Homily for Pentecost
By Fr Gabriel Everitt OSB
20 MAY 2018
Pentecost is the great feast day of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is pictured variously in Scripture as a dove – so for example in the baptism of Jesus – or as in today’s feast as wind and fire, as he descends on the apostles– just as we heard in today’s first reading. In another passage in St John he is portrayed as a torrent of water welling up in the heart of the believer. These passages might suggest that the Spirit is an impersonal force, but in the farewell discourses of St John’s Gospel, in chapters 13 to 17, from which today’s gospel came, he emerges more clearly as a divine Person, the third Person of the Holy Trinity: he is there referred to as ‘another advocate’ as ‘Spiritus Paraclitus’ as in this passage, in which Jesus promises his disciples ‘I will pray the Father and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever, the Spirit of Truth’. In the Creed we profess our belief in ‘the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life … [who is] worshipped and glorified.’ The references to ‘Lord’ and to worship confirm the Church’s faith that the Holy Spirit is a divine Person, co-eternal and co-equal, with the Father and the Son.
When this Holy Spirit comes on the apostles at Pentecost, he makes the biggest difference. Crucially important as obviously is the apostles’ experience of and meeting with the risen Jesus, at first (and maybe not just at first) that experience of resurrection leaves them terrified. They remain huddled behind locked doors. Even as the significance of the resurrection, dawns upon them they struggle to comprehend and believe – St Luke puts it vividly in his Gospel (24:41) ‘their joy was so great they could not believe’. At Jesus’ ascension they stare into the sky, mouths hanging open in astonishment. An angel chides them ‘why are you men of Galilee [ie country bumpkins, simple folk] staring into the sky’. They are told to prepare for something, but even now they are still behind the locked doors of their fear; in Acts 1:14 we are told that they were gathered together with Mary, the mother of Jesus, praying. They are praying for the coming of the Spirit that they have been promised. There is a vital connection here; they pray for the Spirit. And what happens? What happens is that the Spirit comes.
And when the Spirit comes, he makes the biggest difference, bigger even than their experience of resurrection and ascension. The Spirit transforms them: where there was incomprehension, now there is knowledge and understanding, where there was fear, now there is courage and power. These of course are four of the great gifts of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the most dramatic example of the change, of this biggest difference, is the apostle Peter. In Acts chapter 4 Peter and John heal a crippled man at the beautiful gate of the Temple by invoking the name of the risen Jesus. This, the first of their post Pentecost miracles, which proves their possession of the powerful Holy Spirit of the risen Christ, causes a sensation in the Temple, thus annoying the Temple police, who haul them in front of the authorities, namely the high priests Caiaphas and Annas. Peter of course has been here before and famously so. The last time he was here he was crouching frightened before a fire; it was the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin and three times, so painfully Peter in his fear denied even knowing Jesus. But now he has been transformed, he has been transformed by the Spirit and full of the Spirit and fearlessly he proclaims and courageously bears witness to his faith in the risen Jesus. What has made the difference is that Peter has prayed for the gift of the Spirit and his prayer has been answered. He has indeed received the Holy Spirit.
And us? For us it is the same. If we pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit, we too will receive the Spirit. This too is the promise of Jesus to us: ‘Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened’. You will receive the Holy Spirit. But is this true? My answer to you is: yes it is. Your prayer will be answered. But you may say to me, no it is not. I have prayed for things and I have not got them. This too of course is very true. It has also been my experience like everybody else’s and sometimes very painfully. A number of you in this Abbey Church this morning will be going to Lourdes on pilgrimage for the first time this summer. I went for the first time with the Ampleforth pilgrimage in 1989 and on that first pilgrimage I had a very difficult experience. I was looking after a very sick pilgrim, an Old Amplefordian, who had a dreadful disease, which was killing him very slowly and horribly. I stood by him at the Anointing Mass praying like anything, so I thought, for him to be healed by the power of the Holy Spirit of the risen Jesus, just as did Peter and John in the Temple. Nothing happened so it seemed and two years later I heard that he had died after suffering very horribly, just as I had seen him do, every day of those two years.
So it must seem that my telling you that your prayer will always be heard is a lie. Maybe it worked for Peter and John, but maybe we do not just have enough faith today and it does not work for us. However, I do not think I am lying to you, nor do I think Jesus was lying to you when he said ‘Ask and you will receive …’ To understand how this can be so we need to look at another mystery of the Christian faith, which does not at first sight have an obvious, or indeed any, connection with the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and this is the mystery of the agony of Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane. As we know, Jesus prays there ‘Father let this cup pass me by … yet nevertheless not my will but yours be done?’ God the Father did not answer Jesus’ prayer, the cup did not pass him by, just as it did not my OA friend. So was the Holy Spirit absent? Why, if this was his experience, does Jesus also say ‘ask and you will receive’? The answer to this is that the Holy Spirit was not absent from Jesus in his agony in the garden, any more than he is ever absent from anyone he asks to carry his cross, be it ever so painful. St Luke puts it this way: ‘Father if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done. Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him’. John’s version of the garden of Gethsemane goes this way ‘Now is my heart troubled and what shall I say “Father save me from this hour? No it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father glorify your name”. Then a voice came from heaven “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.” The crowd that was there heard it and said it had thundered, others said an angel spoke to him’. This seems important to me: the crowd thought it thundered, in other words a sound like the rush of a mighty wind. It was the coming of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus’ words are true. Ask and you will receive. The Holy Spirit will come to you. In St Luke’s version of this saying, he puts it this way: if you know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven, give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him’. The point is this: there is one gift we need, one gift to pray for. It is to pray for today’s gift of the Holy Spirit and it is this gift which will absolutely always be given. This is Jesus’ promise to you. It did not save Jesus from the agony of the Cross, it did not save my friend in Lourdes from his agony in the way that at the time I willed him to be saved. Sometimes God will heal a loved one and in fact I have experienced this too, but if healed it is for a reason and we do not always know what that reason is or the reason why it may at other times not be given. But still God will always give us his Spirit and always his will will be done – ‘nevertheless your will be done’. Paul in Romans chapter 8 says this of the Holy Spirit: ‘the Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness, for when we do not know how to pray properly’ – indeed quite what to pray for – ‘the Spirit personally’ – the Spirit is a person remember – ‘makes our petitions for us in groans that cannot be put into words’. Then a couple of lines later Paul boldly adds this – as bold as Jesus saying ‘ask and you will receive’ – ‘in the end everything works together for the good for those who love God’. Everything works together for the good for those who love God.
‘I will pray the Father and he will send you another Advocate the Spirit of Truth and he will be with you for ever.’ Ultimately God only has one gift to give us and it is precisely today’s gift. God has only one gift to give us, but it is the only thing that can be for ever. It is himself; ‘how much more will the Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him’. God can only ever ultimately give us this one gift, but it is the only one which actually we need, this gift of himself, the gift of God, which is the Holy Spirit, who is God.