Ordinary Time resumes after Pentecost with the memorial of Mary, Mother of the Church, a recent feast that responds to the desire of many to acknowledge Mary’s role in the Church of Jesus Christ. Appropriately, the feast immediately follows Pentecost, when the Church was bornthrough the Holy Spirit. 

The readings for this feast are from the Book of Genesis and John’s gospel. Mary, the new Eve, stands at the Cross as life-giving blood and water flow from the side of her Son.

Mary will always be present in the Church, a woman of prayer, a mother proclaiming the promises of our Redeemer, Jesus Christ.

O God, Father of mercies, 

whose Only Begotten Son, as he hung upon the Cross, 

chose the Blessed Virgin Mary, his Mother, to be our Mother also; 

grant, we pray, 

that with her loving help, 

your Church may be more fruitful day by day, 

and exulting in the holiness of her children, 

may draw to her embrace all the families of the peoples.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,

who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

God, for ever and ever.

Amen.

We’re back this week into Ordinary Time in the Church Year, after the Lent and the Easter seasons. We resume reading from the Gospel of Mark and begin the First Letter of Peter.

In chapters 10 and 11 of Mark’s gospel, Jesus begins his journey to Jerusalem, a journey many do not understand. Like the rich young man, they decide not to join him. James and John also thought his journey would bring power and prestige, but it was not to be.

The First Letter of Peter is traditionally seen as written by the apostle Peter to Christians threatened by Nero’s persecution in the early 60s. Some modern scholars suggest the First Letter of Peter was written by a later author using Peter’s name.

We hear early baptismal teaching in this letter, reminding its listeners they are God’s own children: they have an inheritance that will never be taken away from them. Though the times be bad, don’t forget the treasure you have.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who in his great mercy gave us a new birth to a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,
kept in heaven for you
who by the power of God are safeguarded through faith,
to a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the final time.
In this you rejoice, although now for a little while
you may have to suffer through various trials,
so that the genuineness of your faith,
more precious than gold that is perishable even though tested by fire,
may prove to be for praise, glory, and honor
at the revelation of Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 1:3-9}

When times are bad we need to remember the promises of God.

A feast of Mary occurs every month in the calendar. Tomorrow we have the recent feast of Mary, Mother of the Church. This month we also have the feast of the Visitation (May 31), placed in the calendar between the Feast of the Annunciation (March 15) and the Birth of John the Baptist (June 24) We’re reminded of Mary’s role as a bearer of good news to her older cousin Elizabeth, who will give birth to John. Mary always brings her Son to us too.

This year May 31st is Trinity Sunday. Might be good to celebrate the Visitation feast on Saturday, May 30th.

On May 25, Pope Leo will release his important letter on Ai, Magnifica humanitas.

The sending of the Holy Spirit

When the Lord told his disciples to go and teach all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, he conferred on them the power of giving men new life in God.

  He had promised through the prophets that in these last days he would pour out his Spirit on his servants and handmaids, and that they would prophesy. So when the Son of God became the Son of Man, the Spirit also descended upon him, becoming accustomed in this way to dwelling with the human race, to living in men and to inhabiting God’s creation. The Spirit accomplished the Father’s will in men who had grown old in sin, and gave them new life in Christ.

  Luke says that the Spirit came down on the disciples at Pentecost, after the Lord’s ascension, with power to open the gates of life to all nations and to make known to them the new covenant. So it was that men of every language joined in singing one song of praise to God, and scattered tribes, restored to unity by the Spirit, were offered to the Father as the first-fruits of all the nations.

  This was why the Lord had promised to send the Advocate: he was to prepare us as an offering to God. Like dry flour, which cannot become one lump of dough, one loaf of bread, without moisture, we who are many could not become one in Christ Jesus without the water that comes down from heaven. And like parched ground, which yields no harvest unless it receives moisture, we who were once like a waterless tree could never have lived and borne fruit without this abundant rainfall from above. Through the baptism that liberates us from change and decay we have become one in body; through the Spirit we have become one in soul.

The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and strength, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of God came down upon the Lord, and the Lord in turn gave this Spirit to his Church, sending the Advocate from heaven into all the world into which, according to his own words, the devil too had been cast down like lightning.

  If we are not to be scorched and made unfruitful, we need the dew of God. Since we have our accuser, we need an advocate as well. And so the Lord in his pity for man, who had fallen into the hands of brigands, having himself bound up his wounds and left for his care two coins bearing the royal image, entrusted him to the Holy Spirit. Now, through the Spirit, the image and inscription of the Father and the Son have been given to us, and it is our duty to use the coin committed to our charge and make it yield a rich profit for the Lord.

Today’s the Feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples of Jesus. Our gospel describes the coming of the Holy Spirit, not at Pentecost, but Easter Sunday. The disciples of Jesus are locked in the upper room in Jerusalem in fear.  Jesus, risen from the dead, breathes on them: “Receive the Holy Spirit,” 

The Spirit brings not only  forgiveness and peace, but they leave the room and go out into the world they were afraid of. The Spirit is with them. 

