Pentecost Sunday

Homily 1 - 2006

Did you notice how Luke put it in the first reading? Each of us hears them in our own native language!

And then Paul made the point that baptism makes us one in Christ, but the Spirit ensures our individuality, our unique giftedness, and thus enriches and contributes to our common life as the Body of Christ in the world.

We struggle with diversity – in the secular world and in the Church.

Our nation struggles with cultural and ethnic diversity. We insist that we decide who comes here, irrespective of their need for asylum, for survival, or for a decent life. We see being different as being somehow inferior.

We truly struggle to look at Aboriginal Australians as sharing the same human dignity and to interact with them respectfully in the light of our shared humanity.

We struggle with political differences, and seek to impose our particular ideology by weight of numbers or economic pressure or astuteness at lobbying.

Our Church struggles with diversity – at times frightened of the individual conscience, of diverse theological leanings or sometimes even personal preferences.

No one can do our growing for us. We can’t inherit human or Christian maturity. Each of us has to start from scratch. So at any one time in the Church there are some who are mature, some still quite immature and most of us somewhere in between.

Our growth as unique human persons and as disciples of Jesus is the specialty of the Holy Spirit.

Paul said in one of his letters: The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given us. That Spirit is precisely the energy who enables and empowers and enriches us to love unconditionally – to love others as unique, as different, even as enemies.

Group-think is not a sign of the presence of the Spirit. Group love! That’s different. That’s the possibility. But it’s always a struggle. We are born focussed on our own needs; and the more insecure we are, the more we get stuck there and the more we are rattled by difference.

Jesus breathed on the disciples. He handed on to them the Spirit that had enlivened him – the Spirit that empowered him to say Peace be with you to the men who had denied and deserted him, and did not understand him.

The sin of the world expresses itself in the unwillingness of people to love - to love God, the source of truth, justice, beauty and love, to love themselves and to understand and to respect their own dignity, and to love others and to respect their human dignity, always, despite the differences.

Empowered by the Spirit, Jesus broke the stranglehold of sin on the world. Breathing the same Spirit on us, he empowers us to engage with the sin of the world, not in our strength but in our vulnerability - the vulnerability that is the hallmark of genuine love. We can hold back, of course, frightened of our vulnerability.

The world’s future is entrusted to us: For those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; for those whose sins you retain, they are retained.

We greeted the gospel today: Come Holy Spirit; fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in us the fire of your love. A wonderful note on which to bring the extended feast of Easter to an end!

Homily 2 - 2009

In today's First Reading, Luke connected the coming of the Spirit with Pentecost. In the Gospel, John connected it with Easter.

We can resolve the difference if we view each of them as we would an icon (a theology lesson in shapes and colours), rather than as a photographic record.

The Gospel conveyed wonderfully the Beloved Disciple's sense of the appearance and impact of the risen Jesus on the lives of the disciples.

Graphically, he described the risen Jesus breathing on them, just as the creating God, at the dawn of creation, had breathed into the clay of the earth the breath of life. We're dealing with the re-creation, re-fashioning, re-newal of humanity.

To make the point even more clearly, the Gospel put it in words. Jesus said: Receive the Holy Spirit - the Spirit that the Gospel had earlier described as the personalisation of the love of Father for Son, and of Son for Father.

And to clarify even further the wonderfully liberating impact of that Spirit of God on unredeemed humanity, he went on to add: Whose sins you forgive, are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained.

The role of the Spirit is to make real Christ's overcoming of the world's sin.

It is instructive to observe how St Paul, in today's Second Reading, summed up the difference that the Spirit can make to our world.

Firstly, he described unredeemed humanity under fifteen headings. (We know what he was talking about only too well! not only “out there” but also still lingering on in ourselves)

He first named fornication, indecency and sexual irresponsibility. They were rife in Paul's world! Essentially, they can express the human need to possess, to exploit, to homogenise, and to relate to persons as things. They can be the responses of people unable truly to engage as persons, fearful to love, or to relate to others respecting their uniqueness and difference.

Paul then mentioned idolatry and sorcery - idolatry of the “small g” gods that saturate our culture - our unrecognised addictions to the myriad “must haves”, both as individuals and as societies: the national interest, the market, jobs above all else. And sorcery – the compulsive need to control the future, to “must know” - the fear of trusting.

