Holy Spirit – Tony Lusvardi, S.J.

As I mentioned last week, this month I’ve been asked to contribute Sunday homilies to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review. Be sure to pay them a visit. Here’s this week’s contribution:

Homily for Pentecost (C)

Guido Reni, *Trinity of the Pilgrims* (1625-6)

Today’s feast of Pentecost is a great reminder to give credit where credit is due. For us Christians, both as individuals and as a Church, credit is due to the Holy Spirit.

This is something that is easy to forget because the Holy Spirit, being spirit, is unseen. The Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, becomes visible to us in the Incarnation. And in the Gospel, Jesus explains that when we see him, we see the Father. He makes God accessible to us in a visible, human way. Not everyone who sees Jesus, of course, recognizes him as God. Recognizing Jesus for who he is requires a certain openness from us, and, for some people—probably for most—it requires being opened up by the Holy Spirit. It requires the Holy Spirit to break through our blindness.

The necessity of the Holy Spirit’s intervention is made especially clear in the events we celebrate today. Jesus promises to send the Holy Spirit to his disciples after the Ascension. They certainly need it. We remember, of course, the behavior of the apostles at the time of the crucifixion—Peter denying Christ and the rest of the group scattering. Even after the Resurrection, the disciples seem uncertain. Out of fear, they lock themselves indoors. After the Ascension, they seem dumfounded by the event and require two angels to appear and shake them from their paralysis. I can’t blame them, actually; the events that they had witnessed were beyond any human experience. Knowing how to respond to them was beyond any normal human capacity. They needed the Spirit that Christ would send.

This weekend we celebrate Pentecost, which is sometimes called the birthday of the Church. You might remember that Jesus told his disciples that he had to go—he had to ascend into heaven—so that he could send the Holy Spirit to them. On Pentecost the Holy Spirit arrives. Before that, the disciples could see Jesus because he was a man—both God and man. So they could see him just as you can see me and I can see you. The Holy Spirit is God, too, but he’s Spirit, and spirits, by definition, are not physical things. You can’t see spirits.

So at Pentecost, the disciples don’t see the Holy Spirit. Instead, they see his signs. Those signs are a driving wind and flames shaped like tongues over the heads of the people there. One sign in particular tells us a lot about the Church. The people at Pentecost come from different countries, and they speak different languages, so normally they wouldn’t be able to understand each other. But when the Holy Spirit comes, they do understand each other. The Holy Spirit changes something inside of them.

Tag: Holy Spirit

Giving credit to the Holy Spirit: a homily for Pentecost

Pentecost homily