Homily for Sunday, 31 March 2024– The Resurrection of the Lord, Mass of Easter Sunday

Readings of the day: Acts 10:34a, 37-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9

Sisters and brothers: Christ is risen, alleluia! He is truly risen, alleluia!

Within the Scripture readings we have just heard on this Easter Sunday morning, I am always profoundly drawn to the descriptions of Jesus’ first disciples, the diversity of their experiences of Jesus’ resurrection and the preaching of apostles like Peter about Jesus’ resurrection.

First, I invite us to focus our attention on Mary Magdalene. She, not any of the Twelve, is the first to see the empty tomb of Jesus, with the stone rolled away from its entrance. She runs to tell Simon Peter “and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved,” that the tomb is empty. But at this point, Mary Magdalene’s experience is not one of excitement and joy; it is one of confusion. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

In her anxiety and confusion, Mary Magdalene reaches for the first logical conclusion that comes to her mind: Somebody has stolen, has relocated Jesus’ body. Peter and the beloved disciple run together to the tomb to investigate Mary’s claim that the tomb is empty. I imagine that, when Mary Magdalene first tells Peter and the beloved disciple that the tomb is empty, they would have thought this was preposterous. But, to their credit, the two men go to the tomb. Mary Magdalene returns to the tomb, too, but remains in the garden outside it, weeping.

Simon Peter and then the beloved disciple enter the tomb. They see the stone rolled away, the burial cloths rolled up in separate places, the head cloth from the body cloth. And the next line in John’s Gospel always amazes me, every time I hear it: The beloved disciple (and we can presume Peter, too) “saw and believed, for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

The beloved disciple believed first. Only later would Jesus’ disciples understand this mystery of the resurrection: “He must rise from the dead.” In the Church, dating back to the eleventh century Benedictine monk St. Anselm of Canterbury, we have a neat little phrase to sum up the goal of the Christian intellectual tradition: It is “faith seeking understanding”—fides quærens intellectum.

Now, maybe this speaks to the smallness of my faith, or maybe it is a more widespread phenomenon of contemporary Western thought (I will leave this question to the philosophers), but I have real trouble believing in something if I cannot first begin to understand it intellectually. I have trouble believing something if it is not at least reasonable to me. Simon Peter and the beloved disciple believe before Jesus’ rising from the dead becomes something reasonable, understandable to them. This is very bold on their part!

And Mary Magdalene, lingering, weeping in the garden outside the tomb, is bold in her own right in John’s account of Easter morning that we have just heard. She does not understand why Jesus’ tomb is empty any better than Simon Peter and the beloved disciple do. She thinks that somebody has taken Jesus’ body and laid it elsewhere. But Mary Magdalene does not flee her complex set of emotions and thoughts, her experience of the present moment: Confusion, anxiety, sadness because, as far as she knows, Jesus is still dead. Mary Magdalene remains in the garden to encounter this experience head-on. And she is blessed, because of her boldness, with an encounter with the risen Lord. Jesus asks her, “Woman, whom are you looking for”?

At that moment, Mary Magdalene recognizes the voice of her Lord, our Lord, immediately: “Rabbouni”! But she is still caught up in trying first to understand before she can believe that he is truly risen, that nobody has taken Jesus’ body away. Jesus reminds her, and reminds us, that the greatest faith precedes understanding—having everything worked out intellectually. Faith seeks understanding, ideally, not the other way around.

“Do not hold onto me,” Jesus tells Mary Magdalene. “Do not hold onto” this very human desire to understand, to make rational sense, before we can believe. “But go to my brothers,” Jesus says, “And say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

So Mary obeys Jesus. She goes and announces to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” And then they, too, come to believe that Jesus is truly risen from the dead. They become vocal preachers, witnesses by their way of life, to Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus’ disciples can at last begin to understand, once they have believed. And then they can act on their faith, their understanding, to found and grow the Church, this communion of “witnesses” to the risen Christ as Peter calls those who hear him preach in the Acts of the Apostles, our first reading this morning.

But this story all begins in a garden, with the encounter between Mary Magdalene and the risen Lord, and in the tomb, when Simon Peter and then the beloved disciple enter to find the tomb empty and the burial cloths displaced. That our first encounters, in John’s Gospel, with the risen Christ happen in a garden and inside an empty tomb is no accident.

It was in a garden where, Genesis says in its account of the creation of the first humans, God created Adam and Eve. It was in a garden where Adam and Eve fell for Satan’s lie that eating the forbidden fruit would make them wise, would make them their own god, able to understand everything as God does, without the need to believe and depend on God whose goodness had created them and sustained them and all things. Yet it was in a garden where, when Adam and Eve sinned, God’s Spirit first blew through Eden and whispered to them, “Where are you”: Where are you, not a wise and all-knowing God but naked and ashamed? And it was in a garden, still, before Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, where God first promised to redeem us from, overcome, destroy sin and its effects.

This promise reaches its peak in the mystery we celebrate today: God has sent his only Son to redeem us, to overcome and destroy sin by his death and resurrection from the dead. And this promise will reach its fulfillment when the Christ returns in glory at the end of time, as we hear today from the Letter to the Colossians: “When Christ [our] life is revealed, then [we] will be revealed with him in glory.”

It is in a garden, just as it was in a garden “in the beginning,” in those first moments of our creation and fall into sin, where God once again calls out. God’s “Where are you” to Adam and Eve becomes Jesus’ question to Mary Magdalene, “Whom are you looking for”?

