Pentecost Sunday

See Commentary on John 20:19-23

Homily 1 - 2005

Today’s gospel is so encouraging. The newly risen Christ says to his disciples: Receive the holy Spirit: for those whose sins you forgive they are forgiven; for those whose sins you retain they  are retained. He is telling us in so many words: Be empowered; Confront the destructiveness of the sin of the world. Earlier, Jesus had referred to the Spirit as the Spirit of truth, who would prove the world wrong about sin, and justice and judgment. He saw the Spirit as the one who would provide the insight to recognise justice and to name its opposite – sin; and in so doing to prove the world wrong in what it takes as read: the world as it takes shape in our institutions, their assumptions and their operations. It is a message we all need to take to heart as we live together in our world and in our Church.

In today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Luke wrote: we hear them preaching in our own language about the marvels of God. Luke connected the power of the Spirit to the capacity to hear and to speak the same language, to communicate the one message of Jesus to every culture... and is so doing to bring the world into unity through dialogue: hearing as well as speaking.

In the second reading, Paul was dealing not with the world stage, but with the local Christian community and its problems of speaking the same language. He envisaged a community of great diversity: There is a variety of gifts, and rejoiced in that varied giftedness.

However, earlier in the same epistle he had confronted the situation where there was also a variety of  factions: some for Apollos, some for Peter, some for Paul, some (the theological sophisticates, no doubt!) for Christ. Paul saw the emphasis on those differences as basically unhelpful. “What are we really on about?” he effectively asked, “Don’t we all love God? Can’t we accept that we will see some things differently yet still respect each other’s integrity and not, in our insecurity, seek to undermine and demonise those who disagree with us?”

Later in the epistle, Paul confronted what he saw as truly destructive: the fact of people being treated differently on the basis of their social standing: (Specifically those well-off were insensitive to those less so). To celebrate Eucharist, and not to do anything about addressing that issue, was for him to make a mockery of Eucharist. For Paul, what mattered were not external irrelevancies but hearts open in practical love. In fact, he saw that the greatest gift of the Spirit, and the proof of the presence of the Spirit, in the desire and the capacity to love: that is, to respect, to listen, to speak and to serve. History shows that unity has always been a knotty problem within the Christian community. It is still a real difficulty in the Church today. I find it a challenge myself – to genuinely respect those I disagree with.

Jesus had said earlier in John’s gospel: God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, so that all who believe in him may not be lost but may have eternal life. God’s initiative in face of the sin in the world, the sin of the world, was not to condemn or to punish, but to send Jesus, the truth-speaker, the one who loved par excellence, so that all who would open themselves to him and to his message, (that is, all who would follow the truth in love) might enjoy eternal life, might live authentically, be truly alive. In the process they would be saved from untruth and half-truth: and, along with that, they would be saved also from the loneliness and the destructiveness of life without love.

Let us listen again to the risen Jesus as, filled with hope and anticipation, he commissions and empowers us: As the Father sent me, so I send you. Receive the holy Spirit. For those whose sins you forgive they are forgiven... for those whose sins you retain they are retained. Effectively he is saying: “The mission now is yours..  Speak the truth, love the truth, be real, live in love. Accept your power to confront a world wrapped in darkness’’.

And yet the haunting possibility is also there that, if we hold back from our mission, fearful and without love, our world remains engulfed in its sin. Well might we pray: “Come, holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in us the fire of your love.”

Homily 2 - 2008

The Gospel we have just read told us: The doors were closed in the room where the disciples were for fear of the Jews. It was the same fear that had led Peter to deny he ever knew Jesus, and the other ten to clear out and leave him to be executed alone. But their fear wasn’t the whole story. Really, they had loved him, too. Their friendship had been genuine. But, under pressure, fear took over, and they had abandoned him – except for a few of the women. And then, the discovery of the empty tomb – no body! Whether that discovery increased their fear and panic, we don’t know. All that the text said was that fear still gripped them. Have you ever sinned seriously? Have you ever felt the fear of God rejecting you? …. You would have some idea of how the disciples felt.

