Peace be with you - Living in the Spirit

Pentecost Sunday Homily

May 24, 2015

Pentecost, the great Feast of the Holy Spirit, is sometimes referred to as the birthday of the Church.  I always had an easy time picturing the first two Persons of the Holy Trinity.  God the Father looked like everyone's very old grandfather. Bearded, kindly.  Jesus, due to the last two thousand years of artistic tradition, is a piece of cake. The hard one, in my mind at least, has been the Holy Spirit. At least we can always fall back on the white dove.  

During the three years of his public ministry, Jesus traveled, slept, ate, and taught his Apostles.  He showed them, in various manners, what sharing in God’s grace would mean in their lives.  He gave them the power to work great wonders, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, casting demons out of the possessed.   Inevitably, though, as weak humans, they misunderstood, doubted, and argued amongst themselves.  This process of preparing them for their own public ministry continued throughout this time. Eventually, things came to a head during the passion, death.  After their triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, to the shouts of Hosana, our Lord’s instruction was at its most clear.  He explained to them that the Christ, the Messiah, was not to be, as some expected, a warrior king, but was, rather, to be seen as a suffering servant, to be seen as one who was willing to lay down his life for his friends.

Well and good, right?  No.  Instead of understanding his instruction, the apostles missed the point entirely.  At Jesus’ moment of greatest need, they deserted him, ran from him, denied they knew him.

As we all know, Jesus broke the bonds of death, and rose from the dead.  The apostles were huddled together, behind locked doors, in the upper room, fearful, paralyzed, afraid that they might share the same fate as he had. He appeared to the apostles, and very first words that the resurrected Lord spoke to them were “Peace be with you.” 

Peace be with you.  Don’t be afraid. It’s me.  I’m not a ghost.  Touch me.  See the wounds in my hands and feet.  Eat with me.  His first concern is to put them at ease, because all has been forgiven.  Many times before, Jesus had spoken about justice, about cutting the weeds and burning them, about the foolish being thrown into the street in the middle of the night to wail and gnash their teeth.  But now, he speaks to them words of peace.  Then he breaths on them.  This is not any random description.  The Greek word used here, pneuma, is a word of action, meaning Spirit and also wind or breath.  In giving them his Holy Spirit, he breathed new life into them, the very life of God.  This power transformed the apostles.  Instead of hiding, frozen with fear, they became fearless and powerful preachers.  Instead of being ruled, as Paul says in our second reading by works of the flesh: immorality, impurity, lust, idolatry, fury, selfishness, dissension, envy and orgies, they manifested the fruit of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Now, in our own lives, just as Jesus feeds us with his very Body and Blood, he enlivens us with his Spirit.  With this Spirit, we are no longer slaves to our flesh and our passions.  Now, with this Spirit, we can be strong, fearless, resolute.  Our lives will still have trials and tribulations. We are still beset with weakness and fear.  We will still be challenged by an ever increasingly secular society, a society that tries to tell us that black is white, that evil is good, that the unnatural is natural.  Now, instead of giving into those fears, we can, with the help of the Holy Spirit, respond that Right is still Right, that wrong is still wrong, that there is no such thing as your truth which is different from my truth, that truth is absolute, and real.  Now, we, who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified our flesh with its passions and desires. 

As Paul said to the Galatians, “If we live in the Spirit, let us also follow the Spirit.”