While this Easter encounter with the risen Christ is still a mystery, God’s Christ calls to us, invites us to enter the empty tomb, to acknowledge that he is risen and is present with and through us. God invites us to do all that, starting in a garden and an empty tomb on Easter morning, before we could ever fully understand this mystery. God invites us, as he did Simon Peter and the beloved disciple, to believe first. Only once we believe, might we understand. And then, as God called Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, the beloved disciple, and all the other Christian disciples after them through the ages, God now calls us to be witnesses.

God calls us to “go and tell [our] brothers” and sisters: We believe. “We are witnesses to all that [Christ] did.” And now Jesus Christ, who died to redeem us, is risen. He is truly risen. Alleluia!

Homily for Thursday, 28 March 2024– Holy Thursday, Evening Mass of the Lord's Supper

Readings of the day: Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14; Psalm 116:1-13, 15-16bc, 17-18; 1 Corinthians 11:24-26; John 13:1-15

There is a legend surrounding Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of “The Last Supper.” Da Vinci took many years to find people to be subjects for the painting of Jesus and each of his apostles. First he found a young, handsome man in his late teens to paint as Jesus.

Seven years later, Leonardo da Vinci had finally found enough subjects, out of hundreds of possible people, to have painted Jesus Christ and eleven of his apostles. The only apostle who remained to find a subject and paint was Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed Jesus. After another long search, da Vinci was told that his ideal subject for Judas Iscariot was a wretched prisoner in a dark dungeon of Rome. So, da Vinci went down into the dungeon and met the prisoner. Da Vinci had made a deal with the authorities that the prisoner could be released from prison and into da Vinci’s care if he agreed to be the figure of Judas Iscariot in the “Last Supper” painting.

When da Vinci finished painting Judas in the likeness of the haggard prisoner, he showed the prisoner his Judas in the “Last Supper.” The prisoner, taken aback, said back to da Vinci, “You don’t recognize me, do you? I’m the man you painted seven years ago as Jesus Christ. O God, I have fallen so low”!

Sisters and brothers in Christ, who has invited us to tonight’s Eucharistic memorial of his Last Supper: Even if our sinful state weakens our ability to recognize another person, or maybe even ourselves—to recognize the likeness and dignity of God with which God created us—God will never fail to recognize us. God will always and forever recognize God’s own image and likeness, God’s beauty as in the young man Leonardo da Vinci first painted as Jesus Christ in the “Last Supper,” in each of us.

God will always welcome us, tonight in a special way and every time we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, to his table in memory of Jesus’ Last Supper. Our God in Jesus Christ once welcomed twelve very imperfect men to eat his final meal with him before he died. One of those Twelve, the head of the apostles Simon Peter, would go on to deny even knowing Jesus, three times, as Jesus was being led to his crucifixion. Another, Judas Iscariot, would betray Jesus to the authorities to have him killed. All the others except “the disciple whom [Jesus] loved”—who stood by Jesus’ cross with the three Marys: Jesus’ mother, “the wife of Clopas,” and Mary Magdalene—would flee the scene of the cross.

All except one of Jesus’ Twelve apostles would fail to recognize Jesus as he was arrested, condemned, crucified to death. But God, in Christ, would recognize them for who they truly were. God recognizes us for who we truly and fundamentally are, sisters and brothers, even when we do not recognize the God-given dignity in one another or sometimes in ourselves or in all creation; even if, like the prisoner Leonardo da Vinci painted as Judas Iscariot, we “have fallen so low” into the wretchedness of sin.

Sin, and the blindness toward the image and likeness of God in each of us that sin causes, is not our original state of being. Our original state of being is one of beauty, blessing, dignity as God intended: “God blessed them and gave them dominion” over creation, the Book of Genesis says of the first people God created, Adam and Eve. This “blessed” state of being is the state God will always recognize in us, even if or when we obscure it, corrupt it by sin. This blessed state is the figure our Lord invites to share his Last Supper, this Eucharistic memorial of his Last Supper, with him.

But what about our sin? Jesus’ Last Supper; Jesus’ Passion, death, and resurrection that follow his Last Supper show us two main ways in which God responds to our sin, our “fall” from the state of divine grace and blessing in which God first created us. First, the events of Jesus’ Last Supper, Passion, death, and resurrection that we will commemorate over these next three days show us that God’s response to our sin will urge us to confront our sinfulness, our woundedness, our betrayals, our denials, our fleeing the scene of the cross. Jesus’ first disciples who confronted their sinfulness would be the first to be restored to God’s grace through these Paschal events: Peter, who would weep immediately at his denial of Jesus and later be able to confess, three times, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you”; Mary Magdalene, who would be the first to tell the beloved disciple and Peter of the empty tomb on Easter morning; the other disciples upon whom the risen Christ would breathe the peace of the Holy Spirit and ask that they forgive as they had been forgiven; Thomas, who would overcome his doubt to make an astounding profession of faith, “My Lord and my God”!

Second, these events of Jesus’ Last Supper, his Passion, death, and resurrection are a continuation (and a fulfillment) of how God has always acted in history toward us, especially in response to our sin, our lack of recognition of our original state of divine blessing. Whenever we have sinned, God has not waited to begin the process of restoring us to his grace and friendship.

From the moment Adam and Eve first sinned by eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, God did not wait to promise that the woman’s offspring would crush the serpent, the Satan, the prince of deceit and evil. God would put an end to all evil, all corruption from our original state of divine blessing.

We have heard tonight from Exodus part of the long epic of how God guided the people of Israel through forty years of wandering through the desert wilderness, from slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt to the land God promised them. These people of Israel were so often not exactly worthy to be delivered from slavery, from wandering through the wilderness, as God did for them many times. The people of Israel would sin. They would complain about everything. They would test God. They would worship false gods, not the God constantly working to save them. Yet today we hear the high point of the Exodus story, Israel’s deliverance story: When God struck down the firstborn of Egypt but (literally) passed over the people of Israel, allowing them to live and continue their escape from slavery.

