Homily for Pentecost Sunday--John 20:19-23
Today on this great solemnity of Pentecost we celebrate the birth of the Church. It is the day when the Holy Spirit came upon the Blessed Virgin Mary and then onto the Apostles present in the upper room. But not before those first bishops and priests had spent the previous nine days in deep intimate prayer with the Blessed Virgin Mary.
In that novena of prayer she helped them to prepare and open their hearts for the coming of the promised divine Paraclete, the Advocate and Helper. If you want to draw closer to the Holy Spirit, imitate the apostles and stay close to Mary in intimate prayer; she is intimately close to Holy Spirit because she is the spouse of the Holy Spirit. With her yes to God, her fiat, Jesus was conceived in the flesh in her womb by the Holy Spirit. If we give our yes, our fiat to God through Mary, the Holy Spirit will conceive Jesus in our souls through Holiness, and we too will become, like Mary, intimate friends of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the One who came with many great gifts on Pentecost to renew the face of the earth. The Holy Spirit gave the apostles seven-fold gifts of grace. These were supernatural gifts-gifts that enabled them to live for God alone, in joyful intimacy and friendship with Him. When the power of the Holy Spirit came upon them they became great witnesses to the world to Jesus and to the truth of His teachings in the face of great difficulties and even outright persecution.
For us, like the apostles, the help we need from on High, that is the gifts of the Holy Spirit, are given to us at well. We need not only His divine strength and light, but also the Hope and joy of divine friendship with Him. With His divine gifts, the Holy Spirit wants to continue His work of renewing the whole world, beginning within our own hearts (this is the way the world is always renew; it begins with our own hearts and then flows out from us). The Holy Spirit wants to use us in order to bring His light to the souls we come in contact with on a daily basis, sharing with them the hope and joy that is alive within us and which comes from this divine guest and friend of our soul.
Let us look closer at these supernatural gifts that the Holy Spirit gave to the apostles and to us, beginning at our baptism, confirmed at our confirmation (which was our personal Pentecost, and which are fed, and can grow and come to fruition in our lives through the worthy reception of the other sacraments, especially Confession and the Holy Eucharist. These supernatural gifts are: WISDOM, KNOWLEDGE, UNDERSTANDING, FORTITUDE, COUNSEL, PIETY, AND FEAR OF THE LORD.
First, the gift of wisdom. Wisdom gives us a spiritual awareness of the love of God and allows us to order and judge the things of this world from this perspective. In other words, with wisdom in our lives we don’t put the things of this world before the Creator of things. The gift of wisdom helps us not only to know the things of God, but to experience them in our lives-to taste them so to speak through faith. Like St. Francis, through the beautiful things of creation, we experience the Creator, but the creation leads us to fall madly love with the Creator. Through the gift of wisdom, we live for God alone, and this deepens our adoration of Him. We then want nothing else but Him.
In the gift of Understanding, or also called the gift of Intelligence, we are given the understanding of divine things, especially when we read the Holy Scriptures and study the teachings of the Church which are the teachings of Christ. With this gift, the Holy Spirit gives us the desire to know and understand better the truths of our Catholic faith and how intricately they affect our relationship with Christ and with one another. We then understand better God’s saving plan for our lives; it becomes relevant in our daily lives—We begin to see more clearly how to live out our Catholic faith in our lives thus becoming holy and truly happy.
The gift of fortitude gives us strength to live our faith. This strength is not just for doing extraordinary things; like martyrdom, but this gift also helps us in the ordinary struggles we have in life, especially our daily struggle against sin. It helps us to persevere even in our darkest moments. With this gift the Christian does not compromise in fulfilling his duty even in the face of insults and unjust attacks. With this gift we become courageous and persevere on the path of truth and uprightness, in spite of a lack of understanding and hostility coming from others who sometimes are in our own family or even in the Church.
Another gift of the Holy Spirit that can help us in important decisions in our lives- what would be the best thing to do? This help comes from the gift of COUNSEL. The Gift of Counsel directs us in our everyday life. It helps us, to prudently choose the right thing to do in a given circumstance. The Gift of Counsel enlightens our conscience in the moral choices which daily life presents--we become moral persons who accept and lives according to moral absolutes. No matter how intricate and difficult the situation is, aided by this great Gift, we are better able to see what to do in a given situation in order to please God and fulfill His Holy Will thus living life to the fullness with great joy. We can then help-counsel others to do the same.
