Pentecost Sunday / Msgr. Owen F. Campion
The Sunday Readings
Pentecost, the feast celebrated this weekend, is the greatest day of the Church’s year, save for Easter and Christmas. It is interesting in this sense. It is the only ancient Jewish feast still observed by the Church.
In the beginning, Christians almost invariably were of Jewish origins. Quite early in Christian history, the Apostles themselves took the Gospels far and wide. As a result of these missionary efforts, many came into the Church who had not been Jewish.
When the Church emerged after Christ’s ascension and the first Pentecost, a series of political upheavals were causing great stresses in traditional Judaism.
All these developments meant that the attention that once would have been paid to Jewish feasts, just as the Lord observed these feasts, faded and eventually ended altogether. Pentecost is the lone exception.
For Jews, Pentecost celebrates God bringing them together as a people. In this, more than just ethnic or genetic unity was achieved. They were unified as a people in their mission to be true to God and to profess God before all the nations.
Christians see Pentecost as the holy day on which God the Holy Spirit put new life into the Apostles. Receiving strength and power from the Holy Spirit, the Apostles then went forward to proclaim salvation in Christ throughout the world.
They formed the Church founded by Jesus. They took the Church and the Gospel to the world. The Church grew, always as a community.
The first reading recalls this process. The Apostles continued the Lord’s work. Through them, the Lord continued to live in the world.
For the second reading, the Church presents a passage from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Absolute faith in Christ as the Savior is key. Without grace that accompanies this absolute commitment and enables faith, humans are confused and liable to fatal misstep.
St. John’s Gospel is the source of the last reading, a resurrection narrative. The risen Lord appears before the Apostles. As God, possessing the Holy Spirit, Jesus gives the Apostles the power to forgive sins, extraordinary because only God can forgive sins.
Reflection
For weeks, the Church rejoiced in Christ’s resurrection, joyously proclaiming that Jesus is Lord and that he lives.
As this season has progressed, the Church, through the readings at Mass, also called us to realize what effect the Resurrection continues to have upon us and upon human history. The salvation achieved by Christ on Calvary will never end. It is for all time and for all people. Mercy and justice will reign supreme.
It is accomplished from one age to the next by the Lord’s disciples spread around the world.
Bound together by completely free and uncompromised individual decisions empowered by grace to follow Christ, true Christians are united in the Church. They share their identity with Christ and the grace of the Spirit. As the Acts of the Apostles reveals, they are part of the community still gathered around the Apostles, under the leadership of Peter, and still looking to the Apostles for guidance and direction. Thus, Christ continues to live in the Church, offering salvation and hope to all.
Practically speaking, Christians, however zealous, cannot be ships passing each other silently in the night. They bear together the mission to bring God’s mercy and wisdom to the world. Christians belong to and are one in the Church. They need each other.
At this feast of Pentecost, the Church’s lesson is therefore very contemporary, immediate and personal. We all belong, as did the first Christians, to the Church built on the foundation stones of the Apostles, a community created by God to bring divine mercy to weary and wandering humans.
This feast invites us into the very framework of holiness and witness formed by Jesus. None of us is alone in faith. We share a common bond with Christ. We share in the mission of Christ. †