May 11, 2008AD
Pentecost Sunday
It’s aboutAll of Us!!
We celebrate today Pentecost Sunday, the Fiftieth Day of Easter, the Feast of the Holy Spirit. Call it whatever you care. For older Catholics, the day was called “the Birthday of the Church”. Something happened fifty days after Jesus’ death and Resurrection and we are a part of it as we gather, decked in red today. It is the Day in which that we celebrate the Holy Spirit lives in us now and we live in the Holy Spirit now. Catholics know this and, hopefully, our conduct reflects it 24-7. Today is about you and me and us in the Spirit of God the Father and Christ Jesus.
The word “religion” is related to the word “realignment”. The Latin word, ligere, is the verb to make things coherent. Religion is to make sense of life; realignment is to make something run more effectively.
Our Catholic identity as the Jesus Movement is related to what happened on the First Christian Pentecost. The Primitive Christian Community realized that they were filled with the Spirit and the Paschal Mystery of death and Resurrection of Christ Jesus continues to permeate reality. In Christ Jesus, the Primitive Christian Community started to get its act together. We still are trying to do so.
The Holy Spirit is Something infinitely knowable and infinitely unknowable, at the same time.
On this Pentecost Sunday, perhaps, we might focus on the word that Jesus used for the Holy Spirit, Whom Jesus promised in His farewell testament in the Last Supper Talk in Jn 13-17. The word, of course, is Paraclete. It is based on Greek words, para – beside; cletos –called. It was a term used for a “defense attorney in court, an advocate, someone to stand beside and act on your behalf.” In this usage, the Holy Spirit is the One Who stands with us in the vicissitudes of life, the ups and downs that are part of our share in the process of descent and transformation that we all experience. The Paraclete teaches us what God says 365 times (!) in the Bible, “Do not be afraid.”
Other derivatives of the notion of Paraclete are also useful. We can think also the Paraclete as a Coach, a
Sometimes, we need to be prodded. The Holy Spirit can be seen in a more adversarial role as well. The Holy Spirit becomes our Taskmaster, our Troublemaker, our Taunter, Who shakes up us to realize that for our own good, we should be bound up in sync with God and with one another. The Spirit goads us on to do ourselves a favor and realize that God’s Plan for each of us and all of us is for our good. It behooves us to pay attention to how God wants us to live. We become the beneficiaries.
To use modern argot, we can understand the Holy Spirit as the “Noodge”, Who challenges our complacency (called “the
Catholics believe in the Deep Incarnation, viz., the Holy Trinity lives in me and all of us now and I and all of us live in the Holy Trinity now. The life breathe, the energy of God exists in each of us and enables us, ordinary folks, to do extraordinary things. All are related and what we do affects everyone else somehow.
The Faith in Action Taskforce (FIAT) of Project Embrace has focused on three areas of attention. Filled with the Holy Spirit, Which is what our red clothing today indicates, let us join the ranks in caring for the poor in our midst as ministry, serious creation care as ministry, commitment and growth in non-violence as ministry. By ourselves, we waver. In the Holy Spirit, with one another, each Catholic can make a difference. Do it for your children.
The Spirit, the Paraclete, the Defense Attorney, the Coach, the Taskmaster, the Noodge, or whatever term you use to describe the Mystery of the Indwelling God, re-aligns us in what human living in Christ is all about. Today is our day. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it! 051108AD jfq