The Gospel of the Day – 2016.05.15
Receive the Holy Spirit
In
the evening of the first day of the week, the doors were closed in the room
where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. 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.’
After
saying this 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.’
(NJB)
The
New Creation
It is the feast of
Pentecost.
It is a day that
Christians throughout the world celebrate.
It is the commemoration
of the gift of the Holy Spirit, given by Jesus, to the church that was founded
in his name.
For the Church, this
moment marks the beginning of a new era. Jesus is gone, and the community of
believers is now in the hands of his disciples; primarily, and others who have
heard the call, like Saint Paul, who never met him (in the flesh).
The final departure of Jesus,
and the bequeathment of the Holy Spirit, is the beginning of the age of
prophecy, it is a time of discernment; it is the Apostolic age. In it the Church
evolves, it becomes a new creation. It is no longer merely a sect of Judaism,
but it becomes an international movement, it spreads throughout the Roman
Empire, and the new way is preached in new languages, in new tongues, in new
stories; such that Jesus himself had never imagined.
Jesus preached the way of
love, of service, of caring, of justice, of mercy; the way of Jesus can be
lived in silence, it does not require words.
The myth of Pentecost, as
related here in the Gospel of Saint John, narrates some of the struggles of the
early Church. It was written more than one hundred years after the death of Jesus,
and decades after the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. It was written
for the Church; in the era, when the differentiation among Christians and Jews
was concrete, and when the leaders in the new movement were trying to establish
their bona fides, as the heirs to
Jesus’ ministry.
The gift of the Holy
Spirit, released in a breath of ritual remembering; not the reception of
something new, for the Spirit of God animates all living beings, but the
acknowledgement of that reality in the passing on of Jesus’ mission.
The mission, to love, and
care for, to serve those in the greatest need, to love justice, and be merciful
in the face of the world’s horrors.
The passage from John
would have been a fine place to end the gospels; except for the final words
given to cement the authority of the church of the lives of the followers. The
naked grab for power, that marks the new creation as one firmly rooted in the
sinful world, and that is the way of things.
Pentecost