Paul extended his list by describing what happens when people cannot relate as persons, when they cannot control their fears and their desires. His list is long: feuds and wrangling, jealousy, bad temper and quarrels, disagreements, factions, envy.

And finally, he listed drunkenness and orgies (perhaps he could have added “recreational drugs”) that so often seem to be society's way to avoid, to cover up and to distract from, the emptiness and the meaninglessness of life.

If that, to some extent, sums up the sin of the world, how on earth are disciples to engage with it?

We'll get back the Gospel.

Before commissioning them – us – to meet the world's sin, Jesus breathed into them – into us – the Spirit: the divine energy of love.

There is only one way to face the world's sin - (both out there, and within ourselves), and that is to love the world, to love people, to love, even, as Jesus said, our enemies.

Hopeless?

Perhaps, it might just be better to cut our losses and to rely on America - its formidable armaments, and its hundreds of nuclear warheads - and to stay on top.

Personally, I prefer the experience of what Paul listed as what we can expect when we are led by the Spirit of Jesus: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control. Without them, it's just business as usual, and business as usual has been going for too many centuries.

Are we Catholics particularly good at loving? Are we known for it in the broader community? It hasn't always been because we have not tried. Some of us have tried really hard to love. But we don't consistently succeed - and I think it is because we start at the wrong place.

We lack the energy, the ability, to stick at it consistently, because we have not firstly plugged into the love energy abroad in the world - the love of God, the Spirit of God.

Jesus said first: Receive the Holy Spirit. Until we receive it - are fascinated by it, bewildered by it, bowled over by it, we're powerless.

God's love, God's Spirit, needs to flood our lives: all that stuff that we carry from our past, and that we reckon we have already dealt with. It has to be soaked in God's love, God's Spirit. Then, we can begin to love - it flows out of us.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in us the fire of your love.

Homily 3 - 2015

How do you handle symbolic visions?

In his collection of prophecies, the prophet Isaiah spoke of a vision he had of God that launched him on his prophetic mission.

He was in the temple. He saw God seated high on a throne. Around him were seraphs [or angels]. The whole temple shook wildly and was filled with clouds of incense smoke. Isaiah was terrified, becoming intensely conscious of his unworthiness, and the sinfulness of the people among whom he lived. One of the seraphs took a flaming coal from the fire beneath the altar, and touched the lips of Isaiah, proclaiming, “Your sin is taken away, your iniquity is purged”. Then Isaiah heard God ask, “Whom shall I send?” and the now-purged Isaiah cried out, “Here I am, send me.”

Last week we celebrated Luke’s description of what we have come to call the Ascension of Christ. I believe it would be better to call it the Enthronement of Christ. As Luke described the scene, we had Jesus lifted up and enthroned at the right hand of God. There was the surrounding cloud of smoke, and we had interpreting angels as well.

Luke was describing in graphic symbol the mystery behind the Resurrection of the crucified Christ. At the Incarnation God had become human, in the process emptying himself, as St Paul put it, of his divinity. The divine was humanised, while somehow still remaining divine. With resurrection, the humanity of Christ was received into the inner world of God. The humanity of Christ was divinised, without ceasing to be human.

That Enthronement of Christ is complemented today in Luke’s description of the follow-up. No longer do we have Isaiah but a large group of disciples. We have the whole house shaken as by a cyclone. We have the flaming fire purging the sinful disciples, and equipping them for their mission to the sin-scarred world. Luke then explained, “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak foreign languages” [that is, to communicate with the whole world].

John approached the same mystery in a more subdued, but intensely intimate way. No terrifying cyclone, but Jesus simply showing up among the frightened disciples in their locked room and greeting them “Peace be with you!” The message of mission was clearly there, “As the Father sent me, so am I sending you.” There was no flaming coal purging their lips, but the intensely intimate gesture of Jesus breathing on them, inviting them to “receive the Holy Spirit”, and equipping them to confront the world’s sin with the offer of unmerited forgiveness.

