THE GIFT OF THE FATHER AND THE SON


THE PENTECOST SUNDAY   

Acts 2:1-11; Ps 104:1,24,29-31,34; 1 Cor 12:3-7,12-13; Jn 20:19-23

The Holy Spirit and his variety of Gifts

We celebrate Pentecost Sunday. On this day, we mark the descent of the Holy Spirit actively on the disciples of our Lord. The coming of the Holy Spirit is the formal birth of the Church as a gathering of the people of God possessing the same Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the third Person of the Blessed Trinity; our possession of him means that God is with us. Just as God was with us in the days of the Son of Man in the flesh, God is now with us in the Person of the Holy Spirit. The specific mission of the Holy Spirit is the application of the saving works of Jesus Christ to the salvation of the human person. What the Son of Man has objectively achieved in his life, death, and resurrection, the Holy Spirit is now to apply to individual persons. This is the specific work of the Holy Spirit among the persons of the Blessed Trinity. He brings to actuality what the Father expresses through the Word, and the Son, as the Word of God, accomplishes. So, the Son of God in his human nature has saved us through his salvific works among us. On the cross, he openly expressed that the salvation of man is accomplished, a fait accompli. The work he accomplished in the Spirit, through his total consecration to the will of the Father, he obeyed his Father till death, would henceforth be actualised in each person through the work of the Holy Spirit. He expressed the need for him to go, for the Holy Spirit to do his work of actualisation of our individual salvation.

The Son of Man, as the Good Shepherd and the Gate of the sheepfold, ushered the Holy Spirit in to begin the work of sanctification of believers after his resurrection. We heard this in the Gospel proclaimed to us. “Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, ‘Peace be with you’, and showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were filled with joy when they saw the Lord, and he said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. ‘As the Father sent me, so am I sending you.’” The first gift of peace is to signify the restoration of justice in each of those who believed in him. He has restored justice by atoning for our sins against the Father through his life, death, and resurrection. Therefore, peace comes to us and to all who believe in his saving death, through the application of the justice of his sacrificial death to our souls. The harmony and order he restored is what he offers the disciples through the greeting of peace. In the same vein, we offer each other peace after the ritual of the Eucharistic consecration, which signifies his life, death, and resurrection. The greeting of peace is in order when we follow the Mass to that point, for we have reconsecrated ourselves with him to the Father. We have peace and harmony restored, and the Holy Spirit can move us as members of the Son of Man. So, he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. For those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; for those whose sins you retain, they are retained.” The communion of life is extended to common activities with the Son of Man through the Holy Spirit.

The Son of Man, the Incarnate Word, received the anointing from the Father to proclaim and bring about the salvation of men. The same role we are to fulfil as members of his body. By receiving his life in baptism and denouncing our individual and sinful lives, we become part of him as his members. We also fulfil his mandate by taking up his activities during his life on earth. For the purpose of carrying out these activities, he gives us the Holy Spirit. Saint Paul explains this well. “There is a variety of gifts, but always the same Spirit; there are all sorts of service to be done, but always to the same Lord; working in all sorts of different ways in different people, it is the same God who is working in all of them. The particular way in which the Spirit is given to each person is for a good purpose.” We note the order of events here: first, we share a common life with him through baptism, then we receive the Holy Spirit to share or participate in his activities in the service of the Father’s will. These activities constitute the proclamation of the Gospel by the Church, the body of Christ.

The proclamation of the Gospel is geared towards two similar ends: the forgiveness of sins and the reception of new spiritual life, which symbolise the death and life of the Son of Man. The disciples who received his life through his breath on them received the anointing from the Father and the Son to begin their participation in his saving activities or mysteries. “When Pentecost day came round, they had all met in one room, when suddenly they heard what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven, the noise of which filled the entire house in which they were sitting; and something appeared to them that seemed like tongues of fire; these separated and came to rest on the head of each of them.” The Holy Spirit came on them in the form of tongues of fire, denoting the imminent work of proclamation of the Gospel in different languages to all peoples. “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak foreign languages as the Spirit gave them the gift of speech.” The Holy Spirit comes to us in the most useful form for the work of salvation around us. The gifts he gives are to enable each of us to work for a good purpose in our situation. It is not for us to decide how the Spirit will come to us; we are to respond to him in the use of the gifts he gives us. “May the glory of the Lord last forever! May the Lord rejoice in his works! May my thoughts be pleasing to him. I find my joy in the Lord.”

Let us pray: O God, who by the mystery of today’s great feast sanctify your whole Church in every people and nation, pour out, we pray, the gifts of the Holy Spirit across the face of the earth and, with the divine grace that was at work when the Gospel was first proclaimed, fill now once more the hearts of believers. Through our Lord Jesus, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.        

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