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).