The Church celebrated one of the greatest solemnities this past Sunday, on that is as great and solemn as the solemnities of Easter, Christmas and the Ascension of the Lord. We celebrated the solemnity of Pentecost, and it can be said that it is also the real birthday of the Church. Yet, in many ways, this truth is hardly appreciated, nor is it commonly preached in many Catholic churches in the world, and this is indeed a travesty.
One of the common links of all the solemnities of the Church is that they are the celebrations of the great and important gifts given to us by God himself. Christmas celebrates the gift of the Son of God given to humanity in the truly human form of Jesus Christ himself. No Christmas gift that can be procured from anywhere can rival or match the immense magnitude of this gift from the greatest giver ever existed. Comparable to that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the tomb after three days from his gruesome and tragic death on Good Friday, which shows that it is by God’s grace and divine love, that life’s seeming great insurmountable obstacle of death can be overcome! Easter shows us that death may seem like an end, it is really surmounted and overcome by God himself. And that gift is not just for Jesus, but for anyone who believes and accepts Jesus as the Son of God, and adheres to the teachings that Jesus came to proclaim to the world. The gift of eternal life is for all believers in the Catholic Church.
Pentecost is regarded so highly by the Church because it is also the celebration of a great gift given by God to all of humanity. It is the gift of God himself, and this is God in the Holy Spirit, who is one person of the Trinitarian God himself, composed of God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ), and God the Holy Spirit.
In dramatic form, on that first Pentecost day in Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples (who were locked in a room for fear of the Jews), and the other believers gathered in the city. Coming first in the form of a powerful wind, the Holy Spirit manifested itself in tongues of fire that rested upon the heads of the disciples in that locked room. This gift of the Holy Spirit gave the disciples the hitherto unseen ability to speak to that gathering of the believers in the city who came from the different parts of the world in their own languages, about the Jesus, his death, resurrection and exaltation as the Messiah of the world. The listeners were bewildered that all of them could hear and understand the disciples in their own languages, and it was a miracle that so many of the believers witnessed and partook in.
The Holy Bible is a revelation of the creation of the world, and one of the stories that it tells in chapter 11 of Genesis that the people of the world united in building a massive tower that would reach the heavens, and in constructing this tower, the people would make a name for themselves and also it would help to prevent the people from being scattered. But God disrupted the construction of this tower by confusing the language of the workers such that they no longer understood one another. The result was that this tower never reached completion, and the people were dispersed over the face of the earth, each speaking their own language.
Bible stories reveal not just an isolated event of the past, but also tells us of the reality of our own situation in life. There is a rich prevalence of social media in our world today. It has helped so many people to connect with their family members who live in different parts of the world, and that is a good thing. But it has also led to a very fragmented world because social media has brought along with it different and diverse sets of values and truths, making real and deep conversations and understanding not just challenging, but also virtually impossible. So, what gives? Was the Pentecost event two thousand years ago just an isolated miracle, or is it trying to show that it really needs to happen in our world today?
One of the challenges facing any preacher of the Good News is that he is facing a world where there is a great fragmentation of truths because each of us has our own different sources of the truth that we adhere to.
At that Pentecost event, everyone at that gathering understood everyone else in their own language. In effect, all became on language.
It was a manifestation of the truth that Jesus came to proclaim, and that Jesus spoke the language of charity, peace, forgiveness, humility, love, long-suffering, fidelity, faith and chastity. Jesus came to show that it is only when we speak the language of all those truths that we will begin to understand each other.
If Jesus came to speak that language of God to save all of sinful humanity, may all of us believers also do the same, and through it, see the world slowly change and transform, and in that way, build an effective new tower of Babel that will eventually allow us to reach God and love and worship Him face to face.
Happy and blessed Pentecost to everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment