Pentecost is the second great liturgical feast of the Old Testament, occurring a “week of weeks” (50 days) after Passover, and corresponding to the arrival of the Israelites at Mt. Sinai, fifty days after their Exodus from Egypt. It is here the covenant of the Law is inaugurated.[1]
Jesus the Messiah likewise used this sacred 50-day period to deliver the New Israel from the dominion of sin and evil by the Passover of his death and Resurrection, and at Pentecost inaugurate the Church.
Having now fulfilled his earthly mission, and having fully prepared his apostles to be the foundation of a new Israel, Jesus returns in glory to the Father’s right hand, from which place the Holy Spirit will proceed forth and accomplish the final phase of creation’s story.
The age of the Church is inaugurated with a special miracle that has remained a defining characteristic of the Church ever since: the miracle of tongues. As with all the great festivals in Jerusalem, people would come in pilgrimage from all over the Greco-Roman world (and beyond), bringing with them the new languages they had acquired in their diaspora. When the apostles emerged from the upper room and began to proclaim the good news that Jesus, who was crucified during the previous Passover, was the Messiah and that salvation and forgiveness were attainable through Baptism into his Name, the crowd was astonished to hear this message being spoken in their native tongues, even though the Apostles were speaking in their native language of Aramaic. The day of Pentecost completes a chapter of the Biblical story that began in ancient pre-history, where God fragmented the family of mankind into multiple languages at the Tower of Babel.[2]
This miracle has remained an outstanding feature of the Church. Even on this very day, throughout the world, the same message of Good News spoken by Peter and the Apostles on Pentecost Sunday is being spoken by their successors in the ministry to the crowds of today. And the message is being heard in all the tongues of the earth.
Only the Holy Spirit is able to overcome this insurmountable barriers between cultures, uniting disparate people as one family. In the Church, division is truly overcome. At the Mass, Christians regularly kneel down as true brethren and equals, with people they would otherwise never associate with. They can be in a completely foreign land with a foreign tongue they do not speak, and yet at the local Church be fully at home.
This quality of the early Christian Church was so notable and distinctive that by the end of the first century it was already a common description for them: the Christians were katolicos, universal, Catholic.[3]
The Church is not simply an organization or some kind of political establishment, even though it exists in society in an institutional way. Any attempt to analyze or explain it only in terms of sociological, political, or economic constructs will fail. The Church has a physical body in the world, but like man it also has a spiritual soul. And like man her spiritual soul eludes science and remains a mystery. The spiritual soul of the Church is the Holy Spirit of God, the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity. And the body of the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, born through Baptism, nourished in the Eucharist, healed in Penance: “Christ is like a single body, which has many parts; it is still one body, even though it is made up of different parts. In the same way, all of us, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether slaves or free, have been baptized into the one body by the same Spirit” (1 Cor 12:12-13).
This corporate reality of the Church as Christ’s Mystical Body enlivened by the Holy Spirit, must be experienced and lived on an individual level in each of her members. If the Church today seems weak and sickly in her mission to the world, it is because there is sin and spiritual illness in the cells of the Body. But the Divine Soul of the Church is indestructible, and is an infinite reservoir of healing, life, and youthfulness. On this day of Pentecost in the year of the Lord 2024, we must pray for a renewed outpouring of the Holy Spirit to burn, heal, reinvigorate, and renew the Church, and the face of the earth.
Come, Holy Spirit, come!
O most blessed Light divine,
Shine within these hearts of yours,
And our inmost being fill!
Heal our wounds, our strength renew;
On our dryness pour your dew;
Wash the stains of guilt away:
Bend the stubborn heart and will;
Melt the frozen, warm the chill.[4]
[1] The second reading from the extended Pentecost Vigil (Ex 19) highlights this aspect of Pentecost.
[2] The first reading of the extended vigil (Gn 11) highlights this aspect of Pentecost
[3] “Wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church” (St. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnæans, 8,2).
[4] Excerpts from the Pentecost Sequence