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