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Pope Benedict XVI- Homilies |
Homily on Pentecost
"A Flame ...
That, in Burning, Brings Forth the Better and Truer Part
of Man"
St. Peter's Square
May 23, 2010
zenit.org
Dear brothers and sisters,
In the solemn celebration of Pentecost we are
invited to profess our faith in the presence and in
the action of the Holy Spirit and to invoke his
outpouring upon us, upon the Church and upon the
whole world. Let us make our own, and with special
intensity, the Church’s invocation: “Veni, Sancte
Spiritus!”
It is such a simple and immediate invocation, but
also extraordinarily profound, which came first of
all from the heart of Christ. The Spirit, in fact,
is the gift that Jesus asked and continually asks of
his Father for his friends; the first and principal
gift that he obtained for us through his
Resurrection and Ascension in to heaven.
Today’s Gospel passage, which has the Last Supper as
its context, speaks to us of this prayer of Christ.
The Lord Jesus said to his disciples: “If you love
me, follow my commandments; and I will pray to the
Father and he will give you another Paraclete who
will remain with you forever” (John 14:15-16).
Here the praying heart of Jesus is revealed to us,
his filial and fraternal heart. This prayer reaches
its apex and its fulfillment on the cross, where
Christ’s invocation is one with the total gift that
he makes of himself, and thus his prayer becomes, so
to speak, the very seal of his self-giving for love
of the Father and humanity: Invocation and donation
of the Spirit meet, they interpenetrate, they become
one reality. “And I will pray to the Father and he
will give you another Paraclete who will remain with
you forever.” In reality, Jesus’ prayer -- that of
the Last Supper and the prayer on the cross -- is a
single prayer that continues even in heaven, where
Christ sits at the right hand of the Father. Jesus,
in fact, always lives his priesthood of intercession
on behalf of the people of God and humanity and so
prays for all of us, asking the Father for the gift
of the Holy Spirit.
The account of Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles
-- we listened to it in the first reading (Acts
2:1-11) -- presents the “new course” of the work
that God began with Christ’s resurrection, a work
that involves man, history and the cosmos. The Son
of God, dead and risen and returned to the Father,
now breathes with untold energy the divine breath
upon humanity, the Holy Spirit. And what does this
new and powerful self-communication of God produce?
Where there are divisions and estrangement he
creates unity and understanding. The Spirit triggers
a process of reunification of the divided and
dispersed parts of the human family; persons, often
reduced to individuals in competition or in conflict
with each other, reached by the Spirit of Christ,
open themselves to the experience of communion, can
involve them to such an extent as to make of them a
new organism, a new subject: the Church. This is the
effect of God’s work: unity; thus unity is the sign
of recognition, the “business card” of the Church in
the course of her universal history. From the very
beginning, from the day of Pentecost, she speaks all
languages. The universal Church precedes the
particular Churches, and the latter must always
conform to the former according to a criterion of
unity and universality. The Church never remains a
prisoner within political, racial and cultural
confines; she cannot be confused with states not
with federations of states, because her unity is of
a different type and aspires to transcend every
human frontier.
From this, dear brothers, there derives a practical
criterion of discernment for Christian life: When a
person or a community, limits itself to its own way
of thinking and acting, it is a sign that it has
distanced itself from the Holy Spirit. The path of
Christians and of the particular Churches must
always confront itself with the path of the one and
catholic Church, and harmonize with it. This does
not mean that the unity created by the Holy Spirit
is a kind of homogenization. On the contrary, that
is rather the model of Babel, that is, the
imposition of a culture of unity that we could call
“technological.” The Bible, in fact, tells us (cf.
Genesis 11:1-9) that in Babel everyone spoke the
same language. At Pentecost, however, the Apostles
speak different languages in such a way that
everyone understands the message in his own tongue.
The unity of the Spirit is manifested in the
plurality of understanding. The Church is one and
multiple by her nature, destined as she is to live
among all nations, all peoples, and in the most
diverse social contexts. She responds to her
vocation to be a sign and instrument of unity of the
human race (cf. “Lumen Gentium,” 1) only if she
remains free from every state and every particular
culture. Always and in every place the Church must
truly be catholic and universal, the house of all in
which each one can find a place.