 I think a lot of us today are like those disciples in the upper room–  afraid  of the world we live in. We may think our world is unmanageable. We’re closing our doors and shutting the windows. We’re afraid. We’re distancing ourselves from the world around us. 

The Feast of Pentecost celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit, whom  Jesus promised, not just to his disciples but to the whole world. The Spirit helps us as individuals, but the Spirit’s sent to our world. “Come, Holy Spirit, and renew the face the earth.” 

We know the Holy Spirit differently than we know Jesus.  Jesus is God come  in human flesh; he’s like us. He’s born a child, lives as a human being, he reacts to events and people around him, he speaks in human words, he suffers and dies and rises. However distant our time is from his, we see and hear him as human like ourselves. 

It’s more difficult to describe the Holy Spirit, isn’t it? The scriptures use symbolic ways describing the Third Person of the Trinity. Our gospel today describes the Spirit as the breath of Jesus Christ. He breathed on his disciples and gave them the Spirit. He promises that the Holy Spirit will remain with us to “complete his work on earth and bring us the fullness of grace.”

Our first reading todays describes the Spirit is a driving wind, tongues of fire empowering those he rests on with wisdom, with new words. They reach out to the whole world and act bravely, not fearfully.

The New Testament describes the Holy Spirit in a number of ways.  The Spirit is a dove who rests on Jesus when he’s baptized in the Jordan by John. 

I find myself  particularly attracted that this image.

There’s a bird feeder outside where I live that’s attracts a lot of house sparrows, but some doves are regular visitors. I notice when a cat comes or a hawk flies over, the sparrows disappear immediately, but the doves are the last to go and first back at the feeder. Now, are they simple? 

 Could we say also they’re fearless? They’re not afraid of their enemies.

Think about the story of Noah in the ark. Noah wonders if the flood waters are gone, so what does he do ? He sends out a dove, who returns with a twig from an olive plant. There’s life there, you can get out of the ark. The dove is not afraid of floodwaters and dangerous places. 

The dove, the Holy Spirit, leads Jesus after his baptism  into the desert, the realm of Satan. The Spirit isn’t afraid of chaos or evil, but recreates the world.  The Holy Spirit is with us today. We don’t have to be afraid..

St. Gregory of Nyssa seems to allude to the fearlessness of doves in his Commentary on the Song of Songs:

“When love has entirely cast out fear, and fear has been transformed into love, then the unity brought by our Savior will be realized, for all will be united with one another through their union with the supreme Good. They will possess the perfection ascribed to the dove, according to our interpretation of the text “one alone is my dove, my perfect one.”

Gregory of Nyssa

The Church in its unity speaks in the language of every nation

The disciples spoke in the language of every nation. At Pentecost God chose this means to indicate the presence of the Holy Spirit: whoever had received the Spirit spoke in every kind of tongue. We must realise, dear brothers, that this is the same Holy Spirit by whom love is poured out in our hearts. It was love that was to bring the Church of God together all over the world. And as individual men who received the Holy Spirit, speaks in the language of every people.

  Therefore if somebody should say to one of us, “You have received the Holy Spirit, why do you not speak in tongues?” his reply should be, “I do indeed speak in the tongues of all men, because I belong to the body of Christ, that is, the Church, and she speaks all languages. What else did the presence of the Holy Spirit indicate at Pentecost, except that God’s Church was to speak in the language of every people?”

  This way is the way in which the Lord’s promise was fulfilled: No one puts new wine into old wineskins. New wine is put into fresh skins, and so both are preserved. So when the disciples were heard speaking in all kinds of languages, some people were not far wrong in saying: They have been drinking too much new wine. The truth is that the disciples had now become fresh wineskins, renewed and made holy by grace. The new wine of the Holy Spirit filled them, so that their fervour brimmed over and they spoke in manifold tongues. By this spectacular miracle they became a sign of the Catholic Church, which embraces the language of every nation.

  Keep this feast, then, as members of the one body of Christ. It will be no empty festival for you if you really become what you are celebrating. For you are the members of that Church which the Lord acknowledges as his own, being himself acknowledged by her, that same Church which he fills with the Holy Spirit as she spreads throughout the world. He is like a bridegroom who never loses sight of his own bride; no one could ever deceive him by substituting some other woman.

  To you men of all nations, then who make up the Church of Christ, you the members of Christ, you, the body of Christ, you, the bride of Christ – to all of you the Apostle addresses these words: Bear with one another in love; do all you can to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Notice that when Paul urges us to bear with one another, he bases his argument on love, and when he speaks of our hope of unity, he emphasises the bond of peace. This Church is the house of God. It is his delight to dwell here. Take care, then, that he never has the sorrow of seeing it undermined by schism and collapsing in ruins.

If I do not go away, the Comforter will not come to you

After Christ had completed his mission on earth, it still remained necessary for us to become sharers in the divine nature of the Word. We had to give up our own life and be so transformed that we would begin to live an entirely new kind of life that would be pleasing to God. This was something we could do only by sharing in the Holy Spirit. 

