“All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” Acts 2: 1-11
“The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you.” John 14: 15-16, 23-26
We can all look back over the years and identify events which, and people who, have made a significant contribution towards shaping us into the people we have become. They may be the circumstances which led us into choosing the person who has become the love of our life, or the birth of our first child, or a teacher who recognised our potential and proceeded to affirm and encourage us. We might have vivid and grateful memories of our graduation day or the day when we started our first job or were successful in a promotion interview. While we will all have a different list of people and events, we can, in faith, acknowledge that they are all markers in the story of God’s love for us.
The way the Pentecost event is described in the Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles suggests that the events of that day left an indelible mark on the lives of the Apostles who, inspired by God’s Spirit, left a large crowd of multicultural pilgrims to Jerusalem in stunned amazement.
Let’s not forget that that Pentecost experience was the climax of a series of Spirit experiences in the lives of those first followers of Jesus. God’s Spirit was present in the encounter a few of them had with Jesus on the day when John the Baptist first pointed him out to them. Moreover, the Spirit was present and active in the many events in which they saw Jesus reaching out with healing and forgiveness to an endless line of needy and broken people. And God’s Spirit was present, if not recognised, even in times when they could not understand what Jesus was trying to teach them. It was only in retrospect that they came to appreciate that these were times when their senses were dulled to the Spirit’s presence. And hasn’t that been the way it has been with us, too?
As we come to reflect on the central message of the Pentecost descriptions in Acts ch 2 and John ch 14, we might be wondering why our readings today open with the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel. The people who set out to build a tower stretching to the heavens demonstrated unrestrained ambition, arrogance, division and rivalry. None of them was free to remove himself from the frantic activity. The story that unfolds relates how God intervened by interrupting their capacity to communicate with one another, and scattering them. The Greek word used for “scattering” can also be translated as unbinding or freeing them doing harm to one another and to themselves. God came among them and freed them from their folly, in order to protect them. It may well be that some of the people who have been agents of God’s Spirit in our lives have, in fact, saved us from our folly.
The real miracle of Pentecost was that all the pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem and the Apostles who addressed them were able to understand one another. That signalled that they had come together as a community that had been unified by the power of God’s Spirit at work among them.
Our Church and our world are in desperate need of another Pentecost. Our world is divided by insane warfare, unrestrained competition for power and possession, social inequalities, domestic violence, debates over rights to be armed with weapons, arguments over the imposition of trade tariffs. The hearts of people across the globe are in desperate need to risk being attuned to the practice of the selfless kind of love modelled by Jesus and inspired by the power of God’s Spirit.
The Pentecost event, described in today’s second reading from Acts, gives us a vision and a hope for community, collaboration and mutual respect made possible only through the action of God’s Spirit. As members of the people of God, walking in the footsteps of Jesus, we have a responsibility to start modelling the kind of community that God’s Spirit brought to birth in Jerusalem on the Pentecost we celebrate today, the Pentecost that brought together a diverse group of Apostles and pilgrims “in one accord”.
There is a variety of readings set down for the Eucharist celebrated at different times on Pentecost Sunday. There are readings for the Vigil of Pentecost, the morning Mass, and the Mass during the day. One of those readings is from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians in which he states: “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.” (1 Corinthians 12: 4-7) The implication of this is that God’s gifts are too numerous for any one person to carry them all. They can only be experienced in a community in which the diversity of members with different points of view and experiences allows each to give expression to who God is.
In our parishes and in the different groups to which we belong, we are invited by today’s readings to risk sharing our gifts and to invite others to share theirs, without being competitive, judgemental or overbearing.