long history of the human race, unity and peace have proved tragically elusive. All three Readings today cast light on the problem.

We know well the first Reading from the Acts of Apostles. Luke framed his story against the background of the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel. That story had presented an original human uniformity shattered into irreconcilable difference and diversity, symbolised by people no longer able to understand or to communicate with each other.

Luke told a story of the outpouring of the Spirit climaxing Jesus’ history-changing redemptive death and resurrection. That redeeming work of Christ enabled people, despite their differences, to hear and to understand the Apostles proclaiming the marvels of God.  Luke did not explicitly list those marvels of God; but in the following chapters of his book he presented wonderful examples of the Apostles’ message. He showed them insistently proclaiming the constantly offered forgiveness of the ever-loving God and the possibility of permanent unity and peace.

In the Second Reading, St Paul illustrated how the Spirit was at work in the early Churches of Corinth and elsewhere. He clearly made the point that the unity made possible by the action of the Spirit was anything but uniformity or conformity. Rather, it was built on the fascinating beauty of diversity: always the same Spirit, working in all sorts of different ways in different people. When the Spirit of God is at work, life is not in monochrome but in technicolour.  With all our differences – religion or ethnicity, social status or whatever, baptism introduces us all into the wonderful world of the Spirit of God. In the one Spirit we were all baptised – soaked, saturated, drenched – Jews as well as Greeks, slaves as well as citizens, and one Spirit was given to us all to drink – in order to satisfy our deepest thirsts and to inebriate us with the marvels of God. [I wonder why people are afraid of difference. Does fear of difference explain why people respond so heartlessly to those seeking asylum on our shores?]

Finally there was the familiar Reading from John’s Gospel: Jesus, filled with the Spirit, among the disciples, wishing them peace, offering forgiveness – unsolicited and unconditional.  More than that, he offered trust; and the ability, through their acceptance of the Spirit, to bring the message and the unbelievable experience of forgiveness to whoever would accept it.

Speaking for myself, I have found that my readiness and ability to accept and to forgive grow as I learn to believe and to accept, finally and without struggle, Jesus’ boundless love for me and his relentless forgiveness. My sense of that forgiveness has been accompanied by the hesitant recognition that, when he looks at me, judgment is the last thing on his mind (just as those useless disciples discovered when he came among them). I believe that when Jesus looks at us, with all our differences and diversity, he sees not our guilts but the deep inner wounds and the unfulfilled emptiness from which our too-frequent destructive interactions come. Seeing our brokenness, he cannot stop himself from responding immediately with compassion and healing love.

In order to enable us to spread the message of the forgiveness of God, the most marvellous of the marvels of God, as he did with the Apostles, Jesus breathes into us his Holy Spirit. What a wonderful image of gentleness, intimacy and trust that is! I think that John is also telling us that the creative energy of the Spirit, who breathed over the chaotic waters at creation and shaped the world, now takes the form of forgiveness so that true human community may finally emerge.

May you all enjoy a Spirit-filled Feast of Pentecost.