  It was most fitting that the sending of the Spirit and his descent upon us should take place after the departure of Christ our Saviour. As long as Christ was with them in the flesh, it must have seemed to believers that they possessed every blessing in him; but when the time came for him to ascend to his heavenly Father, it was necessary for him to be united through his Spirit to those who worshipped him, and to dwell in our hearts through faith. Only by his own presence within us in this way could he give us confidence to cry out, Abba, Father, make it easy for us to grow in holiness and, through our possession of the all-powerful Spirit, fortify us invincibly against the wiles of the devil and the assaults of men. 

  It can easily be shown from examples both in the Old Testament and the New that the Spirit changes those in whom he comes to dwell; he so transforms them that they begin to live a completely new kind of life. Saul was told by the prophet Samuel: The Spirit of the Lord will take possession of you, and you shall be changed into another man. Saint Paul writes: As we behold the glory of the Lord with unveiled faces, that glory, which comes from the Lord who is the Spirit, transforms us all into his own likeness, from one degree of glory to another. 

  Does this not show that the Spirit changes those in whom he comes to dwell and alters the whole pattern of their lives? With the Spirit within them it is quite natural for people who had been absorbed by the things of this world to become entirely other-worldly in outlook, and for cowards to become men of great courage. There can be no doubt that this is what happened to the disciples. The strength they received from the Spirit enabled them to hold firmly to the love of Christ, facing the violence of their persecutors unafraid. Very true, then, was our Saviour’s saying that it was to their advantage for him to return to heaven: his return was the time appointed for the descent of the Holy Spirit.

The Father’s gift in Christ

Our Lord commanded us to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In baptism, then, we profess faith in the Creator, in the only-begotten Son and in the gift which is the Spirit. There is one Creator of all things, for in God there is one Father from whom all things have their being. And there is one only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things exist. And there is one Spirit, the gift who is in all. So all follow their due order, according to the proper operation of each: one power, which brings all things into being, one Son, through whom all things come to be, and one gift of perfect hope. Nothing is wanting to this flawless union: in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there is infinity of endless being, perfect reflection of the divine image, and mutual enjoyment of the gift.

  Our Lord has described the purpose of the Spirit’s presence in us. Let us listen to his words: I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. It is to your advantage that I go away; if I go, I will send you the Advocate. And also: I will ask the Father and he will give you another Counsellor to be with you for ever, the Spirit of truth. He will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine.

  From among many of our Lord’s sayings, these have been chosen to guide our understanding, for they reveal to us the intention of the giver, the nature of the gift and the condition for its reception. Since our weak minds cannot comprehend the Father or the Son, we have been given the Holy Spirit as our intermediary and advocate, to shed light on that hard doctrine of our faith, the incarnation of God.

  We receive the Spirit of truth so that we can know the things of God. In order to grasp this, consider how useless the faculties of the human body would become if they were denied their exercise. Our eyes cannot fulfil their task without light, either natural or artificial; our ears cannot react without sound vibrations, and in the absence of any odour our nostrils are ignorant of their function. Not that these senses would lose their own nature if they were not used; rather, they demand objects of experience in order to function. It is the same with the human soul. Unless it absorbs the gift of the Spirit through faith, the mind has the ability to know God but lacks the light necessary for that knowledge.

  This unique gift which is in Christ is offered in its fullness to everyone. It is everywhere available, but it is given to each man in proportion to his readiness to receive it. Its presence is the fuller, the greater a man’s desire to be worthy of it. This gift will remain with us until the end of the world, and will be our comfort in the time of waiting. By the favours it bestows, it is the pledge of our hope for the future, the light of our minds, and the splendour that irradiates our understanding.

Our weekday readings from the Acts of the Apostles and from John’s Gospel end on these last days of the Easter Season. Today’s reading from Luke describes Paul’s two final years in Rome (Acts 28:16-20,30-31), There he preaches to everyone who came to him “with complete assurance and without hindrance”, even though he’s under house arrest, and so the gospel is now preached in Rome, the center of the world.

Readings from John’s Gospel these last days end with Jesus’ prediction of Peter’s death and John’s role as a witness to the gospel, and the important reminder “There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written.” (John 25 ) 

Strange, though, that Luke, who describes the death of Stephen the deacon in great detail, says nothing about the deaths of Peter and Paul. He certainly knew the circumstances of their martyrdom in 62 or 63 AD, some years before he wrote Acts.Why didn’t he write about it? It might have cleared up a lot of questions about their deaths that some modern historians have raised. 

Perhaps Luke did not want to draw attention to that tragic time when Nero’s persecution put so many innocent Christians to death? Not the time to open those wounds? 

We have the graves and remains of Peter and Paul at the Vatican and outside Rome’s walls, but no account of their death that someone like Luke could give. I wonder why he didn’t write about it.

More importantly, both Luke in Acts and John in his gospel want to remind us that following Jesus Christ means following him into the mystery of his death and resurrection.