And tonight we have heard the fulfillment of the first Passover through the second, which began with Jesus Christ gathering his disciples for a Last Supper before he died. Jesus gives us in this renewed Passover a new commandment, “an example,” a mandate for us that gives this celebration its old name of Maundy Thursday, mandate Thursday: “That you should also do as I have done for you.”

What has Jesus done for us that is so radical, such a fulfillment of the first Passover, and why has he done this for us? He has started by washing feet, which we will remember in a few moments by replicating in this celebration. John’s Last Supper account starts with Jesus taking the place of a slave before his disciples. This act is startling to his disciples, to Peter, who refuses at first to allow Jesus to lower himself to that level.

But this is only the beginning. Jesus will go so far as to take upon himself all our sin, everything that obscures our view, our recognition of the beauty, the grace, the blessing with which God first created us, and have it nailed to a cross with him on Calvary. Tomorrow we will hear the prophet Isaiah’s foretelling of how, on Good Friday, Jesus accepted being made as one “despised and rejected… as one from whom others hide their faces” and who hold “him of no account.”

Jesus would do none of this for us, for our salvation, because we are worthy. On the contrary! But Jesus once gathered his disciples together for a Last Supper. The next day, “he was crucified, died, and was buried… And on the third day he rose again.” Jesus did all this because, no matter whether we recognize our blessedness, our beauty, the image and likeness of God that we all bear, how much God loves each and all of us (so that he, God in Jesus Christ, would die for us!), God will always recognize all this in us. To Jesus, we will always be like the figure Leonardo da Vinci painted as Jesus. We will always be, as maybe one of my favourite Psalm in the Bible (Psalm 8) begins by describing us, “little less than gods.”

And, through this celebration of Holy Thursday of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus only asks of us two things: First, remember what he has done for us on this night. And, second, do as he does: “Do this in remembrance of me”… “You should also do as I have done to you.” We remember and we do for one another as Jesus has done for us when we remember our blessedness, God’s love for us. We remember and fulfill Jesus’ Last Supper commandment to us when we recognize ourselves and one another as Jesus recognizes us perfectly. We remember and fulfill Jesus’ Last Supper commandment when we act on what we recognize, most fundamentally, in ourselves and one another: A people blessed from the first moments of our creation; a people created in and bearing God’s image and likeness (as in a da Vinci painting, but much more beautiful!); a people called to take, eat, and drink of this Last Supper of friendship, of salvation, of God’s self-emptying, of the blessing of our Lord.

Homily for Monday, 25 December 2023– The Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Day

Readings of the day: Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98:1, 2-3, 3-4, 5-6; Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1:1-18

Sisters and brothers, a Merry Christmas to you, our families, our loved ones, our friends!

Increasingly, one of Pope Francis’ favourite words is, “Closeness.” Pope Francis uses the word “closeness” nine times in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers and Sisters All,” which owes its title to an Admonition of St. Francis of Assisi to the friars of his religious community. This Admonition of St. Francis invites the friars to practice fraternal care and kindness toward one another and toward the poor, after Jesus’ example of fraternal closeness with us, with humanity.

The most perfect expression of closeness our world has ever known is when God took on our human nature in the person of Jesus Christ, that first Christmas morning in Bethlehem. But this was not the first time God expressed closeness with us, with the created world. From the very first moments of creation, God has ordered creation, intended it, to exist in closeness, interdependence of one being on another for us to flourish, the “common good.”

John’s Gospel on this Christmas morning takes us back to “the beginning” of God’s relationship of closeness with creation. John’s Gospel recalls God’s intention, from the beginning, that all things, all beings enjoy the same closeness and depend on one another to flourish. “In the beginning,” John’s Gospel begins this morning, “the word was with God, and the word was God.”

Here, in the majestic beginning of John’s prologue, “the word” is logos, the reason everything is. And, in the Greek of the Gospel of John, God is Theos (think of words like theology, the study or pursuit of God). In this beginning, Theos meets logos; God draws into intimate closeness with the reason anything and everything exists, so that these become one. From the very first moments of creation, God is the reason all things exist, why we exist and are called to participate in our own flourishing, God’s own project for our everlasting well-being and salvation.

And the one God, we profess by faith, exists in the intimate closeness of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father sent the Son, begot the Son, to live “among us,” John’s Gospel says, in our human flesh. And then the Son would breathe his Spirit upon the earth to continue to ensure our closeness with God, the greatest good of each of us and of the Church, meant to live in closeness with one another.

We are sacred creatures, created in the image and likeness of God, sisters and brothers, but we are also social creatures. As the Book of Genesis says near its beginning, “It is not good for [us] to be alone.” As Pope Francis is fond of saying, “Nobody is saved alone.” God has made us for closeness, between us and God, St. Augustine of Hippo says, “For, O God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” And God has made us for closeness among one another. This is how we have been created, and how we will be saved, how we will be in heaven.

That design of God—for closeness, between us and God, among ourselves, between us and every other creature—is captured in our readings today. That design of God, for closeness, has been from the very beginning, when Theos and logos became one.

God’s drawing us into ever-greater closeness—with God, among ourselves, with all created things—has played out in history. Today the Letter to the Hebrews proclaims that “long ago God spoke to our ancestors.” God spoke his will, his design of closeness to us through prophets. But now God “has spoken to us by the Son.” There can be no greater closeness than God becoming human, one like us in all things but sin in the person of Jesus Christ.

And the prophet Isaiah announces a blessing to the messenger of peace, good news, salvation. “How beautiful upon the mountains,” Isaiah says, “are the feet of [this] messenger”; the messenger who proclaims the closeness God has desired for and with us from “the beginning,” the closeness now fulfilled in God becoming a human being, sharing in our human experiences from birth to death and resurrection.