The Gift of PIETY helps us to live out the commandment to love God and love our neighbor. True Piety is knowledge that God is love, that he loves us, and loves each person infinitely. Our response should be to worship and adore God properly, reverently and devotedly, at Holy Mass and before His true, physical presence in the Holy Eucharist, in order to love God more and to love those whom he loves. With this gift, the Holy Spirit heals our hearts of every form of hardness and un-forgiveness, and opens them to tenderness towards God and our brothers and sisters. With this gift, we feel urged to treat all people with great kindness and friendliness, to do good even to those who wrong us, to love and forgive even those who hate us and persecute us. We all need this gift, just think about how often each day we are called to love people who are human speaking hard to love.
Lastly, the Gift of the FEAR OF THE LORD is a special gift, which helps us to dread and avoid sin. The gift of fear is not like the fear we experience in a horror film or the fear of being hit by a lightening bolt from heaven. It is not a fear in which we are afraid of God. It is our sin, which causes us to fear God in this wrong way.
The true gift of fear from the Holy Spirit is a holy fear, a fear of not hurting someone who loves you so much and whom who want to love in return. When we love someone, we want to avoid offending or hurting him. This is the type of fear we should have with our Lord This fear is like the fear of our child who loves his daddy so much that he fears doing anything that would offend Him. This gift of fear can help us to avoid sin, doing that what is offensive and displeasing to God and harmful to others and ourselves. With this Holy fear we longer fear the loss of human respect, we are set free from our slavery to human respect, we fear only offending God who love us so much.
Today at this Holy Mass, let us ask the Holy Spirit to help us with all of his gifts. We need these gifts so very much. He is an all knowing Expert who will guide us in our decisions and difficulties if we ask Him; He will help us to make the right choices in our lives, to choose this action or that; He will help us in our relationships, to get along better with those we love, especially in our families; He will help us in the times we have no idea what to do, situations that seem hopeless or impossible such as the illness or death of a loved one, our own serious personal illness, the loss of our job or our struggle in finding new employment. And when we feel lost, if we cry out to the Holy Spirit, He will immediately, and I do mean immediately, rush to our aid and begin to show us the way. We can simply say with great trust, “Holy Spirit help me for I am lost.”
We need more than ever the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the darkness of our present age so we don’t lose hope; be assured, the Holy Spirit will definitely renew the face of the earth, beginning with a renewal of the Church. And so we need these gifts to be able to stand up for the truths of our beautiful Catholic faith so the world doesn’t lose hope; to be able, as a matter of love and charity for souls, to stand up in defense of all the teachings of our Church, especially the ones that the world seems more and more to reject. Better yet, not just to defend them but to make them shine in the world by living them with great fidelity so that our very lives may become living Gospels, witnesses to the truth that comes from God alone and which alone sets the hearts of men free and saves them. The Holy Spirit will help us, like the apostles to leave our fear behind.
If, with the help of the Blessed Mother, we turn to him daily in prayer the Holy Spirit will become our most intimate friend and guest of our soul. He will enlighten us to those things that keep us from a closer relationship, loving union, with Him and the Father and the Son. He will, as a true friend, show us our sins so that we can be healed of them in the Sacrament of Confession. He will then make us pure of heart so that we can, through the eyes of faith, see the face of God in the Holy Eucharist, adoring Jesus and receiving Him reverently, with great faith and love in order to become one with Him and through Him one with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. We can then, like the apostles, empowered by the gifts of the Holy Spirit be Jesus’ faithful, trusting and fearless witnesses to all the earth, proclaiming the Gospel by our holiness of life, thus bringing God and His love alive in us to a world so hungry for His love and so desperately in need of the fullness of His truth.
Let us pray:
Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love.
V. Send forth Thy Spirit and they shall be created.
R. And Thou shalt renew the face of the earth.
O God, Who didst instruct the hearts of the faithful by the light of the Holy Spirit, grant that by the same Spirit we may be truly wise, and ever more rejoice in His consolation. Through Christ our Lord.
Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed the Virgin Mary, your well beloved spouse.
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