This Sunday, Jesus Christ’s Last Breath Is a Driving Wind That Fills the Earth With Fire

Pentecost is springtime. The Holy Spirit comes in fire like the sun, and in the breath of Christ like a refreshing breeze, revivifying the Church like the sunny day after a beneficial rain.

Here are six takeaways for Pentecost Sunday, Year A, drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: When Jesus breathes on the apostles, his last breath was still very much on their minds.

In the Gospel for Pentecost Sunday, we are back in the Upper Room with the apostles on Easter Sunday when Jesus breathes on the Apostles and says “receive the Holy Spirit.”

Think of what that meant in that room at that time. The last time anyone saw Jesus alive was on the cross when, “crying with a loud voice, he said, ‘Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!’ and having said this he breathed his last.” He died; he was buried; he had failed. He was done and everyone knew it.

Except everyone was wrong. Here he is, back with them, in a glorified body that can somehow enter a locked room — but nonetheless a physical body that eats fish and pushes air through lungs. And now, after breathing his last and committing his spirit to the Father, he is breathing again and committing the Holy Spirit to his apostles.

His last breath from the cross has the same meaning as his new breath in the Upper Room. When he breathes his last on the cross, dying in our place, Jesus forgives us our sins. When he breathes on his apostles after the Resurrection, he gives them the ability to extend that forgiveness across time and space down to each of us today.

“Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says. “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.’”

Only God can forgive sins. But now Jesus’s representatives can, too, in his name, because they have the Holy Spirit, which is God himself. That’s what happens when Jesus shares the Holy Spirit with mankind. We are forgiven, remade, renewed — deified. From now on, we live our life from inside God.

Second: To drive the point home, 50 days later, at the Jewish Feast of Pentecost, everyone feels the breath of God.

At Pentecost, it’s as if the risen breath of the man-God has grown in strength to a gale as “suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind and it filled the entire house in which they were.”

Then, tongues of fire appear over their heads and they finally get to experience what John the Baptist promised: “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I … He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

St. John Henry Newman describes how the same thing happened to St. Philip Neri, his spiritual patron. “The Divine presence of the Holy Ghost descended upon him under the appearance of a ball of fire,” he said, “lodging in his breast” and causing palpitations of the heart. Receiving the Holy Spirit is the same kind but a greater degree of experience the disciples had when they said “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?”

St. Cyril of Jerusalem describes the Pentecost experience this way: “They partook of fire — not of burning but of saving fire; of fire which consumes the thorns of sins, but gives luster to the soul.”

The fire of the Holy Spirit is an unmistakable way of showing how closely we commune with God, the “all-consuming fire,” who Moses first encountered in the bush that was engulfed in flames but unburnt. It has the same effect on us that it had on the prophet Isaiah, whose mouth was touched by burning coal in a vision.

It is a fire that purifies, invigorates and inspires. But, paradoxically, it is more than that, because it also quenches us, nourishes us and replenishes us. How?

Third: The Pentecost Sequence we pray at Mass describes how the Holy Spirit works with us.

I find the poetic version of the Pentecost Sequence which is read or sung at Mass to be very hard to understand, but I pray the prose version of the sequence almost daily. You can find it here.

First, it describes the Holy Spirit’s fire as a light which shines in the hearts of the faithful “even in their darkest corners.” But then it switches metaphors. The Holy Spirit refreshes us like rain, bringing us “relief and consolation,” washing us clean, easing the weary, cooling temptations, softening and refreshing our parched soil so the Word can flourish, and healing the injured soul the way plants are healed, from the inside out.

It’s a beautiful description of the way the Holy Spirit brings grace, in much the same way a plant grows sturdy with both sunlight and water. It fills us with life so that we can thrive as who we are, where we are, in Jesus.  The Psalm explains what this looks like: “Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.”

Fourth: Thus, the Holy Spirit makes the Church into a kind of botanical garden.

The first thing the fire and water of the Holy Spirit does is create unity where none would otherwise exist. And the second, opposite, thing he does is create diversity where you would think that none could exist.

The First Reading is about unity. “When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all in one place together,” says Acts. They were praying, as instructed, for the Spirit to come — and the act of waiting and anticipating has united them. When he does come, they are united further. The international crowd assembled outside says, “Are not all these people who are speaking Galileans? Then how does each of us hear them in his native language?”

To this day, Catholics in India and Australia participate in the same liturgy. The same prayers are on the lips of the underground Church in China and the parishes of the Midwestern Unites States. The same Catholic language of worship, doctrine, and discipline unites Ghana and Guatemala; Poland and Paraguay; Finland and the Philippines — and the international gathering Peter addresses from the Upper Room in the Gospel will be repeated this Sunday outside the Pope’s window in Rome.

Fifth: But the Holy Spirit also makes a thousand distinctive flowers bloom in the Church.

The second reading shows the diversity of the Holy Spirit.

As St. Cyril of Jerusalem put it, “Water comes down from heaven as rain, and although it is always the same in itself, it produces many different effects, one in the palm tree, another in the vine, and so on throughout the whole of creation.”

In this way, “There are different kinds of spiritual gifts, but the same Spirit,” writes St. Paul. “To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit.”

In the Spirit, everyone’s gifts thrive to their full measure: lovers of silence find peace and calm, lovers of activity and interaction find encouragement and vigor. The Holy Spirit drives those dedicated to service and those dedicated to study; it fills the elderly, children, moms and young men. The Spirit will go where he is welcomed and will awaken what’s best in the culture of Vietnam and Papua New Guinea; it makes Costa Rico more Costa Rican and France more French.

Because of the Spirit, the Catholic faith is the faith of the brainy (St. Benedicta of the Cross), the poetic (St. John of the Cross), and the illiterate ( St. André Bessette). The Holy Spirit speaks in one way through conservatives who assent to the magisterium, and in another way through liberals who assent to the magisterium. We are the Church of bricklayers and grocers, bankers and chemists, housecleaners and professors, band leaders and bus drivers — everybody has a share in the Holy Spirit.

Sixth: The Holy Spirit unites them all in the breath of God — and the Body of his Son.

The Gospel explains how Jesus Christ does all of this in the Church. Think of everything he gave the Church from the cross. After he breathes his last, “one soldier thrust his lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out.” In his redemptive act, Christ poured forth his Holy Spirit in his breath, and the waters of baptism and blood of the New Covenant from his side. We receive this outpouring in the sacraments, and the sacraments change everything. They make us partners with his Spirit, branches of his vine, and the children of his Father. The breath of God changed Adam in the Garden from animal to man — and it changes us from citizens of earth to citizens of heaven.

So when you receive the Eucharist this Pentecost, thank him for the spiritual Garden of Eden he has placed us in through the Church, and let the wind of the Spirit drive you out into the world to help renew the face of the earth.

Image: Wikimedia commons

By Tom Hoopes