God made us for closeness—with God, one another, all creation—from “the beginning.” But that is not all, according to John in his Gospel prologue we hear this Christmas morning. John’s language in the Gospel we have heard this morning is, par excellence, the language of closeness. Theos and logos are one “in the beginning.” God, the word, God’s Son Jesus Christ “became flesh and dwelt among us.” The word John uses here for “flesh” is not the more sanitized of the two words Greek has for “flesh,” soma. No, John says, in Jesus Christ God became sarx. God shares in Christ with us every aspect of our human experience, including the messiest, least sanitized aspects like birth, suffering and death.

There is another hidden gem in this phrase of John’s Gospel proclaiming the Incarnation, God taking human flesh in Jesus Christ. John says, “The word became flesh and lived among us.” The word we hear as “lived” among us is an ancient Greek word referring to theatre, not so “lived” as that Jesus “pitched his tent” (skene) among us. We owe the English word scene, as in a play, to the Greek skene. Only God is not acting when God desires and achieves this intimate closeness with us, taking our human flesh and sharing in our human experiences.

God has “pitched his tent” among us, a permanent dwelling, a permanent, intimate closeness. God pitching his tent among us is meant by John to evoke the early history of the people of Israel. Before Israel was ruled by kings like David and Solomon, before there was a fixed temple in Jerusalem as the centre of the Jewish faith, God was said to dwell under a tent, the Ark of the Covenant. The ancient Israelite tribes would transport the Ark of the Covenant wherever they went, so God was always with God’s people, close to them. In Jesus, God was once more pitching God’s tent with humanity. Only now God’s tent was not made of fabric or animal skins; God’s “tent” was one of human flesh, all our possible human experiences.

John uses another remarkable word in today’s Gospel reading to point to God’s closeness with us, the closeness God wants us to enjoy among ourselves and with all created things. At the end of today’s Gospel reading, John says, “It is God the only-begotten Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made [God] known.”

More literally, the Son dwells not so much “close to the Father’s heart” but “at the breast” or bosom of God. Those of us who have ever nursed a baby will say that there are not too many more intimate acts we perform with our body than a mother feeding an infant at the breast. What a beautiful image of maternal closeness John’s Gospel gives us of the relationship of the Son to the Father!

God desires this same closeness for us, the same relationship between God and us. In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis invites us to special “closeness marked by gratitude, solidarity, and reciprocity,” a closeness that values the poor and their faith by which they are closest to God, to the Lord who made himself poor, who humbled himself, taking on our human likeness. Pope Francis urges us to a particular “closeness to the underprivileged [in] the promotion of the common good.”

Sisters and brothers in the Christ born to us this day: This is how we live and experience the closeness God intended for us from “the beginning”; the closeness that unites God to the reason we and all created things exist; the closeness by which God willed to be born, to live, to die, and to rise from death in our human flesh; the closeness with which the Son dwells at the very bosom of the Father; the closeness that is ours to enjoy and by which we flourish and are saved.

Homily for Sunday, 28 May 2023– Pentecost, Mass during the Day

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.”

Homily for Sunday, 15 January 2023– Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: Isaiah 49:3, 5-6; Psalm 40:2, 4, 7-8, 8-9, 10; 1 Corinthians 1:1-3; John 1:29-34

This time of year is a time of change. We change to a new calendar year. I am not sure if I speak for many of us, but it takes me a few days (or weeks?) at the beginning of a new year before I am able to write this year’s and not last year’s date on papers I am signing, without having to think about it.

How many of us have ever made New Year’s resolutions, or made these this year? We commit to changing old behaviours and habits for our own health, or we resolve to be kinder to ourselves or others somehow.

Not long ago, we were in the midst of the Christmas season, the celebration of Jesus’ birth. It is a time of joy, not only for religious reasons, but for many of us (I hope) a time to be with loved ones, family, and friends. If there is a time that reminds us that we, human beings, are both sacred and social creatures, Christmas is it. And Jesus willed to share in our sacred and social human nature in all things but sin. In this we rejoice. And we had four weeks of Advent before Christmas, as a preparation of our hearts and minds to celebrate Jesus’ birth and our hope in his return at the end of time.

Now we are back in Ordinary Time. It is quite the change from Advent and Christmas. Some of my closest friends and family members know how excited I get (and poke fun at my expense for this) about being able to wear green vestments at Mass for the first time since November. Liturgists (or maybe it is just me) get excited about such things. But really, we find ourselves past one of the high points of the Church year, back in Ordinary Time.

We could say (and we would be right) that Ordinary Time does not have to be ordinary in the sense of boring or nothing special. Ordinary Time, these thirty-four-plus weeks of the Church’s liturgical year, is a season of counting time. Toward what do we count time in the Church? In Ordinary Time, we count or keep time with hope toward Jesus’ return in glory on the Last Day. The “ordinary” in Ordinary Time does not mean boring, nothing special, but it means to count, keep track, or number something. Still, this is quite a sudden change from Advent and Christmas back into Ordinary Time.

John’s Gospel today speaks of more or less sudden change of another kind. John the Baptist, who has been baptizing people in the Jordan River, sees Jesus approaching him and exclaims, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”! Something is about to change in this encounter between Jesus and John, which ends with John baptizing Jesus. Something is about to change for the entire people of Israel of John’s and Jesus’ time. Something is about to change for the whole world. Something is about to change for us.

