Pentecost Sunday - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2021

Egypt has successfully brokered a truce between Israel and Hamas. The big question now remains, in the light of recent history: Will the truce last? On the evidence of TV footage of the destruction inflicted, overwhelmingly in Gaza, and the carnage suffered by both sides, though especially by Palestine, one wonders what benefit is conceivably in it for anyone. Obviously, the clear winners are the arms manufacturers and the countries that sell them — though so little is usually heard of them. The ones that suffer most, as usual, are the poorest.

Will our world ever learn? Does our world want to learn? Or is the inevitability of war just lazily accepted; and the committed search for non-violent solutions to conflicts abandoned as idealistic, even naively utopian. Wonderfully, though ineffectually, the Popes we have had in the seventy-five years since the Second World War have, one after the other, clearly and loudly condemned as unjust every international armed conflict that has taken place. Sadly, theirs have often been lone voices.

Our Church has a different vision of possibilities of human community and mutual co-operation than have most other world institutions. As St Paul, speaking from his own experience, was able to remark in today’s Second Reading taken from his Letter to the Corinthians: “In the one Spirit we were all baptised, Jews as well as Greeks, slaves as well as citizens, and one Spirit was given to us all to drink.”

St John took us even further back than our experience of Church to the reality of Trinity. The short passage that we had this morning from his Gospel presented a wonderful communal interaction on the part of all three persons of the Trinity of total mutual giving of themselves and receiving from each other. Jesus noted, for example, that “Everything the Father has is mine”, and then “All [the Spirit] tells you will be taken from what is mine”.  Elsewhere it is made clear from John's Gospel that the mutual, two-way love of Father and Son itself gives rise to a tangible spirit of joyful love, the third of the persons of God, who, as Jesus pointed out in today’s passage, “issues from the Father”.

But God does not stop there. This Spirit of joyful love is inherently creative, indeed, the only truly creative power there is. The communal inner life of the Trinity flows out into our universe through their work of on-going creation, culminating in and channelled through the action of the Spirit. Any wonder that humanity, created by the Trinity in the image of the same Trinity, is radically made also for community and mutual love! Even God celebrates what had been going on since the first moment of the Big Bang. We could say that that is what today’s Feast of Pentecost was about. It was a symbolic, sacramental kind of celebration of what God had begun with the creation of the world. How sad it is that most of us have not yet woken up to the wonder!

Today’s Gospel passage tells us more. Speaking to the newly-forming Church, Jesus also made the point that, “The Spirit of Truth will lead you to the complete truth”. Indeed, Jesus spoke of the Spirit’s influence on human consciences, assuring us that the Spirit “will tell you of the things to come” — things like how to resolve the so-far intractable problems at the basis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Doctrines, commandments, even familiarity with the Gospels, are relevant to solutions. But they are rarely enough. The intricacies of human problems can be helplessly confusing. Consciences must be brought to bear. Beyond that we usually need discernment inspired by the Spirit of God to know “the complete truth”. The Spirit is the expert negotiator the world needs — in the big things and the small.