Pentecost Sunday, Year B, May 19, 2024

 
“The Spirit unifies our body, overcoming and resolving the internal conflict that we so often perceive between the desires of the flesh and the desires of the spirit. We become one in ourselves.” Happy Pentecost Sunday!!!

 DOCTRINE AND FAITH

(Acts 2, 1-11; Ps 103 (104); Gal 5,16-25; John 15,26-27;16,12-15; Pentecost Sunday, Year B, May 19, 2024)

 “The Spirit of truth will guide you into all the truth” (Jn 16:13). This is what Jesus promises to his disciples. There is a gradual progression of revelation: God gradually lets us know the truth of his face, and we understand it better and better if we let ourselves be guided by his Spirit. The feast of Pentecost itself testifies to this progression in the history of salvation. Originally, it was the harvest festival, in which God was thanked for the first fruits of the harvest. With the Exodus, Pentecost becomes the feast of the alliance, in which Israel thanks God for the gift of freedom and the Torah. With the Pasch of Jesus at Easter, on Pentecost, the gift of the Spirit is celebrated, which offers us true freedom and is the only law of the believer, not external, but internal; not freedom as a simple liberation from constraints and chains, but freedom as the possibility of loving, in joy and peace, in fidelity and meekness... that is, in all those manifestations of the Spirit that Paul lists writing to the Galatians.

God's gifts for our lives are many. First of all, there is the gift of the fruits of the earth which nourish our body. Then, there is the gift of freedom and of law that guides our actions, so that we do not remain slaves to our own selfishness and wrong passions. Finally, as a synthesis and fulfillment of all the other gifts, there is the gift of the Spirit, which makes us participants in the very life of God.

 The first gift of God is the fruits of the earth which we nourish ourselves with. We are a body and God takes care of our body. He nourishes it, makes it grow, does not leave it prisoner in a tomb of death; he resurrects it, glorifies it, making it a participant in the resurrection of Jesus. What is a glorified body, already participating in the resurrection? It is not simply a body that no longer knows death, that lives forever. Paul, writing to the Galatians, states that “the flesh has desires that are contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit has desires that are contrary to the flesh; these things oppose each other, so that you do not do what you would like” (5,17). We understand these words easily, because we all have a life experience of them. We are inhabited by multiple and conflicting desires, which divide us, pushing us here and there, preventing us from doing the good that we would like to do. A glorified body is a unified, pacified body, in which the many desires of our existence converge towards a single direction, that of life and a life to the full.

 The second gift of God for which we give thanks is the gift of freedom and of law that guides our action, offering it criteria, points of reference to anchor itself on. We are not just a body; we are a body that acts and relates to others; we have desires that must continually confront and meet, sometimes clash, with the desire of others. God also takes care of our relationships and his gift allows us to understand each other, even if we speak different languages, as happens in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is one, but (Luke narrates in the Acts) is divided into many tongues of fire, which rest on each one, so that the many spoken languages return to being a single language, in the fire of love, which is the Spirit.

Finally, the third gift, which summarizes the previous ones, is the gift of communion with God. The Spirit leads us into a full and happy life because it makes us participants in the very life of God. Jesus recalls this in the Gospel of John, when he states that the Spirit "will take from what is mine and declare it to you" (16,14). And what belongs to him, Jesus explains immediately afterwards, when he states: "All that the Father has is mine" (v. 15). What Jesus possesses and shares with us is the very relationship that he lives with the Father, the exchange of love that always exists between the Father and the Son, their communion. The Spirit introduces us into this same relationship of love, he ensures that what belongs to the Father and what belongs to Jesus also becomes ours.

 Here are three gifts of the Spirit to invoke; three different gifts but united by the same common thread, that of unity and communion. The Spirit unifies our body, overcoming and resolving the internal conflict that we so often perceive between the desires of the flesh and the desires of the spirit. We become one in ourselves. The Spirit unifies our relationships, allowing us to understand each other despite the diversity of languages spoken by each. We thus become one among ourselves. Finally, the Spirit unifies by weaving bonds of communion between us and God, until we become one thing: we in God and God in us. We become one with God.

Walking in the Spirit means walking towards the truth of this unity. The works of the flesh are plural and shatter the heart; on the contrary, that of the Spirit is a single fruit that unites by weaving communion. Luke says that the disciples were all together in the same place when the Spirit came upon them. Where there is the Spirit, there is communion; where there is communion, the Spirit can manifest the abundance of its fruits. + John I. Okoye

(graphics  by Chukwubike OC)