John’s Gospel is clear that Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist changes John the Baptist most immediately of anybody. John may have been part of a movement of Jewish people in Israel who withdrew from the noise and distractions of the big cities and towns, mainstream Judaism either of the Pharisees with their strict adherence to the Jewish Law or the temple priests, to pray and encounter God. The baptisms John had been performing carried the main meaning of repentance, washing clean of sin as much as any physical or ritual impurity. Baptisms like John was performing were quite common, even in more mainstream Judaism, in Jesus’ time.

But then Jesus meets John the Baptist at the River Jordan. John says in our Gospel that he had been baptizing with a certain hope for the Messiah, the coming of the Saviour of Israel and the world. John was doing something similar to what we are doing, sisters and brothers: Counting toward or counting on (anticipating) with hope the coming of the Saviour, only we are counting with hope toward the second coming (we Christians believe) of Jesus Christ at the end of time. John the Baptist was counting on the first coming of the Messiah: “I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he [the Messiah] might be revealed to Israel.”

And John is able to identify Jesus quickly when he arrives on scene: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”! John is changed radically by this encounter with Jesus. No longer will he need to baptize with water in anticipation—as a counting toward in hope— of the coming of the Saviour of the world. The Saviour is there, standing before John: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

The meaning of baptism, as much as the role of the Baptist, also changes radically in this encounter between John and Jesus. No longer is baptism, or the role of John the Baptist, primarily about repentance or washing clean of sin or other impurity. This is still, to the present day, one of many meanings of this very complex ritual. Baptism continues to include a dimension of cleansing from sin, both original sin that we inherit through the generations from the first people who lived on earth and the sin we commit. Baptism continues to include a dimension of receiving and being sealed by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Those of us who have attended a baptism of an infant may remember that, after the baptism itself, the infant is anointed with chrism, a very strong, pleasant-smelling oil. This is the same oil we receive at confirmation, a sacrament of renewing and intensifying the gift of the Holy Spirit with which we are first sealed in baptism.

But the first and foremost meaning of baptism, ever since John baptized Jesus in the Jordan, is that we become more like Jesus who, by becoming human and by being baptized by John, became like us in all things but sin. By our baptism we are made members of a priestly, prophetic, and royal people, the Church, in imitation of the high priest, the prophet of prophets, the King of Kings, Jesus Christ. In baptism, sisters and brothers, we have a share in Jesus’ life and ministry: A life in service and love toward one another that draws us to God, that draws us toward eternal life. In baptism we especially have a share in the death of Christ so that, by Jesus’ resurrection (in which we also share through baptism), death is transformed. Death is made no longer final. Eternal life in heaven is our final state.

By being baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist, Jesus changes for us the meaning of baptism. In baptism, who we are radically and suddenly changes. We become sharers, full participants, in the eternal life Jesus offers us by his becoming human, his baptism, his life, death, and resurrection. Each of us becomes like Christ, the perfect human being, as Christ became like us. Each of us becomes, in a way, “another Christ.”

We (very purposefully on the part of the Church) hear John’s Gospel account of Jesus’ baptism as we begin Ordinary Time. All this happens: We become more like God “who humbled himself to share in our humanity” in the person of Jesus Christ, from the moment of our baptism. Hopefully (let us pray for this) our becoming more like God, more like Christ, by the grace of God will help us to be kinder, more just, and more loving toward one another. All this happens as we continue to count forward in hope toward the return of our Saviour on the Last Day. All this happens as we continue to count forward in hope, the true meaning of “Ordinary” Time, toward eternal life.

Homily for Thursday, 5 January 2023– Christmas Weekday

Readings of the day: 1 John 3:11-21; Psalm 100:1b-2, 3, 4, 5; John 1:43-51

Today John’s Gospel picks up just as Jesus has chosen Andrew and Peter to be his first disciples. And immediately after choosing Andrew and Peter, Jesus decides “to go to Galilee.”

I find it interesting about this beginning of our Gospel reading today that Jesus’ choice “to go to Galilee” after calling Andrew and Peter to be his first disciples immediately suggests that Jesus is not in Galilee, the region of Israel that includes his hometown, Nazareth. And neither are Andrew and Peter, Galilean fishermen whose calling to be Jesus disciples Matthew, Mark, and Luke all situate on the Sea of Galilee—John differs from the other Gospels in this respect—near their homes when Jesus chooses them to be his disciples in John’s Gospel.

Andrew, Peter, and also Jesus are away from home when Jesus’ call of his first disciples takes place. So are Philip and Nathanael, the next two people John says became Jesus’ disciples.

Sisters and brothers, I think that here John is suggesting that to be Jesus’ disciples will occasionally (if not frequently) mean being called beyond our homes, figurative if not literal and physical; beyond our comfort zones.

We hear that this is true of Andrew and Peter. This is certainly true of Jesus. His being called outside of his home, his comfort extended all the way to his being called to die on a cross outside of Jerusalem, the city at the heart of Israel, yet so far and different from Galilee’s peace and tranquility.

To have been called outside of their home, their region, their comfort was true of Philip and then Nathanael. This is clear from Nathanael’s response to Philip’s invitation to be the disciple of this “Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” Nathanael asks Philip, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth”?

Nathanael is called at that moment beyond the comfort of his own biases. It was probably a bias against people from Nazareth shared among many people. The reason for this bias, or Nathanael’s anti-Nazareth comment, is unclear. Maybe Nazareth was the rival village to other Galilean communities like Bethsaida, home to Philip, Andrew, and Peter. Maybe this bias was like Edmonton versus Calgary today… It is hard to say.

Yet Philip’s invitation calls Nathanael beyond this bias, beyond identifying strictly with his home, his region, or any other comfortable markers of identity. Now Nathanael will identify first as a disciple, an apostle of Jesus.