And then, Jesus came and stood among them… Not a word of condemnation, not a word of recrimination – just: Peace be with you. And a second time: Peace be with you. Have you ever experienced God getting across to you the message: Peace be with you? - without a word of condemnation? or recrimination? with no mention at all of sin? ... That’s salvation! That’s what Jesus came to assure us of… That’s why the Father sent him. We’re such slow learners that we needed to kill him first, and then to hear him saying to us, simply: Peace be with you.

Earlier in the Gospel, we were told: God so loved the world so that he sent his only son, so that all who believe in him might not die, but might have eternal life. God loves this world of you, and me, and them… sinners! All God wants is not his pound of flesh, his revenge, but our salvation – that we might be truly alive.

To confirm the point, Jesus breathed on them, just as the creating God had breathed on the Adam of clay and made of him a living person. Jesus clarified what he was doing. He said: Receive the Holy Spirit – (The Spirit is the one who has taken over the role of the historical Jesus in the world since Jesus returned to the Father.) Just as Jesus, while he was around, had been the creating, loving God-made-flesh, now the Spirit is the love of God abroad and at work in the world today… indeed, there, within our own hearts – if only we would wake up to it.

Then Jesus said: As the Father sent me, so I now send you. Filled with, alive with, saturated in the love of God, the Holy Spirit, there in your hearts, go into the world -  the world of sinners like yourselves – and say: Peace be with you. Love people; respect people; live justly; set them free from their fear, from their despair and their emptiness. Set them free from their sin. Bring them peace, through your own love for them.

Not everyone will respond favourably to us – as they didn’t to Jesus. Some can’t face the price of changing, of growing, of breaking free. But others will. So, out we go … not alone and unsupported, but together, with each other, and, not just with each other, but, more wonderfully, with the Spirit of the loving God alive in us!

Homily 3 - 2011

The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the risen Jesus, is simply the loving of God personified – it is the love stance, the love energy, the love power of God, abroad in the world. Today’s gospel showed the Spirit wonderfully exemplified in the risen Jesus.The first words of the murdered one were simply, Peace be with you. Jesus’ saving response to the savage hostility of the whole web of people complicit in his murder was simply to offer peace.  

More than that, he offered to the disciples the Spirit, the love-energy, that empowered him. He invited them to open themselves to that energy, that Spirit, to open their hearts to it, to receive it into themselves: He breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit – receive the love-energy of God personified. Only then did he move on to say that, once saturated in that Spirit of God, if they forgave people’s sins, those people would indeed be freed up and released from their sin, their hostility: Whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven.

To the extent that disciples would forgive, they would share with Jesus in the mission on which the Father had sent him: to set the world free from the hostility that twists and distorts the hearts of everyone, and that fuels the world’s never-ending, all too predictable, cycle of violence: As the Father sent me, so I send you. That is: Go out and forgive; forgive those who hurt you, those who are not yet sorry, those who, refusing forgiveness, may never be sorry – just as I did.

I think it worth noting a few points, because forgiveness is a tricky business. Left to our own devices, I am not sure that we can forgive, [genuinely forgive, that is]. To forgive someone who has hurt us deeply can feel like compromising our personal dignity, and surrendering our sense of self-worth. Perhaps even harder is to forgive someone who has deeply hurt one whom we love deeply or for whom we feel responsible. It can seem like betraying them.

Does God command us or expect us to forgive? I don’t think that true adult love commands or lays expectations on anyone. God will love me whether I forgive or not. But, in loving us, God offers us the possibility to forgive, and the gentle invitation to forgive – because, until we forgive, we are not free. We remain fixated on, and our attitudes remain dependent on, the one who has hurt us. And unaddressed hurt turns into resentment, and resentment into bitterness, and true happiness and peace elude us. And, perhaps, when we forgive someone who has deeply hurt one we love, we may find, to our surprise, that we have not betrayed our loved one at all. Nor have we compromised our personal dignity but found it.

