Pentecost Sunday - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2007

Each of us hears them in our own native language – and they came, according to the current world map, from: Iran, Iraq, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Northern Africa, Italy and the Mediterranean. Despite their different languages and nationalities, they heard the apostles preaching to them in their own languages about the marvels of God – about the marvellous redeeming, reconciling love of God.

Luke pictured the Pentecost event as a reversal of what happened at the Tower of Babel – that tragic mythical story according to which people first lost the ability to communicate with each other. Restoring, with Pentecost, the possibility of communicating was a symbolic step heralding the now marvellous possibility of people once more understanding each other, broadening their horizons, respecting and exploring difference, redefining the idea of neighbour, and learning to move beyond the limiting boundaries of their own familiar ways of doing things, in order to reach out to others in love and to become reconciled.

The Hebrew Scriptures put sin – pride, specifically - as the cause of the disastrous loss of people’s ability at the Tower of Babel to communicate and to understand each other. That was quite an insight!

Communicating with others, understanding them, respecting and accepting them in their differences being reconciled, is still difficult. It doesn’t come easily. I suppose we could say that, without the intervention of the Spirit of Jesus, it doesn’t happen at all.

We can see the connection between Luke’s dramatic presentation  of the coming of the Spirit and the more subdued account in John’s Gospel (that we read today).

As Jesus there breathed on the apostles the Spirit, he commissioned them with the mission: whose sins you forgive are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained. Sin is precisely a breakdown in love, a failure in relationships. It takes shape in the self-preoccupation that leads to destructive behaviour of some kind or other. Sin is always destructive or our own or of others’ dignity. The work, then, of the Spirit of Jesus serves to enable and empower reconciliation, the re-building of relationship, and the construction of God’s Kingdom.

Today marks the beginning of our nation’s annual celebration of National Reconciliation Week. It is forty years since the nation first recognised the original people of this land as citizens and allowed them the privilege of voting. Hopes for ongoing reconciliation were high forty years ago – but so much still needs to be done.

Given the continuing reality of sin, and its power to hide the obvious, genuine reconciliation between individuals and groups can only happen through the power of the God’s Spirit. It’s a wonderful coincidence that, this year, National Reconciliation Week happens during the afterglow of this wonderful Feast of Pentecost.

Let’s pray to God’s Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, for our own continual conversion, for the ongoing conversion of our nation, that we as Australians may all hear together and treasure God’s universal and inclusive love for all people, without distinction. In that way, we might learn to love all, whoever they are, and to devote our intelligence and energy, especially to those among us in greatest need.

Christians, Catholics, have no monopoly of the Spirit, of course. God’s Spirit, as Jesus said, breathes where it wills. But we can have privileged access to that Spirit of Jesus: our Baptism and Confirmation hard-wired us for the purpose. However, we constantly need to click on, to download.

I hope still that we Catholics, following the unambiguous lead of our bishops, will be at the forefront of our nation’s moves towards genuine reconciliation - that, like the Apostles on that first Pentecost, we may be heard clearly preaching the marvels of God, and of God’s inclusive, non-discriminating, universal love and care for all.