God is love. The Holy Spirit is the joyful dance of love of Father and Son. We are sent to the world. What we have to bring it is no more and no less than the joyful love of God. When thinking of love, I prefer the warm symbol of Jesus intimately breathing into us than Luke’s more rousing symbols of cyclone and tongues of fire.

Over the past week the Royal Commission has confronted us with a hurting world and a hurting Church, indeed, a sinful and bewildered Church in a rightly angry and hostile world. Yet despite its sin, at its heart the Church remains the Body of Christ, which in this very moment in other quarters of the globe is enlightening and empowering countless martyrs.

Hurting and humiliated as we might be, we are still being sent to this world and indeed to our brothers and sisters in our Church. We do not need to have answers or explanations – they are hard to come by, anyway. What we do have is simply the Holy Spirit breathed into us by the risen Jesus – the creative, life-giving, healing, saving and joyful love of God. We can lovingly listen to those who want to talk, gently support those who need support and humbly respect those who feel angry and even hostile.

To give that Spirit, we must first receive it. We need deliberately, silently, personally to open ourselves to be first loved by God.

Homily 4 - 2018

The active volcano in Hawaii has been at it again, with enormous explosions sending molten rock and ash high into the air. I think of volcanoes whenever I read of God’s appearance to Moses, Israel’s charismatic leader, on Mt Sinai: the noise, the winds, the fire, the fear. The purpose of the authors of the Book of Exodus, writing their story several centuries later, was to tell their readers that was really going on was more striking than any volcanic eruption. God was stepping into human history, forming the Hebrew people, giving them their Law, setting them free from oppression.

St Luke was a great story-teller, too. With this account of Pentecost, he used something of the imagery of God’s intervention at Mt Sinai to describe the coming of the Holy Spirit of God into our world: powerful wind, deafening noise, spectacular flames, ecstatic disciples. God was stepping into history once more, forming his people of the New Covenant, writing the Law on their hearts, setting in motion a new liberation, destined not simply for one small ethnic group, but for the whole world.

St John, writing his Gospel some time after Luke, wanted his readers to go deeper into their understanding of Jesus, to recognize not only that Jesus was, as he put it, the “Christ, the Son of God”, but, that, as they pondered that truth ever more deeply against the background of their personal experience, they “might have life through his Name”.

John’s story of the coming of the Spirit is much quieter than Luke’s. Rather than erupting volcanoes and spectacular reactions occasioned by strong winds, loud noise and flames of fire, John draws more on the imagery of God’s gentle creation of the first human. As the creating God had done to Adam, Jesus “breathed” on the gathered disciples, saying simply, “Receive the Holy Spirit”.

According to Luke’s account, through the coming of the Spirit, the disciples were enabled to preach about “the marvels of God” in ways that people, despite all their differences, could understand, relate to and appreciate. In John’s account, the breathing into them of the Spirit was to enable them to fulfill what Jesus invited them into when he said, “As the Father sent me, so am I sending you”. Jesus’ mission had been to reveal to the world the beauty, the truth, the love and the creative joy of God; and he specified that even more by inviting them to share in the mystery of God’s unconditional forgiveness of the world’s sin as they related to each other in the communities to which they belonged: “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven.”

And here we are two thousand years later; and the same Spirit is at work in the world and the Church now as then. We do not have to choose between Luke’s account and John’s account. Details differ; but both writers are wrestling with the same mystery, and invite us to do the same. What is that mystery behind their stories, and do we ever depth it fully? That is the important question. The story is not the issue but the meaning is.

Can we.. , do we speak about the “marvels of God”, the beauty, the truth, the love and the creative joy of God in ways that people can appreciate? Do we set people free as we accept them as they are, as we listen to them? Do we open their hearts to God’s forgiveness by ourselves gently, personally and obviously forgiving them? Do we look at them with love or with hostility and criticism? We have the choice. The Spirit of God has been breathed into us. All we need is to take the time, to make the effort, to allow that Spirit thoroughly to saturate us and, as it were, even to electrify us.

Homily 5 - 2020

It’s hard talking about the Holy Spirit because we have no images to help us — except the Dove at Jesus’ Baptism and the Tongues of Fire at Pentecost. Yet, there is room still to think.