When God invites us to freedom by offering us the possibility to forgive those who have hurt us, God invites, not from outside, as it were, but from inside. Remember the order of things in today’s Gospel. First, and absolutely essential, because without it, we’re powerless, Jesus’ unconditional offer of peace – twice. Then, he urged them: Receive the Holy Spirit: receive my love, my total forgiveness, open your hearts to it, let yourselves be soaked in it, and gradually transformed by it. Then, and only then, see what happens.  

As we let ourselves be loved by God, as we receive God’s love personified, we slowly become like God. To forgive becomes possible. More than that, we begin to notice that to forgive becomes desirable. To the extent that our forgiving happens, we become free and our world begins to change. Jesus’ mission to save the world gains momentum.

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.

Homily 5 - 2017

St Luke told us that devout men living in Jerusalem from every nation under heaven were bewildered when they heard the group of apostles that first Pentecost morning preaching in their own language about the marvels of God. I wonder if the apostles were all saying the same thing, or whether John was saying one thing, Peter another, James something else. The marvels of God! If you had been one of the apostles, which marvel of God would you have wanted to shout about, in your own language, to the assembled crowd? As you are sitting here this evening, at the end of a long day, at the end of an eventful week, what is it about God that has got you away from your warm lounge room, from your TV set, or whatever, that has fascinated you so much that you want to join with the rest of us and give thanks to God?

What had struck the apostles about the risen Jesus and about what he had shared with them during the few occasions he had been somehow present with them? If we take our lead from St John’s Gospel, I think it would have been the fact that, after his lonely death, after their abject abandonment of him, their cowardice and utter loss of faith, while still overwhelmed by their own sense of danger and caring only for themselves and their skin, he had appeared to them and wished them Peace. He had taken no notice at all of their desertion, their sin. He still loved them. In fact, as today’s Gospel made clear, he saw the whole meaning of his mission, entrusted to him by his Father, as proclaiming to the world, as bringing to the world, the forgiveness of God. The God of Jesus is God who forgives sin, who forgives the still unrepentant, who yearns to give every sinner another chance, and another chance, endlessly [seventy-times seven!]. Jesus revealed a God who is not interested in punishment but in healing – in healing the inner brokenness, loneliness, self-hatred, or whatever, that leads people to sin. God’s judgment is mercy.

God is all of one piece, utterly consistent, no favourites. God is love. Love is what God is. God has no more trouble loving Pope Francis than loving Donald Trump, or the leaders of ISIS; loving you, than loving me. God does not force forgiveness down anyone’s throat. People need to accept it for it to do them any good. In fact, what else is salvation if not accepting God’s love, responding with our own as best we can, and entering into the divine dance?

That is the marvel of God that I want to preach. No surprise! It is the mission entrusted to us all by the risen Jesus: As the Father sent me, so am I sending you. It is precisely the reason why he breathed on us at our Confirmation, and repeatedly invites us to Receive the Holy Spirit and empowers us with the commission, Whose sins you forgive are forgiven. How do you forgive sins? The same way that God does – by loving people, by loving sinners. We can. And we do not need to close our eyes to their sin. People sin because deep in their bones they do not believe, do not know, that they are loved. The Church is meant to be the community where we encourage each other and allow ourselves to be encouraged. The Spirit gifts us all differently; but those gifts are simply the diverse personalized, practical ways we express our love for others, our service of each other.

Our problem is never God. It is ourselves. We do not trust God. We somehow prefer to keep control of our own outcomes, our own destiny, to save ourselves. As well, the culture in which we live and that reinforces our mutual competitiveness and hostility, deadening us to our sinfulness, presents another massive problem.

Quite a mission to be entrusted with! But we are not alone. We share with Jesus’ in his mission.