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PENTECOST (B)

  1. Each morning, when I remember I must add, I like to say a prayer to the Blessed Trinity which I discovered many years ago when I was teaching the theological tract on the Trinity. The prayer goes as follows:


“Omnipotence of the Father, help my weakness and draw it out of the depth of its misery.

Wisdom of the Son, direct all my thoughts, words and actions.

Love of the Holy Spirit, be the beginning of all the operations of my soul, so that they may always be conformed to the Divine good pleasure.

Let us fervently desire the Holy Spirit;

where the Spirit of God reigns, holiness is found.”


What I would like to touch upon briefly today are the final words of the prayer: “Let us fervently desire the Holy Spirit; where the Spirit of God reigns, holiness is found.”

  1. In our preface prayer this afternoon/morning, we will say to God our Father – “You sent the Holy Spirit to those marked out to be your children by sharing the life of your only Son, and so you brought the Easter mystery to its completion.” Perhaps we should ask: What happened at Pentecost? If we follow St. Luke’s chronology, we could say – Fifty days after the resurrection, the glorified Jesus Christ poured out the Holy Spirit in abundance and revealed the Spirit as a divine person so that the Holy Trinity was fully manifest. The mission of Christ in the flesh and the mission of the Spirit – and they work together though distinctly as the right hand and the left hand of God the Father – become the mission of the Church, for the Church has been sent to the nations of the world to proclaim and spread the mystery of the communion of the Holy Trinity and the mystery of our being taken up into that divine communion. There’s a beautiful antiphon in the Pentecostal Vesper Service in the Byzantine Liturgy which reads as follows: “We have seen the true Light, we have received the heavenly Spirit, we have found the true faith: we adore the indivisible Trinity, who has saved us.”

  2. In our preface prayer today we will also say to God our Father – “Today we celebrate the great beginning of your Church when the Holy Spirit made known to all peoples the one true God and created from the many languages of mankind one voice to profess one faith”. Our Catholic faith teaches us about our Three-Personed God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This means that the divine life which has its origins from all eternity in God the Father and has come to planet earth in human history through God the Son with us in the flesh is made our interior personal possession by God the Holy Spirit through the ministry of the Church. How can this be? When Christ the Lord lived in our history, his visible presence, his sacred humanity was the source of light and grace for those who were in contact with him and began to be his followers. Now that he has returned to his heavenly Father in his glorious ascension, Christ’s visible presence, his spirit, power and authority, has passed over into the sacraments of his Church by the work of the Holy Spirit. This is what St. Augustine had in mind centuries ago in one of his homilies when he said – “God the Son did not leave heaven when he came among us in weakness, and he did not leave us when he returned to heaven in glory. That is why he could promise all who follow him: ‘I will be with you always’.” The Holy Spirit is the fulfillment of that promise. This also means that the Church is the fulfillment of that promise. Just reflect for a moment, as we celebrate the Pentecostal Liturgy, on all the wonderful realities the Lord Jesus has won for us by his Easter death and resurrection: the forgiveness of sins, the grace of the sacraments, the truth of the Gospel, the great gift of the Eucharist we celebrate, the true and real share in God’s own life. These realities would be non-existent if there were no Church, and there would be no Church if there were no coming of the Pentecostal Spirit.

  3. There’s a familiar scene in the Acts of the Apostles where Paul encountered a small group of disciples of whom he asked – Have you received the Holy Spirit since you began to follow Jesus. Much to his surprise, they replied that they did not even know there was a Holy Spirit. This certainly is not true of us here today. However, perhaps our being schooled in the Holy Spirit is less than we could desire. Perhaps we can ask a second question – What does the Holy Spirit do in the Church? As the Catechism indicates – The Spirit builds, animates and sanctifies the Church. As the spirit of love, the Spirit restores to those baptized the divine likeness that was lost through sin and thus causes those baptized to live in Christ the very life of the Holy Trinity. The Spirit then sends the baptized forth to bear witness to Christ and organizes them in their respective functions so that all might “bear the fruits of the Spirit”. But we should make this more personal and not just institutional, although the institutional is very necessary also, and so we ask a third question – How does Christ and his Holy Spirit act in our hearts here and now? Christ communicates his Spirit and the grace of God through the sacraments to all the members of the Church who thus bear the fruits of the new life of the Spirit. And what name are we to give to the Spirit resident within us? Jesus called the Spirit “the Paraclete” – not the parakeet as one youngster in the religious education program suggested – which means advocate, helper, friend, consoler, the one who stands ever at our side to school us in Christ. The New Testament also refers to the Spirit as the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of God the Father, the Spirit of glory, the Spirit of the promise. The Liturgy calls the Holy Spirit the forgiveness of our sins; our long Catholic tradition calls the Spirit the interior master of prayer.

  4. On the last day, when the Lord Jesus comes again, we must pray – Come, Lord Jesus. To make this happen, we should pray in the meanwhile – Come, Holy Spirit. But this creates a little problem – How can we pray “Holy Spirit, Come” if the truth is that we need the Spirit already present to enable us to pray “Come, Holy Spirit”. At any rate, let us ask the Holy Spirit this day to help us to remember every day that we fervently come to desire the Holy Spirit; for where the Spirit of God reigns, there is holiness of life.