Today’s Second Reading from St Paul stated cryptically, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ unless under the influence of the Holy Spirit.” Paul was not referring simply to the words [anyone can say them]. To claim Jesus really as our “Lord”, means that Jesus has become the focus of our admiration, our source of motivation, our guide for how to live and act.

This Jesus [our guide for living] said of himself, “I came not to be served but to serve, and to give my life for the redemption of all”. His life was one of total service, of total and unconditional love.

As Paul said, to meaningfully claim “Jesus is Lord”, we need the Spirit. So who is the Spirit? In the Trinity, according to the Nicene Creed, the Spirit results from the infinite love for each other that flows between Father and Son — and personalises the creative, joyful energy of that love. The Spirit is precisely the joy-filled, creative energy of our loving God, at work now in our world.

In an earlier letter, St Paul listed, probably off the top of his head, what he called some “fruits” of the Spirit’s presence in believers’ lives. He mentioned: love, joy, peace, patience, graciousness [or kindness], goodness, faithfulness [or trust], gentleness [or non-violence] and self-control. Those attitudes [or virtues] sum up my sense of the mature Jesus.They describe very well the kind of person I wish I had become.

The “fruits” of the Spirit are more than pure “gifts”. Along with the Spirit’s loving, creative energy, they also require our free, personal choice and practical cooperation.

Come, Holy Spirit!

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.

Homily 7 - 2023

I find today’s Reading from St John’s Gospel so continually enlightening that it keeps on surprising me. It was Easter night, the end of the event-filled day of Jesus’ Resurrection, and the doors of the room where a sundry group of Jesus’ former disciples had gathered were closed.

John added the conclusion that the reason they were closed was because the disciples were fearful — probably of the Roman military who had already arrested and summarily executed their leader Jesus. I wonder if there was more, too, than fear filling their hearts. I wonder if they also felt guilty for having abandoned Jesus under pressure; and now found themselves regretting their cowardice, unable to anything about it, and feeling harshly critical and rejecting of themselves.

The passage continued: “Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, ‘Peace be with you’, and showed them his hands and his side.” The greeting Jesus used would have been “Shalom”, a Jewish word that no language can really translate satisfactorily. It does mean “peace”, but it also contains so much more: overtones of contentment, fulfilment, and much else. Not content with wishing it once, Jesus repeated his greeting again — so much did he want to convince them of his sheer good-will towards them. This was prior to their having a chance to say anything at all beforehand, certainly no word of sorrow or regret or apology. He had obviously forgiven them — quite gratuitously, and clearly because of his wonderful goodness, not theirs.

Then Jesus added: “As the Father sent me, so am I sending you”.

What was the mission entrusted to Jesus by his Father? In an earlier chapter the Gospel had stated: “God loved the world so much … God sent his only Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved.” God deeply desired to save people from the destructive, even violent, ways that they regularly used in so many of their interactions with each other.

Jesus prefaced his mission by assuring people that God loved them. He lived that way of love himself. He consistently instructed people to deliberately choose God’s way of love with everyone, insisting there was no other way to find peace in the world and to save the world from itself. He had shown his utter conviction of the non-negotiability of the choice for love by his deliberate acceptance of death by crucifixion. He would never draw back from what he had so obviously believed.

It was on this same mission that Jesus now sent his disciples. Their mission would resemble a new re-creation of the world. Just as then, God had breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life, so now Jesus “breathed on” the disciples, saying , “Receive the Holy Spirit”.

Finally, Jesus instructed his disciples, “For those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven …”. The new creation, the second start toward a truly saved world, would prioritise God’s Way, Jesus’ Way, of unconditional forgiveness — the unmistakable, universal acid-test of gratuitous, universal love that Jesus had just personally exhibited.

Fortunately, an alternative preferable translation can be made of the last words of today’s reading, “… for those whose sins you retain, they are retained”. Thank goodness! because nowhere in John’s, or in any of the Gospels, is there an occasion where Jesus is shown to retain anyone’s sins. Rather, in line with Jesus’ remark that “…the sheep that belong to me listen to my voice… They will never be lost, and no one will ever steal them from me”, today’s concluding passage can be translated quite naturally as, “…Whomever you hold fast, they are held fast.”

The Church is called to be a reliable haven for struggling pilgrim-disciples in a still sin-prone world.