Fire, a Cloud and the Life of Grace: Pentecost

The Feast of Pentecost
Readings

Pentecost is a harvest festival from the Old Testament. At Pentecost, the harvest is the Church. The story of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost also reveals something about the interior life of God and our participation in that life through grace.  Our faith is in one God, three Divine Persons, a Triune God who invites us to participate in Divine life. Through the Holy Spirit we participate in the life of the Triune God. Being good is not enough, ultimately. Salvation is to live the life of grace poured out on us in the Sacraments, most especially Confirmation and experienced in our growth in wisdom, the gift of the Holy Spirit.
 
At Pentecost, the nature of God is revealed for our benefit. We respond to that grace, body and soul, when we try to grow in understanding and participation in Divine Life. God allows us to see something of the Divine interior life in today’s feast. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel [Prudence], Fortitude [Courage], Knowledge, Piety [Reverence], and Fear of the Lord [Wonder and Awe in God’s Presence]. (cf. Is 11:1-2) The Fruits of these gifts of the Holy Spirit are an increase in Charity, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Generosity, Gentleness, Faithfulness, Modesty, Self-control, Chastity. Too often we focus on our failings as we see them. When we look at the grace filled life described in scripture and the faith of the Church, we can see who we are supposed to be. Which is more important to a human being? A complete catalogue of everything you’ve screwed up in your life or a road map to where you are going? To live the life of the Holy Spirit, is to be open to the life-giving Triune God and, thus, an enduring image beckoning you to your future. Today, I want to talk about the Triune God, the Holy Spirit, Pentecost and the life we are preparing for now and in heaven.

Trinity as Family: Father, Mother and Son
We can only speak meaningfully of God by the use of analogies. Analogical illustrations can give us some idea of God but also can warn us off from false notions of the Divine. So, one analogy is to compare the Trinity to a human family. The image of Trinity as human family was recently popularized in light of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.  Father and Son make sense in the analogy of the human family. But the analogy is misleading if you see the Holy Spirit as mom. The problem of the human family an analogy of the Trinity is that it invites gender into the discussion of God’s nature. In Catholic dogma, God has no gender; God is neither male, nor female. The human family as an analogy for the Trinity is attractive to our way of thinking and is illustrative of theological truth in a limited sense. God does adopt us as his children. In our Trinitarian theology, however, the Holy Spirit proceeds from Father and Son in love. Mothers are not the result of the love between Father and Son, it is the other way around, at least in my family. As an analogy to human love, the Trinity as revealed by Christ and defined by the Church doesn’t work so well with this model. How about a different analogy?
 
God as Love: Lover, Beloved and the Love
The scriptures teach us that God is love. 1 Jn. 4:7-21. St. Augustine used an analogy of the Trinity modeled after the human idea of Lover, Beloved and the Love between Lover and Beloved. First, the Trinity can’t be divided into three parts. You cannot “dissect” one from the other, as in the clover analogy used by St. Patrick. Without a beloved, there can be no such thing as a lover, and without love, neither beloved nor lover could exist. Therefore, the idea of an inseparable and indivisible unity is maintained by this analogy.

• There is a certain ordering within the three, as the lover must love first, but there is also simultaneity of the three, since love and beloved exist as soon as the lover begins loving.
• This analogy serves as an approximation for eternally begetting within the Trinity, where there is an ordering (the Father is the unbegotten and first principle), and yet there is also simultaneity, since the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds eternally, as soon as the Father loves (which is always). 
• But perhaps the most compelling part of this analogy is that it is not one of three people in love exactly, but one of love itself as having an inherent three-ness. This aspect of the analogy helps us to understand God because God is not merely a Trinity of persons who have a communion amongst themselves; rather, the three persons are a communion of love.  But, the weakness of this analogy that is most often pointed out is in this role of the Holy Spirit. It could seem that the third person—love—does not quite have a personal character as do the lover and beloved, and we can hardly imagine what it would be like to have love so real that it itself can be counted as a third.  Klein, Elizabeth. God: What Every Catholic Should Know. Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition. How does the Holy Spirit, a person in the communion of the Holy Trinity, reveal the mystery of God at Pentecost?

 
The Descent of the Holy Spirit at Easter
The gospel at Easter said that when Jesus appeared to the apostles in the upper room three days after he had died and was buried, that he,

“… he breathed on them, and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

 Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on the disciples on Easter as God the Father breathed on the pile of mud that would be named Adam in Genesis.  St. Cyril of Jerusalem said that Jesus action was a kind of “anticipation of what will happen at Pentecost.”  In other words, what is given to them now as a power, will be given to them slowly in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit at the feast of Pentecost. It also, reveals Jesus as doing what God does. Keep that in mind while considering the story of Pentecost.
 
The Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost
The liturgy links Easter and Pentecost in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, which is the full narrative of the account of Pentecost.

“Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language.” Acts 2:1-11

 Number one, on what day did the first Pentecost occur?
Pentecost was a Jewish feast 50 days after Passover. It was the celebration of the 50th day after the offering of the sheaf during Passover. Pentecost as a feast predates the birth of Christ. Passover was a huge pilgrim festival in Jerusalem during the first century followed by seven days of seven weeks. That is forty-nine days. On the fiftieth day, Pentecost (which essentially means 50 days), the “feast of weeks” was celebrated. The Jewish feast of Pentecost was a harvest festival,  a festival of remembrance. Passover celebrated the deliverance of Israel from Egypt and then, 50 days later, Jews would celebrate the arrival of the Israelites at Mount Sinai in the desert and the reception of the law, the 10 Commandments.   Exodus 19-20. The story told in Acts of the Apostles occurred on this day fifty days after Passover in about the year 33 A.D. Do you remember that God descended in a cloud of smoke and fire when he gave the law to Israel at the mountain in Sinai? That, is the background for the story told in Acts of the Apostles. They remembered.
 
Number two, why does the Holy Spirit descend upon them in tongues as of fire?
God descended in a smoke and fire on the mountain in Sinai. In Exodus 19:18 it says

“Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire; and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain quaked greatly.” Ex. 19:18

 At the baptism of Jesus, the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a dove. So, why did the Holy Spirit descend upon the apostles in tongues of fire? Pretty obvious. In the Old Testament, the Lord descended upon Israel in fire and gave them the old law. Now in the New Testament, God the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles to give them the new law written, not on stone, but on the tablets of their hearts. In Jeremiah 31:33 it says,

“But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days—oracle of the LORD. I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” Jer. 31:33

The law is written into the consciousness of the Apostles, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God. Remember also, our Blessed Lady is in that upper room when all this occurs. She experienced the Holy Spirit as “overshadowing her” on the day she conceived the Lord by the power of the Holy Spirit. Luke 1:26-38.   God’s glory, his shekinah, is always represented by this cloud and by fire. Remember the burning bush that Moses encounters? A glory cloud descends on the Temple Solomon built. Cloud and fire are the visible manifestation of the glory of God, the Holy Spirit.
 
The Israelites were led through the desert during the day by a pillar of cloud and in the dark by a pillar of fire. The Holy Spirit.  We are led by our conscience infused with the grace of the Holy Spirit. Grace is the way that we participate in the Triune life of God. Why is it important to think about God the right way? God is not a tyrant who at a distance throws his commands at us, enforced by lightning bolts. Instead, to be true to the Holy Spirit is to be true to ourselves. That is why our lives are not our own. To tune out the voice of God and listen to other voices destroys us from the inside out. The life of grace is our participation in the life of the Triune God, body and soul. It is the abundant life promised by Jesus. We are ensouled, organic creatures and so we grow into this reality. The Holy Spirit is not God wearing a disguise, but the source of our life in God “in spirit and in truth .” Jn. 4:24
 
Third, what about the gift of tongues?
In the Acts of the Apostles, the gift of tongues is the ability to speak in other languages. Acts relates that the people hearing the Apostles preach said that “are not all these who are speaking Galileans?” Acts 2:7  The Galileans, are speaking their language, probably Aramaic, but everyone else hears the proclamation of the Gospel in their native tongues, whether they were from Persia, Media, Cappadocia, Asia, Egypt or Oro Valley. This is the beginning of the Gospel being brought to all the ends of the earth. According to the internet, the New Testament has been translated into 1,521 languages and the complete bible has been translated into 670 languages, give or take a few!
There is another back story of great importance to this gift of tongues. Remember the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11? Human arrogance attempted to construct a tower to reach heaven and God toppled it and confused people’s languages in punishment. God is reversing the punishment and bringing humans together in professing one faith in a variety of tongues. Pentecost heals the Tower of Babel and undoes the sin of Babel. The world will be united through the Holy Spirit, not through human power and pride.
 
The Holy Spirit is the power of regeneration of the world
Pentecost brings the Easter season to a close. Jesus’ passion and his death, our death, isn’t the end of the story. Our lives, as was His, is ultimately ordered toward his resurrection from the dead, the reunion of our soul and body, as was his in the Resurrection. His ascension into heaven, the entry of his humanity into the life the Trinity, the heavenly realm, was not the end of the story of salvation. The goal of Jesus’ passion and death and resurrection was the giving of the Holy Spirit. The climax of salvation history is the indwelling of God’s spirit in each of us. The work of Christ’s passion and death continues in each of us as we strive to be conformed to the grace of the Holy Spirit.
 
This, of course, says something essential about the nature of God and the mystery of the Trinity, which celebrate on the feast of the Most Holy Trinity. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “On that day (that is Pentecost) the Holy Trinity is fully revealed” (CCC 732).  Pentecost is a Trinitarian feast celebrating the beginning of the Church as the fruit of Christ’s Paschal mystery.
The great St. Augustine said this about the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost:
 
The tongues in which they spoke as the Holy Spirit filled them were a foreshadowing of the Church’s preaching of the Gospel in the tongues of all the nations. After the flood, in pride and defiance of the Lord, an impious generation erected a high tower and so brought about the division of the human race into many language groups... At Pentecost, by contrast, the humble piety of believers brought all these diverse languages into the unity of the Church. What discord had scattered; love was to gather together.  Augustine, Sermon 271; trans. E. Barnecut, 1992, p. 73
 
We at St. Mark are the harvest of that love. Pentecost is an Israelite harvest feast; an Old Testament type. In the New Testament, we are the harvest drawn into the communion of the Triune God through the sacraments. Next week, we celebrate the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity. See you then.