23/05/2026
*PENTECOST HOMILY YEAR A 2026*
Pentecost is the feast which marks the end of the great fifty-day period from Easter to Pentecost Sunday.
As Spiritans- the Congregation of the Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost Fathers and Brothers) is today 323 years old as it was founded on the Pentecost day.
By Baptismal implication all of us are Spiritans, by baptism and by association with us the Members of the Holy Ghost Fathers.
The name of the feast is derived from the Greek Pentecoste or “Fiftieth (day)”, which in turn corresponds to the Hebrew Shabuoth, the Feast of the weeks (cf Leviticus 23:9-21; 25:8-55; Exodus 34:22; Deuteronomy 16:10). The Jewish feast was a thanksgiving for the wheat harvest and took place seven weeks after the Feast of Unleavened Bread. By the first century of our era this feast also had an historical association with the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai as well as the covenants with Noah and Abraham.
Christian association with the feast began with Acts 2:1-45, during which the universal Church commemorates the Descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles, at the third hour in the Upper Room and the inauguration of apostolic preaching; fifty days after the Resurrection of Christ.
However, just as “Passover” (1st month Abib-March-April) took a new dimension and meaning within the Christian context during the Last Supper of our Lord with his Apostles, so too Pentecost (3rd Month Sivan-May-June) of old acquired a new meaning and became a new experience in the life of the apostles.Pentecost is a Christological mystery- that is, it pertains to Jesus Christ.
In a passive sense-namely, in relation to the one sent-Pentecost is the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Pneumatological mystery par excellence. But in the active sense-in relation to the sender-it is a mystery that pertains to Christ; “Exalted at the right hand of God he received the promise of the Holy Spirit from the Father and poured it forth as you see and hear” (cf Acts 2:33). The Holy Spirit is the “Spirit of the Son”, the third person of the Trinity insofar as he was received and historicized in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Pentecost is also a Christological mystery because of the reality of mystical body of Christ, (cf Eph 4:7). Christ gives the Spirit insofar he is the head and receive the Spirit insofar as he is the body-the Church.
There is an antithetical parallelism between the events of Babel (Gen 11:1) and Pentecost-one that contains both an element of affinity and one of contrast. The element of affinity is that in both cases a project of unity among all peoples, made possible and manifested by the unity of language is at issue. There every people of the earth “spoke the same language” (Gen 11:1), here each person hears the apostles “speaking in his own language” (Acts 2:6). The element of contrast consists in the type of unity pursued, and it is a radical contrast. The unity of Babel is human unity, for human glorification, ie a unity according to the flesh and that of the Pentecost is a unity according to the spirit. The difference is the centre.
So the Church is the anti-Babel rather than the new Babel. This passage from Babel to Pentecost signifies, to us an expression of Teilhard de Chardin, “to be decentred from ourselves and recentred on God”.
WHY THE PENTECOST/HOLY SPIRIT-The Pentecost is a celebration of God’s love and continued relationship with humanity. It is a celebration of the impartation of God’s life on humanity, a descent of transformative power of a personality, though non-corporeal from the Father, through the Son upon humanity. He is Advocate and our Sanctifier, who never also leaves His recipients the same when encountered but positively.
So when the Christians celebrate the Pentecost, she is not merely carrying out a memorial event, or just remembrance of when the Holy Spirit came to the apostles new. The Christians is actually asking God to bring into re-enactment asking the member of the Church, open up themselves so that the same action the Holy Spirit that continue to renew the Christians will keep up talking to the life of those who believe.
So Pentecost celebration is the celebration of the power of the Holy Spirit coming to man in order to achieve those things that God has proposed in your life. Don’t allow any other thing in your life take the place of the activity of the Holy Spirit, or to suppress the Holy Spirit.Refer to Old Testament account of man filled with the Holy Spirit and man fallen and other examples in OT- Moses of Exo 2:15 and later in chapter 3&4ff.
SIMILARLY: as Act 1: 8 shows,Pentecost is a time to awakenDEAD CHRISTIANSWEAK CHRISTIANSBACKSLIDDEN CHRISTIANSFEARFUL CHRISTIANS…
EXAMPLE: Compare the state of the church in John 20:19 , Act 1:12-14 and her state from Act 2:1ff, the former was the church behind closed doors, the church crippled by fear of the Jews, the church in a standstill, the church in chains and bo***ge, the church marking time in one place… Because it lacked the Spirit of power and dynamism. The later church is one empowered and is under the unction of the Holy Spirit- thus, it the church liberated from the Spirit of fear, a church not confined but dynamic and Apostolic.
As baptised Christians, this Pentecost is experiential and on-going and as such the extent of this experience and possession by the Holy Spirit is dependent on our individual dispositions to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. The prophecy of Ezekiel Chapter 47 reveals the different levels at which one can be filled by the Holy Spirit-the Water of Life. Suffice to say in view of Ezekiel’s prophecy that; some Christians are ankle-deep; some knee-deep; others waist-deep and only few are swimming in the Holy Spirit.
Being an on-going experience, the Sacraments we receive in Baptism, Confirmation, or Charismatic “Baptism in the Holy Spirit”, or even Ordination are in way not the terminus ad quem but a terminus a quo to this new Pentecost experience.
Thus, St Paul advised Timothy; “…fan into flame the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline” (II Tim 1:6, 7).
Thus, the Most Holy Catholic Church traditionally prays “Come Holy Spirit and fill the hearts of the faithful…”.
Without the Holy Spirit, God is far away, Christ stays in the past, the Gospel is a dead letter, and the Church is simply an organization, authority a matter of domination, mission a matter of propaganda, the liturgy no more than evocation, Christian living a slave morality. But in the Holy Spirit: the cosmos is resurrected and groans with pangs of the Kingdom, the risen Christ is there, the Gospel of the power of life, the Church shows forth life of the trinity, authority is a liberating service, mission is a Pentecost, the liturgy is both memorial and anticipation, human action is deified. (Bishop Ignatius of Latakia-at the Ecumenical Council of Churches at Uppsala; 1968).
Receive the Holy Spirit! It is a New Pentecost! Live in the Spirit! It is on-going! Happy Pentecost
