Pentecost [B] Acts 2:1-11; I Cor 12:3b-7, 12-13; or Gal 5:16-25, Jn 20:19-23

When we look around our little church here, we will find that there is no shortage of images, mostly in the form of statues and paintings of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. There is a long tradition of images within the church, beginning with the paintings in the Catacombs in Rome. The Holy Spirit, whose feast we celebrate today, does not lend itself all that easily to imagery. The traditional image of the Holy Spirit is the dove. That is drawn from the gospel accounts of the baptism of Jesus. There are two other images of the Holy Spirit in this morning’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Luke says that all who gathered in one room heard what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven; he goes on to say that something appeared to them that seemed like tongues of fire. Just as the evangelists do not say that there was an actual dove at the baptism of Jesus, Luke does not say that there was an actual wind and fire at Pentecost. There is something about the Holy Spirit that does not lend itself to any kind of concrete representation because the Holy Spirit cannot be seen as such. Yet, the Holy Spirit is profoundly real.

 

There is a great deal in our universe that is real but is not visible to the naked eye. We may need a microscope or a powerful telescope to see it. What we see with our eyes is only a fraction of our physical world. The Holy Spirit is part of the spiritual world, and so it is not surprising that we cannot see the Spirit with our physical eyes.

 

In today’s second reading, for example, Saint Paul, uses an image drawn from nature; he speaks about the fruit of the Spirit. He is talking about the visible impact of the Spirit on someone’s life. We may not be able to see the Holy Spirit, but we can see the impact of the Spirit in someone’s life, just as we cannot see the wind, but we can see the impact of the wind on people and objects of various kinds. Paul is saying, ‘wherever you find love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control, the Spirit is there at work’. The Spirit becomes visible in and through these qualities, these virtues. The person who possessed those qualities in abundance was Jesus because he was full of the Holy Spirit, full of the life of God.

 

Paul gives a full list of works of the Spirit and their opposites, the works of the flesh, that is, the works of natural, unreformed, and selfish behaviour. Christ has sent His Spirit so that our behaviour may be completely changed, and we may live with His life. The works of the flesh are not merely the gross, ‘fleshly’ distortions of greed, avarice, and sexual license, but include also such failings as envy and quarrels. Paul’s list is a useful little checklist to apply to our own way of life. The desires of self-indulgence are always in opposition to the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are in opposition to self-indulgence: they are opposites, one against the other; that is how we are prevented from doing the things that we want to.

What is self-indulgence and why is it the greatest threat to a life in the Spirit? Self-indulgence, simply put, is the desire for pleasure. If we look carefully at people today and modern society in general, we see immediately that they are dominated by the passion of love of pleasure or self-indulgence. Human beings have a constant tendency towards this terrible passion, which destroys their whole life and deprives them of the possibility of communion with God. The passion of self-indulgence wrecks the work of salvation.

According to the Fathers of the Church, self-indulgence is one of the main causes of every abnormality in man’s spiritual and bodily organism. It is the source of all the vices and all the passions that assault both soul and body. St Theodore, Bishop of Edessa, teaches that there are three general passions that give rise to all the others: love of pleasure, love of money, and love of praise. Other evil originate from these three, and subsequently “from these arise a great swarm of passions and all manner of evil.”
The antidote and cure to this predilection to sin is living a vibrant life in the Spirit. St Paul assured us that “If you are guided by the Spirit you will be in no danger of yielding to self-indulgence, since self-indulgence is the opposite of the Spirit.” In the list of the fruits of the Spirit listed by Paul, self-control is listed last instead of first even though we may assume that self-control is the clearest antidote to self-indulgence. And yet, love is listed first. The reason is that love always seeks the well-being of the other rather than oneself, and if there is no love even in the ascetic practices of our faith, we are merely empty gongs, and everything we do, even if it has the appearance of a virtue, is self-serving.

It is precisely because we continue to struggle with self-indulgence that we have to constantly allow the Spirit to fortify us and strengthen our resolve to be holy and faithful to the Lord.

Today, we remember how the Risen Lord, breathed His Spirit on the apostles and on all of us, saying: “Receive the Holy Spirit!” The Spirit comes to each one of us as a gift but also as a challenge to the ongoing conversion of our hearts and minds. As the source and giver of all holiness, let’s implore the Holy Spirit to keep us in grace and remove those artificial obstacles, habits, and ways of thinking that prevent us from living fully in and for Christ. Let’s also listen to the exhortation of Paul:  “Walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.  If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit” (Gal 5:16, 25).

 

 THE FEAST OF ASCENSION [B]  (Acts 1:1-11; Eph 1:17-23 or 4:1-13; Mk 16:15-20)

Today, we are celebrating the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord. The Ascension marks the completion of Jesus' earthly and bodily presence on earth.  Jesus had to return to his Father so that he could send the Holy Spirit to make his work continue in and through his disciples.

The feast of the Ascension is not about the departure of Jesus somewhere above us, but, rather, about the ways that the Lord is present among us, helping us to share in his work of proclaiming the gospel everywhere. How do we proclaim the gospel? We do so not so much by our words but by our lives.

 Rebecca Pippert, the author of Out of the Salt Shaker: Into the World, tells of a time she was sitting in her car at a traffic light with her window rolled down. As the light turned green a car drove by and its occupant threw something into her car hitting her on the cheek. It didn’t hurt but she was so startled that she pulled over immediately. When she unrolled the paper, she discovered it was a Gospel tract. She says she was the apparent victim of what she refers to as “torpedo evangelism.” —the torpedoer meant well. But he or she did the wrong thing for the right reason in the wrong way. We can engage people in conversation about their Faith and their relationship with God in a non-judgmental manner. We can encourage. We can invite. We can offer counsel. But we leave the hard work, the heart work, up to Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

It is through the Holy Spirit that the risen Lord works among us and within us to enable us to become fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself. Today’s feast is very closely related to next Sunday’s feast, the feast of Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. The period after the resurrection, when the risen Lord was present to his first disciples in visible, bodily form, had to come to an end before he could be present to disciples of every generation, to us today, in and through the Holy Spirit.

In the first reading, it is said that the risen Lord was lifted up while the disciples looked on, and after he was lifted up, they were ‘staring into the sky’. It is as if they did not want the visual connection between themselves and the Lord to end. They peered after him, anxious to see him and to know that he saw them. After the crucifixion they thought they would never see him again; then he appeared to them in bodily form, although in a transformed state. Now, that period of his visible risen presence to them was coming to an end, he took his leave of them again. According to that first reading, while they were staring into the sky, two men in white put the question to them, ‘Why are you men from Galilee standing here looking into the sky?

The question that the two men ask in our first reading today suggests that the disciples were looking in the wrong direction if they wanted to see the Lord. They won’t see him standing there, looking into the sky. They will have to look elsewhere to see the Lord. The Lord remains visibly present to his disciples, although in a different way from how he was visibly present immediately after his resurrection. The second reading suggests where the disciples need to look to continue seeing the Lord. That reading makes reference to the Body of Christ, the church. According to that reading, when the Lord ascended, he gave gifts to his followers. ‘Each of us’ - in the words of Paul - ‘has been given his or her own share of grace, given as Christ has allotted it’. Because of the Lord’s return to God, we have each been greatly graced and gifted through the sending of the Spirit. The sending of the Spirit and the gifts that accompanied the Spirit’s sending brought into being the Body of Christ, of which we are all members through faith and baptism. It is above all in and through his Body, the Church, that the risen Lord is present and visible in the world. Rather than looking up into the sky to see and meet the risen Lord, we are invited to look towards the members of Christ’s body. We, the baptized, are all called to be the sacrament of Christ, the place where Christ is powerfully present in the world.