The account of the Acts of the Apostles offers us
another very concrete indication. The universality
of the Church is expressed by the list of peoples
according to the ancient tradition: “We are
Parthians, Medes, Elamites …,” etc. One may note
that St. Luke goes beyond the number 12, which
always expresses a universality. He looks beyond the
horizons of Asia and northwest Africa, and adds
three other elements: the “Romans,” that is, the
western world; the “Jews and proselytes,” encompass
in a new way the unity between Israel and the world;
and finally “Cretans and Arabs,” who represent the
West and the East, islands and land. This opening of
horizons subsequently confirms the newness of Christ
in the human space, in the history of the nations:
The Holy Spirit involves men and peoples and,
through them, it overcomes walls and barriers.
At Pentecost the Holy Spirit manifests himself as
fire. His flame descended upon the assembled
disciples, it was enkindled in them and gave them
the new ardor of God. In this way what Jesus had
previously said was realized: “I have come to cast
fire upon the earth, and how I long that it already
be burning!” (Luke 12:49). The Apostles, together
with the faithful of different communities, carried
this divine flame to the far corners of the earth;
in this way they opened a path for humanity, a
luminous path, and they worked with God, who wants
to renew the face of the earth with his fire. How
different this fire is from that of wars and bombs!
How different is the fire of Christ, spread by the
Church, compared with those lit by the dictators of
every epoch, of last century too, who leave a
scorched earth behind them. The fire of God, the
fire of the Holy Spirit, is that of the bush that
burned without being consumed (cf. Exodus 3:2). It
is a flame that burns but does not destroy, that, in
burning, brings forth the better and truer part of
man, as in a fusion it makes his interior form
emerge, his vocation to truth and to love.
A Father of the Church, Origen, in one of his
homilies on Jeremiah, reports a saying attributed to
Jesus, not contained in the sacred Scriptures but
perhaps authentic, which he puts thus: “Whoever is
near me, is near the fire” (“Homilies on Jeremiah,”
L. I [III]). In Christ, in fact, there is the
fullness of God, who in the Bible is compared to
fire. We just observed that the flame of the Holy
Spirit burns but does not destroy. And nevertheless
it causes a transformation, and it must for this
reason consume something in man, the waste that
corrupts him and hinders his relations with God and
neighbor.
This effect of the divine fire, however, frightens
us, we are afraid of being “burned,” we prefer to
stay just as we are. This is because our life is
often formed according to the logic of having, of
possessing and not the logic of self-giving. Many
people believe in God and admire the person of Jesus
Christ, but when they are asked to lose something of
themselves, then they retreat, they are afraid of
the demands of faith. There is the fear of giving up
something nice to which we are attached; the fear
that following Christ deprives us of freedom, of
certain experiences, of a part of ourselves. On one
hand, we want to be with Jesus, follow him closely,
and, on the other hand, we are afraid of the
consequences that this brings with it.
Dear brothers and sisters, we always need to hear
the Lord Jesus tell us what he often repeated to his
friends: “Be not afraid.” Like Simon Peter and the
others we must allow his presence and his grace to
transform our heart, which is always subject to
human weakness. We must know how to recognize that
losing something, indeed, losing ourselves for the
true God, the God of love and of life, is in reality
gaining ourselves, finding ourselves more fully.
Whoever entrusts himself to Jesus already
experiences in this life peace and joy of heart,
which the world cannot give, and it cannot even take
it away once God has given it to us.
So it is worthwhile to let ourselves be touched by
the fire of the Holy Spirit! The suffering that it
causes us is necessary for our transformation. It is
the reality of the cross: It is not for nothing that
in the language of Jesus “fire” is above all a
representation of the cross, without which
Christianity does not exist.
Thus enlightened and comforted by these words of
life, let us lift up our invocation: Come, Holy
Spirit! Enkindle in us the fire of your love! We
know that this is a bold prayer, with which we ask
to be touched by the flame of God; but we know above
all that this flame -- and only it -- has the power
to save us. We do not want, in defending our life,
to lose the eternal life that God wants to give us.
We need the fire of the Holy Spirit, because only
Love redeems. Amen.
[Translation by Joseph G. Trabbic]
Look
at the One they Pierced!
This page is the work of the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and
Mary