But how jarring this must have been for Nathanael! Incredulous (but, as Jesus says of him, without deceit), Nathaniel’s first question of Jesus is, “Where did you get to know me”? To know Jesus is an important theme throughout John’s Gospel and letters in our Bible. Remember the Gospel reading of a couple of days ago: John the Baptist, by his own admission, did not know Jesus until God revealed Jesus to him as “the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” And only then does John readily testify that Jesus “is the Son of God.”

Nathanael does something very similar to John the Baptist earlier in John’s Gospel: Jesus replies to Nathanael that he got to know him when he saw him “under the fig tree.” Nathanael gets to know Jesus at the invitation of Philip, and is then able to identify Jesus, very correctly: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel”!

Nathanael’s correct identification of Jesus as “the Son of God” is possible, even from within a (somewhat) comfort zone. Our worship here, sisters and brothers, is good and right, yet possible from comfort. Jesus will always acknowledge our good will—our rightness and goodness in loving and serving him as his disciples, and in loving and serving one another in Jesus’ name. But Jesus will call us, little by little, beyond our comfort, until we are ready, he says, to “see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending above the Son of Man.”

In these days in which our Church mourns the death yet celebrates the life of a true Servant of the Servants of God, Pope Benedict XVI, I am reminded of a line from his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope, Spe Salvi. Pope Benedict says in Spe Salvi: The human person “was created for greatness—for God himself; [each of us is] created to be filled by God. But [our] heart is too small for the greatness for which it is destined. It must be stretched.”

Our hearts “must be stretched” beyond mere comfort to be true hearts of disciples of our Lord; to enter eternal life, the “greatness” for which God has created us, to be forever with Jesus our Saviour; to “see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending above the Son of Man.”

Homily for Tuesday, 3 January 2023– Christmas Weekday

Readings of the day: 1 John 2:23-3:6; Psalm 98:1, 3cd-4, 5-6; John 1:29-34

Optional Memorial: The Most Holy Name of Jesus

In these days between Christmas Day and the Baptism of the Lord, which marks the end of the Christmas season, we hear a lot from the Gospel and letters of John at Mass. And there is, in these readings we hear, a pattern. Our readings from John’s Gospel and letters remind us of who God is (or who Jesus is) and who we are.

Neither who Jesus is nor who we are changes. Jesus is, has been, and will always be “the Son of God.” We are, have always been, and will always be “called children of God.” But our perception of who Jesus is and who we are is what changes. Our faith is not static. Could we not say that our faith is a constant process of growing into our realization of those central truths of who we are, “children of God,” and who Jesus is, “the Son of God,” God made flesh?

Over this Christmas season, I have been able to spend some time with my youngest nephew, August or Gus, who is almost a year old. Gus received several articles of clothing from family and loved ones over Christmas. Those of us who have had (or still have) young children or grandchildren will appreciate this: It is very difficult, I find, to know what size of clothing to buy for a baby. Many people bought Gus clothing sized for an eighteen-month-old. Now, most of those eighteen-month-old clothes are a little big for him (although he is already beginning to fit comfortably into some of them). In six months, will he have outgrown some of those outfits already?

This is a similar reality to our Christian faith, sisters and brothers. Who we are and who God is do not change. But faith is an invitation to grow into, and maybe even eventually to outgrow, how we perceive God and how we perceive ourselves before God now.

If the great John the Baptist had to put on the “baby clothes” of faith, before he was baptizing people in the Jordan—and before he baptized Jesus himself—how much truer is this of us? John admits that, not long before he baptized Jesus, he “did not know” Jesus. But, John says, “the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’” Only then is John the Baptist able to testify to Jesus “that this is the Son of God.” Only then is John the Baptist ready for the next size up in faith clothing: “That will be one camel hair onesie, please, men’s size, hand washable in a river.”

And the same is true of us, sisters and brothers. The First Letter of John says, “Beloved, we are God’s children now.” We have always been and will always be God’s children; this will never change. But the same letter goes on to say that “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Yet when God “is revealed,” 1 John says, “we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

This is quite a bold statement: We will grow in our faith. We will outgrow our present faith clothing. In fact, our faith will grow so much that, sometime between now and when we are in heaven, when God’s presence is revealed to us fully, we will need extra-extra-large, God-sized clothing, because “we will be like” God. We, like John the Baptist, if we are not able to do so already, will be able to point to Jesus and testify that he “is the Son of God.” We will be able to point to other people in our experience who live as Jesus Christ did, who are the saints living among us, and say, “this is a daughter, this is a son of God, beloved of God.”

It looks as though we will need to start looking for the next-size-up outfit!

Homily for Sunday, 25 December 2022– The Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Day

Readings of the day: Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98:1, 2-3, 3-4, 5-6; Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1:1-18

Sisters and brothers in Christ, Merry Christmas!

The word of God today, on this Christmas morning, is all about remembering beginnings so that we might discern what (or whom) God is revealing to us here and now.

This Christmas morning we hear the first words of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” I wonder if this is just because just because I am the consummate theology professor, my mind and spirit warped by sitting at my desk these last few days grading papers and exams, or if anybody else here finds it jarring to hear anything but the more typical Christmas story in our Gospel: The baby Jesus born to Mary into a manger in Bethlehem, because there was “no room for them in the inn,” and shepherds greeted by the song of an angel and told to go to the manger to greet the newborn Saviour of the world.

All of that happened. Other Gospels tell of those details of Jesus’ birth. But John has nothing about a baby, nothing about angels, nothing about Joseph. Mary is not named in John’s Gospel; she is “woman” at the wedding at Cana and “the mother of Jesus” at the foot of the cross. John’s Gospel has no shepherds and no manger scene. The first time John introduces us to Jesus is when he is an adult being baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist.