Though, the Lord was taken up, was taken away, yet he was working with them. The Lord did not ascend to distance himself from the church, but to be closer to the church. Again, St. Paul understood this very clearly as a result of his meeting with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus. After persecuting the church with great zeal, the risen Lord appeared to him and asked him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ In persecuting the church, Saul came to realize that he was persecuting the Lord because, as today’s gospel says, the Lord was working with those who were witnessing to him. Today’s feast then is more about presence than about absence. We celebrate the Lord’s presence in the church. His Spirit has been poured into our hearts and, together, we are his body.

We pray on this feast of the Ascension that we would be faithful to the task that the Lord has given us, and that we would come to recognise the ways the Lord is working with us as we seek to do that task.

 EASTER VI [B]: Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48; I Jn 4:7-10; Jn 15: 9-17

One of the greatest gifts in life is friendship. The Book of Sirach in the Old Testament declares, ‘A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter: whoever has found one has found a treasure. For many married people, their best friend is their spouse. All of us, hopefully, whether married or not, have a faithful friend, someone who loves us as we are, who listens to us when we need someone to share with, who stands by us in good times and in dark times. It is difficult to get through life without the love of a friend.

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus says to his disciples, ‘I call you friends.’ What Jesus says to them, he says to each one of us. He says that he reveals his friendship for us in two ways. Friends trust one another enough to share what is deepest in their hearts. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus says ‘I have made known to you, everything I have learned from my Father’. What was deepest in Jesus’ heart was his relationship with God, his Father, and he has shared that relationship with us. In the words of the second reading, he has revealed God to be Love. He hasn’t simply spoken to us about God’s love but has given expression to God’s unconditional love in his whole way of life and, especially, in his death. When we speak of God’s love as unconditional, we must understand that His love is not something that can be bought. It is not given to us as a quid pro quo, a reward for good behavior, or payment for some devotion or sacrifice which we have made to earn that love. St John asserts that God loved us while we were still sinners. His love for us is not dependent on us being righteous or worthy. No sacrifice or price we are willing to pay would be sufficient to purchase it. It is not fully true to say that God’s love makes no demands on us. In fact, a great deal is demanded of us. And here we have it in both the second reading and the gospel that God’s love challenges us to a new way of life that makes certain demands of us.

Firstly, we are required to obey and keep His commandments. His commandments are an expression of His will and our refusal to obey those commandments is rebellion against His will. To claim that we love God and yet oppose His will would be a lie.

Secondly, predominant among God’s commandments is the commandment to love others: “Love one another, as I have loved you.” This is the benchmark by which all love is to be measured. We do not just love those who have been good to us, who have treated us well, whom we are indebted to. Love extends even to those who have done nothing to deserve it, those outside our circle of friends and family, and even those whom we consider enemies. Of course, we are not commanded to “like”, as “liking” or “not liking” someone is purely subjective. True love is never subjective. To love, instead, is to intend the well-being of the other person. And this is something that can be accomplished and measured objectively. This is why St John can argue that “Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love.”


Jesus also says that he has befriended us in a complete way, ‘so that his own joy may be in us and our joy be complete’. The gift of true friendship is a blessing that always brings us joy. A faithful friend is one of the great joys of life. Jesus himself knew the joy of God his Father’s friendship. By befriending us, he wants us to share in his joy. By loving us as God loves him, he wants us to know a joy that nothing in this world can give us, a joy that is complete. We can seek happiness in all kinds of places, but true joy, a joy that is deeply rooted and lasting, is found when we open ourselves up to the gift of the Lord’s faithful friendship. We will only fully experience the joy Jesus speaks about in eternal life when we will be fully opened up to God’s love, but here and now Jesus wants us to begin to experience this joy by receiving the gift of his friendship.

 

The primary way we remain in Jesus’ loving friendship is by allowing his faithful love to flow through us and embrace the lives of others. We are to love one another as he loves us, to find ways of befriending one another as he has befriended us. Jesus poured out on us the love he received from God his Father, and we are to pour out on others the love we receive from Jesus. When this happens, then our joy will be complete. May the risen Lord who commanded his disciples to love one another as he had loved them give us the grace to love others as he loves us without counting the cost.