Sunday, May 19, 2002 AD
Pentecost Sunday
Let’s Take It from the Top!!
We complete our celebration of the 50 days of Easter on this, the 50th Day. The Jewish festival of Shavouth, the 50th day from the First Seder of Passover, was celebrated this past week. Today, Catholics celebrate the Pentecost, the Feast of the Holy Spirit.
St Luke tells us, in his inspired historical monograph, the Acts of the Apostles , that, around 9 AM, on the 50th day after the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit, was sent upon the first followers of Jesus, the 12 (with the choice of Matthias to replace Judas), the Mother of Jesus, Jesus’ relatives and friends and the women who had come up from Galilee to Jerusalem. The Spirit fell upon them all, including Mary Magdalene, Joanna (who was married to a steward of King Herod!! (cf Lk 8.3), Susanna, Cleophas and his traveling companion (Mrs Cleophas?), Matthias and Justus Barsabbas. The Spirit was given to all of them, not some of them.
Pentecost is a most democratic event. No distinctions were made between slave or free, male or female. (The distinction of clergy and laity came later.) We ask you to celebrate that reality today with your red attire.
All human language ultimately limps when it comes to describing God’s dealings with us. After all, God is infinite and transcendent. God’s dealings with us cannot be adequately expressed, even in inspired biblical language.
In Hebrew, the word for Spirit is ruach, which is feminine. In Greek the word for Spirit is pnuema , which is neuter. In Latin, the word for Spirit is spiritus, which is masculine.
In biblical Hebrew and biblical Greek, the words have multiple connotations. They can mean 1) the wind; 2) the life-breath; 3) extraordinary energy, enabling ordinary folks to do extraordinary things.
In addition to this, even divinely-inspired biblical God-language is incapable of expressing the eternal vs. the temporal. All of us have already received the Spirit in baptism and throughout our lives. All of us receive the Spirit now when we gather, as the Community of Jesus Christ, to hear the Word of God and to celebrate the sacraments. (All of us receive the Spirit in times maybe when we ourselves do not realize it. Only God does and that is all right too!) All of us will receive the Spirit in the future which is why we continue to invoke the Spirit upon us. It is a sense of the biblical “even now, but not yet”!
The times in which we live challenge us, 21st century AD Catholics, to re-examine our biblical roots. We are a community called to one, holy, catholic and apostolic. More and more, in line with Scripture and tradition, we should scrutinize accretions through the centuries to assure that they, indeed, reflect what the New Testament documents have in mind. Are they in conformity with the way things were and the way that they should be?
The universal call to holiness, re-affirmed by Vatican II, is a reminder to us of what the Pentecost experience described in Acts and in John 20 (John’s original Easter chapter). We need to be reminded that, within our Catholic tradition, all, not some are called to live the Gospel. There are not meant to be super-Catholics.
Your red clothing today mirrors your baptism in the Holy Spirit, so that we are called to be born again and again and again! With God’s Help, may we answer the call again and again and again!!
051902 AD jfq
