A group of dispirited followers of Jesus had gathered and locked themselves in an upper room, probably the same room where the Last Supper was held. There was more perspiration than inspiration in the room. There was fear and suspicion. The room was occupied by a listening group of followers who were afraid that they would suffer the same fate as their master. So, they listened to every step on the stair; they waited for the knock of the executioner; they prayed that no one would discover their hiding place and that the world would leave them safe in their sacred enclosure.
In contrast there is the powerful image of the Holy Spirit as one who is not shy of the boundaries and the barriers that people erect. He is not halted by locked doors or locked hearts; he doesn’t exclude himself from the restrictive areas people settle in. When the Spirit comes, it is not like a spring breeze that whispers unnoticed through a room; it is more like a hurricane that lays flat all the precious protections against its force. And the Spirit takes this group of dispirited followers and fires them with a new energy and a new enthusiasm and a new authority. The presence of the Spirit makes the disciples open their lives to others: they don’t just decorate their sacred enclosure; they leave it and pass over into the lives of other people with the gifts of Gospel and peace and forgiveness.
The disciples go outdoors. They go to the marketplace where people gather and there, they proclaim to all how they have changed by the power of the Spirit. They tell a Magnificat and proclaim how God has worked wonders in them. At first the crowds think that the apostles are drunk – no doubt because they’re sure it takes some kind of spirit to transform these men. Whatever it is, everyone acknowledges that something happened to dramatically change the outlook and behavior of the followers of Jesus. The name of that experience is Spirit.
The crowd’s second reaction is a joyous one when they realize that the apostles are speaking their language. Perhaps we’ve all heard people say to us in a mixture of relief and enthusiasm: ‘’Now you’re speaking my language!’’ When that happens there is communion, where. before there had only been misunderstanding and division. The apostles got through to people, they spoke the deep language that is in all of us, and which rarely gets spoken. It is the language in search of understanding; it is music in search of a melody. St Paul spoke of it as inarticulate groaning, the cry of the spirit within us. The apostles reach people in this profound language. It is the language of the Spirit.
The Spirit which fired the apostles, and which enthused Paul is the same Spirit which fires and enthuses us. The Spirit does that in our own mundane attempts to work at forgiveness and love and understanding. That is the language of the Spirit. Forgiveness and love and understanding form a language which everyone understands and needs to hear. That is the language we are invited to speak, and the promise is that when we speak it people will recognize it as their own language. They can truly say that we are speaking their language because it is the language which has no boundaries, and no special dictionaries are needed to understand it. It is the language of the Spirit. It is the call of the honorable bird.