Instead of the more familiar Christmas story, the kind we can put on greeting cards and show in a Nativity scene, John takes us back to the very beginning, not only of Jesus as a human being, but of the universe itself. The people who first heard John’s Gospel would have been attentive to its unmistakeable allusion to the first words of the entire Bible, in the Book of Genesis, about the first moments of the creation of the universe: “In the beginning.”

And what was there “in the beginning,” before God created anything of the universe, or anything in it? Well, there was nothing. Genesis says that “in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.”

That is it? “A formless void” and darkness over “the face of the deep”?! That sounds a little boring. But then God decides to create something. God breathes wind, God’s spirit, over the nothingness. And God creates light. Now we are talking, God; we have some excitement in the creation story!

John’s Gospel picks up on this creation of light motif just as well as Genesis does. John says in our Gospel today, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” And then John introduces to us John the Baptist. John the Gospel writer is clear: John the Baptist is “not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” John’s function is to point to Jesus, “the true light.”

So John the Gospel writer identifies Jesus as the Word, “and the Word [as] God.” The Word of God, with God the Father and the Spirit, was present when our universe was called into being: “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The Word, the Son of God, called forth the first light of creation. At the same time, he is the light identified by John the Baptist and John the author of our Gospel.

John connects these two events: The first movements of creation and God’s coming into our world in the person of Jesus Christ: Word from Word or, as we pray in our Creed, “God from God, light from light, true God from true God. Through him all things were made.” But John hearkens back to creation, back to the beginning, to set up the next movement of this magnificent prologue of his Gospel.

It would be one thing for John to remind us of the action of God in our favour—for our salvation—all the way back to the creation of the universe. But John does not stop there. Remember that the purpose of John’s invitation to us to remember back to “the beginning” is to help us to discern what, or whom, God is revealing here and now, in the present. The punch line in our Gospel reading this morning, the central point of John’s opening chapter (his prologue), is this: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

We are familiar enough with this statement from John that God, who existed before the universe was created, when nothing else existed, has put on our human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ “and dwelt among us.” Until this point in John’s Gospel, his first hearers would not have been too disturbed, either. In Jesus’ time and that of the Gospel writers, expectation of a Messiah, the world’s Saviour, was widespread. But, besides the small minority of people in the vast Roman Empire who had already come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah by John’s time, the people, Jews and Gentiles alike, did not expect (or readily accept) that God’s Messiah would enter the world quite in that way, in our human flesh.

For God to become human, to experience everything it means for us to be human—joys and sorrows, birth and death—was preposterous to most people in Jesus’ or John’s time. This is why John includes a bit of a reality check in our Gospel this morning: That “the world did not know,” did not recognize its creator and its Saviour in human form; “he came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”

But, to the minority of people of John’s world (and, frankly, our own today) who did accept Jesus as the Saviour, God the creator of the universe “in the beginning” was revealing his ongoing plan for our salvation in a new way. And this new way of continuing old revelation—God has always been with us—changes who we are in relationship to God, John says. We have been given “power to become children of God.” We are now the human flesh, the hands and feet, the loving, kind, and just heart of Jesus, the Word, in our world. God’s work of our salvation that started with those first moments of creation, “in the beginning,” is not finished yet. And it will not be finished until Jesus returns in glory at the end of time.

“We have seen [God’s] glory,” John affirms in our Gospel today. We have seen the Word of God, made flesh and dwelling among us. But even the prophets, hundreds of years before Jesus, were proclaiming a message very similar to John’s. Isaiah was active during the exile of the people of Israel in Babylon, over five hundred years before Jesus. He was preparing the Israelites to return to their homeland after Babylon had been overtaken by the Persians, who allowed Israel’s return home. The Israelites were weary. They were worried about having to rebuild their land from ruins. So Isaiah convinces them to return home by returning to the beginning of his message. A significant part of the Book of Isaiah, the middle sixteen chapters, from 40 to 55 of Isaiah, begins with a message of comfort: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem… that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.”

Isaiah now concludes this section with a similar message. And, Isaiah says, “how beautiful on the mountains” of Israel “are the feet of the messenger who announces” this message of peace and comfort, of salvation and reconciliation with God. “Your God reigns,” Isaiah proclaims. The same God who reigned over the nothingness before creation and said, “Let there be light”; the same God who would take on our human flesh reigns and saves now and forever. Isaiah, like John, goes back to the beginning as if to say, “This is the same God, and our same relationship with God. Yet, in the context of old revelation, God is doing something new.”

We hear from the Letter to the Hebrews this morning essentially this same message: God has been with us through the prophets. God has created and ruled over “all things.” And now he has revealed himself as human, in the person of Jesus Christ. This is what we celebrate this morning, sisters and brothers: “We have seen [God’s] glory.” We can continue to proclaim with the Psalmist that “all the ends of the earth have seen the glory of God.” We have seen God take our human form in the person of Jesus Christ. We are reminded of God’s creating and saving power, all the way back to “the beginning,” to when the universe was nothing, “a formless void.” This is so that we can look forward to God completing the work of our salvation. We are invited to participate in God’s work of our salvation, to put human flesh on the presence of God in our world through works justice, kindness, and peace, until our Saviour, the Word, God made flesh, returns on the Last Day.

Homily for Sunday, 5 June 2022– Pentecost

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

John’s Gospel is peculiar in many ways, not least of which is John’s account of Pentecost, Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit on his disciples, which we hear today.

