Readings of the day: Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; John 20:19-23
I invite us to think of how often we gather together in a place only to set out from that place. This is a very ordinary human experience. We might meet with one or several friends, and then set out for home happy and grateful that we have had that time with friends: The joy and the strength that we receive from friendship. If we work, many times we have regular meetings in our workplaces, to discuss individual and collaborative tasks in the workplace. And then we go forth to do the work. Some of us may gather for regular family or household meetings, or pray together at home.
In a religious sense, on Sundays (and, for many of us, on weekdays also) we gather in this place, in a church. We celebrate the Eucharist. And after we receive communion—a word that literally derives from gathering in one place as one, in union—we are sent forth to put into action in our world what we hear from the word of God: “Go, the Mass is ended”!
Pentecost is a special occasion of gathering together so that we may then be sent forth. Many of us may think of Pentecost as the birthday of the Church. The Acts of the Apostles recounts for us today the first time in Christian history that people of such astounding ethnic, linguistic, and geographical diversity—“Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome…Cretans and Arabs”—were all gathered into one place and heard Jesus’ apostles proclaim the word of God in their own language.
Acts’ account of the first Pentecost is truly an amazing story! Yet, if we have ever read Acts, Chapter 2, beyond the end of the reading we have just heard (and I encourage us to open our Bibles and do so at home, especially if you have rarely or never done so), we quickly notice that what we have heard from Acts today is only the beginning of the story. It is only the beginning of the first Pentecost event! The earliest Christians from all over the Roman Empire at the time stay in the one place long enough to hear a long speech from Peter, covering the earthly life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. But then, at some point, all those people need to return to their homes. They take their Pentecost experience back home with them and tell of it to their friends, families, neighbours. And, by the end of this chapter, the Acts of the Apostles says, the number of believers—the number of “those who were being saved”—was growing astoundingly “day by day” in all those parts of the Roman Empire and beyond.
But that first Pentecost would not be the first time, nor the last, when God would gather great numbers of people together only to send them forth with something to nourish the whole world; to nourish their homes, their workplaces, their relationships. It is no accident that Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, coincides closely with the Jewish feast of the “weeks of weeks” (Shavuot) or of “seven times seven” days after Passover.
On that first Pentecost day, of which we hear in Acts, Jewish people scattered all over the Roman Empire and beyond are on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the holy city that is the center of their faith. Shavuot is originally an agricultural holiday; it had been the day on which Jews gave thanks to God for the harvest and made a sacrifice of part of their harvest at the temple in Jerusalem. By Jesus’ time, Shavuot had developed into a feast of thanksgiving not only for the harvest but of thanksgiving to God for the gift of the Law, the Commandments on Sinai God gave the Jewish people through Moses. There are seven weeks of seven days between two great Jewish pilgrimage feasts: Passover—when God delivered the people of Israel from Egypt—and Shavuot, when God gave the same people of Israel the Law on Sinai.
Between Passover and the Festival of Weeks (Shavuot), the particular gift that God gives to God’s people, as a sign of God’s loving promise of salvation to us, changes. First, God gives freedom from slavery in Egypt. And then second, God gives the harvest—food from the earth to sustain our bodies—together with the Law to sustain our souls. But together with this second feast, God gives us yet another gift: God gives God’s own Holy Spirit. This divine gift of God’s Holy Spirit is the most universal yet. If the feasts of Passover, of the harvest, and of the receiving of the Law of Moses had been Jewish feasts, even if they were for all Jewish people living everywhere, God’s Holy Spirit would be for all people and all nations, starting with the Jewish people and then those who had come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah.
The Book of Acts is clear about this: God’s gifts to us keep escalating. God’s gifts to us keep becoming more and more universal. God’s gifts (and God’s ultimate gift of salvation that awaits us at the end of time) are not static; they keep becoming greater and more widespread. This is why God waits until all the pilgrims from all over the known world at the time were in Jerusalem to give them his Holy Spirit through the preaching of the apostles. The Holy Spirit descends on the apostles “like the rush of a violent wind” and as tongues of fire. But then God gives the Holy Spirit to everybody present as the sound of speech, each speaking—giving the Holy Spirit—to one another in their own languages.
God waited to give this astoundingly expanding, audible gift of the Holy Spirit to the nations until all those people were gathered together in pilgrimage to the Holy City, Jerusalem. But this gift was not for the people who received it to hold onto it for themselves. Those whom God had gathered together in Jerusalem, God now would send back to their homelands, to give God’s Holy Spirit to all the people there. And so the Church, those baptized, those being saved, would keep expanding, becoming more truly universal. Pentecost is the birthday of the Church. Yet it is only the beginning of the story of the birth and rebirth of the Church in God’s Spirit. The first Pentecost was only one of many times God has gathered God’s people together to receive a great gift, only so that God might send us forth to offer to all people the gift we have received.
God gathers together only to send forth. Every time we gather for Mass is a celebration of this reality. Every Mass is a little Pentecost!
But we can resist going forth with the gifts, with the Holy Spirit God offers us to give to all peoples and all nations. We are free to do this. And to resist or even try to impede God’s gift of the Holy Spirit in this way is easier for us than maybe we would like to think. Just ask Jesus’ apostles, huddled in the upper room after Jesus had died, for fear of the Jewish authorities who had had him crucified.
This is the setting as our reading today from John’s Gospel begins: Hardly an auspicious start for the apostles, to the history of our Church! Like the apostles, we may find ourselves afraid to emerge from where we are gathered, holding onto God’s gift of the Spirit for ourselves, sometimes not even realizing that we possess it. We might find ourselves afraid of, mired in, our own sin. We might find ourselves in a state of pessimism about the world, or our own relationships: What good will my going forth with the Holy Spirit, living my faith boldly yet lovingly and kindly, do amid all the problems and even evil of the world?
It is into this anxiety, this pessimism, our own sinful state, that Jesus breaks through and offers us, once again, God’s Holy Spirit. And once again, it is audible: Jesus’ voice proclaims, “Peace be with you (shalom)… Receive the Holy Spirit.” And, yet again, we whom God has gathered together are sent forth: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
That is some power God gives us, to forgive and retain sins! This was a power Jews of Jesus’ time—including Jesus’ own apostles—would have said that only God possesses, no human being. Now Jesus gives us the height of divine power, the power over sin, evil, and death itself! God’s gift of the Holy Spirit is not to be kept for ourselves. It is not static but living and dynamic. It is meant to be given away. It is meant to grow. It is meant for all peoples and all nations, this gift for which God continually (and here, yet again) gathers us together only to send us forth, to proclaim audibly, for the rest of the world to hear: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
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