Homily for Pentecost 2010

 Today we feast the coming of the Holy Spirit on the first Christian disciples, the twelve apostles especially - as described in the 1st reading. This took place in Jerusalem, on the Jewish feast of Pentecost, 50 days after Christ’s Resurrection.
 It was, clearly, a remarkable event. First came the noise of a powerful wind, and the appearance of something like tongues of fire settling on each disciple. These are biblical features of a theophany, a disclosure of God. They alert us to a new divine presence, energy, activity. God the Father, responding to the obedience of his Son, is sending the Holy Spirit into the world. “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit.” There’s a completion here. This filling with the Holy Spirit is the fruit, the final upshot, of Christ’s whole life and ministry, his death and resurrection. “I have come to spread fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled,” Jesus had said. Today that fire falls from heaven, and the Spirit of the Lord fills the whole earth. This is a gift God will never retract.
 But then there followed a second remarkable thing. The disciples “began to speak in foreign languages as the Spirit gave them the gift of speech,” so that each of their multinational listeners heard them in their own language. Here something else comes to the fore. Not just a new presence and action of God released into the world. But, following that, arising from that, connected to that, a new social entity, a new social agent. At Pentecost, along with the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, a new “body” - St. Paul’s word - comes on to the stage of history. I mean, of course, the Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic, the mystical Body of Christ, the “organ of the Paraclete” (the Holy Spirit) as Cardinal Newman called it. The Spirit fell on the first believers in Christ and equipped them to propose that faith to the world. He brought the Church into being. And this too is a gift God will never retract.
 So today is both an end and a beginning. Jesus has returned to the Father and the coming of the Holy Spirit is the sign of his completed mission. But at the same time, in the power of that Spirit, the mission of the Church begins. It’s the continuation, in a different form, of the mission of Christ. It’s destined to go on till the end of time and embrace every corner and generation of humanity. It’s a mission put into effect through word (“speaking” as the 1st reading calls it), and sacrament (“forgiving” or “retaining” sins, as the Gospel of John just put it). It’s a mission that has as its object the incorporation of humanity into the body of Christ, a gathering into unity which undoes the scattering of sin.
 Today, in other words, is the birthday of the Church. Today, to repeat, a new social entity, a new historical force, unique in its kind, begins its life. “The happy day has dawned for us on which the Holy Church makes her first radiant appearance to the eyes of faith and sets the hearts of believers on fire,” said St. Augustine on this very day.

 And here’s the difficulty. At this very point, our Pentecostal enthusiasm may falter. Almost all of us are here presumably because, in some sense at least, we’re with the Church. And yet are our hearts set on fire as Holy Church makes her radiant appearance? Perhaps almost all of us here, in varying degrees, in ways too many and subtle to articulate, carry in our hearts misgivings about the Church, perhaps just a certain embarrassment, perhaps real anger or something in between. I don’t want to explore this here, or try to catalogue the many forms these misgivings may take, or analyse why it should be so. Enough just to acknowledge it. And then suggest that in this feast, this solemnity of Pentecost, there is for each of us a grace of a new connection with the Church, on the basis of a new understanding rooted in faith. It’s the “hearts of believers” that are set on fire, St Augustine says.

 Let me offer an approach. Among our primal needs is this: the need to say “we”. Not just always “I”, the omnivorous “me”, not just “You”, not just “They” or “Them”, but “we”. Every union brings its measure of suffering, but every union, every “we”, so far as good and true, raises our life, enriches our life. We cannot in fact live, really live, without it. How many older people looked back at the wartime as a time of “we”, of “us”, a time of national unity since lost. Marriage and family, friendship, common enterprise, joint projects, businesses, neighbourhoods, societies, communities, clubs: what myriad forms it can take, this deliverance from isolation.
 Today a new social entity, a new “we”, enters history, becomes a player in the world. It’s unique. And  through faith, through baptism and confirmation, we enter that “we” and it enters us. I’m not sure we’re sufficiently conscious of this. Christianity is not just me and God. Nor is it just me doing good to others for God’s sake. It’s also a new “we”. And that is what we mean by the Church. The Church is a union, a communion, set up and kept going, through all our human weaknesses, by the eternal “we” of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The grace of today is to realise that the Church is not “them” or “it”; it’s “us”. And if I can say a heartfelt “we” in this context, my life undergoes an unbelievable richness. Thanks to the Holy Spirit, I live the life of the whole Body, and the whole Body lives its life in me. And anything honourable I am doing, so far as I am doing it as a member of the Body, becomes more than merely mine. I may be studying, running a business, looking after a farm, raising a family, working for the local Council, teaching, nursing or whatever. I may just be looking after a house, or just being ill. But when this is all woven in with my faith, with a regular sacramental life, with prayer, it is the very life of the mystical Body of Christ, the “organ of the Paraclete”, that I am living. It is “mine”, deeply mine, uniquely mine, but also “ours”. And this - let me surprise you, though I hope I don’t - is the fullest kind of life the human being can live. What comes into the world today, with this new social entity, with this new “we”, is a quite new quality, fulness, wealth of life. Eternal life, in fact. Because this “we” unlike all the others, however precious, is never going to pass away. It was for the sake of this “we”, this unity, that the world was created, and every touch of the Holy Spirit in every human heart is actually relating that heart, however unaware, to this unity, this peace, this “we”. “What discord had scattered, love was to gather together,” says St. Augustine again. “Like the limbs of a single body, the separated members of the human race are restored to unity by being joined to Christ, the common head, and welded into the oneness of a holy body.” So let’s not be reluctant to share the faith of the Church and the life of the Church, her discipline even, her sufferings. They’re ours. May we realise today that the Church is not the enemy of our freedom or identity, is not a totalitarianism or a tribalism, is not something that has to sort itself out before I deign to have truck with it, is never invalidated by the sins and stupidities of its members and representatives. It’s a gift of the Holy Spirit. It’s the place where we can breathe. It’s where we can live and love, and utter a “we” stronger than death.
 May Mary, silent presence in this feast, help us to live this.

          Fr. Hugh, O. S. B.