Remember that, one week ago, for our celebration of Jesus’ ascension to heaven, we heard Luke’s version of these events. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples to remain in Jerusalem until he ascends to heaven, and then he sends the Holy Spirit upon them: “Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection and his gift of the Holy Spirit to his disciples happen all at once. We hear today how, on the very day Jesus rises from the dead, he stands among his disciples in a house where they had gathered, behind locked doors “for fear of the” Jewish leaders who had handed Jesus over to the Romans to die. Jesus appears in his disciples’ space, despite the locked doors, and greets them, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And Jesus sends his disciples, as John makes a point of saying, with the gift of the Holy Spirit that he had promised them during his ministry and at the Last Supper: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

So, which is it? Did Pentecost—Jesus’ sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples; the birth of the Church—happen after or before Jesus’ ascension? Or did Pentecost happen more than once?

The renowned Sulpician Bible scholar Fr. Raymond Brown caused no small controversy at the time when he wrote that Christians should consider that Pentecost has happened not only once; not twice, before and after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, but many times. And the Holy Spirit still descends upon and inspires our Church to action, to mission today. We have all experienced Pentecost-like moments, sisters and brothers, many times in our own lives. I am not only speaking of our celebration of Pentecost once a year, fifty days after Easter, but much more often than that. And, most of the time, we are not even aware when we are experiencing an encounter with the Holy Spirit; a Pentecost-like moment.

The first Pentecost-like moment in each of our lives as Christians is at baptism. Now, at baptism if, as most of us are, we have been baptized as infants, we will not have been aware that we have just encountered the Holy Spirit. But our parents and godparents will have been aware of this Pentecost-like moment. They will have spoken for us at our baptism, when they respond, “It is,” to the question of the priest or deacon just before the baptism: “Is it your will that [this child] should be baptized in the faith of the Church, which we have all professed with you”? At the anointing with chrism after baptism, the Rite of Baptism clearly speaks of the effects of this sacrament: “The God of power and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has freed you from sin, given you a new birth by water and the Holy Spirit, and welcomed you into his holy people.” The moment of our baptism is our first encounter with the Holy Spirit as members of “God’s holy people,” the Church. It is our first Pentecost-like moment.

In baptism we (or our parents and godparents for us) make our first profession of faith, one St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians says today is only possible by the grace of the Holy Spirit: “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” And St. Paul connects the moment of our baptism back to those first Pentecost moments Jesus’ apostles experienced, in the locked room when Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon them; in Acts when tongues “as of fire” descended upon them. St. Paul says, “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body… and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

In confirmation we are again anointed with the chrism oil we received at baptism: “Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.” If, for most of us, our parents and godparents witnessed for us and assented to the work of the Holy Spirit in us from the moment of our baptism, in confirmation we have the chance to assent; to agree to, witness and consciously receive the Holy Spirit for ourselves. For us, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, the singular “gift of the Holy Spirit” becomes a remarkable diversity of gifts that spur us on to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ by all we say and do. In confirmation, this vast array of gifts of the Holy Spirit is summed up in a formula of seven: “The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of right judgment and courage, the spirit of knowledge and reverence… the spirit of wonder and awe in [God’s] presence.”

We may sum up the gifts of the Holy Spirit in this kind of list of seven but, as St. Paul knew and we know, the Holy Spirit’s gifts to us are unlimited by any of our human categories or language. Still, all these gifts of the Holy Spirit, without number, is meant to serve one purpose in us; in the Church. St. Paul says, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” And our ultimate good, sisters and brothers—the good God desires for all of us together—is eternal life.

Each of our Church’s sacramental rituals include a moment when we call upon the Holy Spirit and his gifts without number to direct us toward this “common good” and ultimately toward eternal life with God. I will not analyze each time in our sacramental rites when we call upon the Holy Spirit. This would take me far too much time, and I would be keeping us from (eventually) leaving here to proclaim the Gospel to the world with the gifts the Spirit has given us. And I do not wish to do this.

But I want to draw our attention simply to the Mass, since we are in the midst of it now. Most of us, if we are paying attention, know the first major moment at which we call upon the Holy Spirit during the Eucharistic Prayer at Mass: The priest extends his hands over the bread and wine and prays that the Holy Spirit transform this bread and wine into “the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Yet I often wonder if even the most faithful, attentive Catholics at Mass realize that there is a second moment during the Eucharistic Prayer when we call upon the Holy Spirit. There is no change in the position of the priest’s hands, or much of anything, to indicate when this happens, except that the priest prays that the Holy Spirit might descend not upon the bread and wine a second time, but upon us. We pray that the Holy Spirit might transform us to “become one body, one spirit in Christ.”

“Just as the body is one and has many members,” St. Paul says, “all the members of the body, though many, are one body.” We pray, every time we celebrate our Eucharist, that the Holy Spirit might transform us to make this unity in multiplicity of gifts and members of the Church a reality.

I find it astounding, every time I hear our reading today from Acts, that “every nation under heaven,” people speaking and hearing the Gospel in their own languages, were “all drawn together in one place.” All witnessed together, in unity yet phenomenal diversity, that first Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended like wind and in tongues of fire on Jesus’ first apostles.

They—Jesus’ first apostles; the vast multitude of people, each speaking and hearing the Gospel in their own language—are a lot like us: Gathered together in one place before God; gathered to receive gifts of the Holy Spirit without number but all oriented toward “the common good” and toward our eternal life with God. That, if anything, is amazing. Only the Holy Spirit of God can do this. Only the Holy Spirit can gather us together “in one place” to hear the Gospel; gather us together to be transformed, more and more, into “one body, one spirit in Christ”; gather us together where we may receive the strength and inspiration to proclaim the Good News and communicate the Spirit of God to our world.

This is our Pentecost: Not only a one or two-time communication of the Spirit to Jesus’ first apostles, but a Pentecost moment projected into our history and our memory as a people of God. We celebrate here and now an ongoing Pentecost; our encounter now and forever with the Holy Spirit that draws us all “together in one place”; that orients us toward the common good and that will bring us to eternal life.