Receiving the Holy Spirit and Being Enriched by the Father of the Poor, Pentecost Sunday, May 28, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Pentecost Sunday 2023
May 28, 2023
Acts 2:1-11, Ps 104, 1 Cor 12:3-7.12-13, Jn 20:19-23

To listen to an audio recording of the homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Ten days ago, on the Solemnity of the Ascension, I was privileged to be present with pilgrims from Columbia and Focus in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, the twelfth-century edifice built over a fourth-century shrine built over the first century building on Mount Zion that Christians during the first centuries preserved as the first Church in Christianity, where God instituted four Sacraments. The room was crowded with several groups of pilgrims from all over the world and quite noisy. But with the help of our Whispers listening devices, we were able to ponder how Jesus gave us there the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Holy Orders on Holy Thursday, the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation on Easter night, and how God the Father and God the Son sent God the Holy Spirit for the first Sacrament of Confirmation on Pentecost. Being the Solemnity of the Ascension, however, we pondered above all the prayer of the early Church, how Jesus at his Ascension a short distance away on the Mount of Olives had enjoined the apostles not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the “promise of the Father” about which they had heard him speak, for “in a few days,” he continued, “you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” The apostles and the other followers of Jesus returned to the Upper Room and very wisely huddled around Mary to learn from the one who was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit at Jesus’ virginal conception and who continually lived as a Spouse of the Holy Spirit how to get ready to receive the “promise of the Father” and respond to his action. We entered into that ecclesial prayer, beseeching the Holy Spirit, to fill us with the gifts of knowledge, understanding, wisdom, prudence, reverence, awe and courage, as well as with the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-mastery. We chanted the Veni Creator Spiritus and today’s sequence the Veni Sancte Spiritus. We asked the Holy Spirit, the Father of the Poor, the Great Consoler, the sweet guest and refreshment of the soul, the giver of every good gift, the living font, fire, and spiritual unction, the great Consoler and most blessed Light, to come to fill us with heavenly grace and his sevenfold gifts, to illumine our senses and hearts, fill us with love, strengthen our bodies, repel our adversaries, give us his peace, grant us rest and refreshment in work and solace in suffering, wash us of our sins, heal our wounds, correct our errors, irrigate what is lifeless, bend what is resistant, warm what is cold, help us grow to know, love and believe better in Him, God the Father and God the Son, and lead us to merit a virtuous life, salvation and eternal joy. I urged each of my fellow pilgrims to keep up this prayer — begun there in the Upper Room, just as where it had begun 1993 years ago with the Mother, apostles and first disciples of Jesus — alive over the next ten days as we returned home and awaited Pentecost.
• Today every Catholic Church and chapel across the world is an Upper Room where we implore the same outpouring of the Holy Spirit that descended upon the Church at her beginning. We turn to the Pater Pauperum, the “Father of the Poor” with poverty of spirit, recognizing how much we need him, the Dator Munerum, or “Giver of Gifts,” to provide us what we need to live as Christians and to carry out the mission of love Jesus has entrusted to us. And with the insistence of the decenarium of prayer with Mary behind us, Jesus comes to us in the Gospel, just like he did the apostles in the Upper Room, and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Jesus said those words on Easter night. He had told us during the Last Supper — incredibly — that it was to our advantage that he go, because if he didn’t go, the Spirit wouldn’t come to us, but if he did, he would send him to us (Jn 14:26). And immediately after his departure in the new and eternal Passover, the first thing Jesus did was to breathe on the apostles the Holy Spirit and tell them to receive that Gift, a gift that would be perfected 50 days later. Today Jesus says to us anew, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” He wants us to open our hearts and align our lives, like Mary, like his first followers, to the work of the Holy Spirit within us.
• The reality is that many of us, even though we confess every Sunday at Mass and each day when we pray the Rosary, “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” often our faith in the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity is more conceptual than life-changing. St. Josemaria taught that for many of the faithful, the Holy Spirit remains the “Great Unknown.” Many of us are like those disciples in Ephesus who responded to St. Paul’s question, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?,” by humbly admitting, “We have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” Such a practical ignorance can affect even greats in the Church. Pope Benedict, at World Youth Day in Australia fifteen years ago, said, “The Holy Spirit has been in some ways the neglected person of the Blessed Trinity,” and confessed that it was only as a 37-year-old priest teaching theology that he began to grasp the importance that the Holy Spirit should play in his life as a priest and professor. It was only then that he began to know him intimately. He stated, “It is not enough to know the Spirit; we must welcome Him as the guide of our souls, as the ‘Teacher of the interior life’ who introduces us to the Mystery of the Trinity, because He alone can open us up to faith and allow us to live it each day to the full.” And we don’t have to be members of the Charismatic Renewal to allow the Holy Spirit to become that teacher and guide. If we wish to understand the faith, if we wish to live it, if we wish to pass it on, we must allow ourselves to be led by the Holy Spirit, even if we, like the future pope, are beginning as adults. For us, the “great unknown” must become the “great known,” the teacher, the leader, the consoler, the advocate. “The Holy Spirit,” Pope Benedict summarized, “is the highest gift of God to humankind,” the one for whom it was better for Jesus to ascend so that we could welcome him. That is how important the Holy Spirit is. That’s how important the feast of Pentecost is. That’s how important the Sacrament of Confirmation is.
• So today it’s not enough for us to focus on the Holy Spirit for a day and pray and praise him. Jesus instructs us in the Gospel to do more: he tells us to receive him. And we shouldn’t receive him superficially, on hardened, rocky or thorny soil. Jesus wants us to receive the Holy Spirit on good and fruitful soil, to let him do his work, to fill us with his gifts, to help us experience his fruit, to sanctify us from within, and to fulfill in us what he has been sent to accomplish. And so we can ask: What is it mean, practically, to receive the Holy Spirit well?
• To receive the Holy Spirit means, first, to cooperate with him as he seeks to teach us all things, guide us into all truth, declare to us the things that are to come and remind us of everything Jesus has taught us. This means a hunger to learn, to pray, to treasure Sacred Scripture.
• Second, to receive the Holy Spirit means to cooperate with him as he seeks to “dwell in us and be in us” (Jn 14:17) This means that we take the reality of our being a Temple of the Holy Spirit seriously and try to keep our Temple as beautiful and clean as the most zealous sisters keep their chapels and the most hardworking sacristans keep the marble, bronze and wood of their cathedrals sparkling.
• Third, to receive the Holy Spirit means to cooperate with him in prayer. As St. Paul says, the Holy Spirit comes “to the aid of our weakness for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us” (Rom 8:26). He helps us learn how to pray so that our life might become an existence made prayer and enable us to live our whole life in union with God. St. Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words, that he helps us to cry out “Abba, Father!” and pray as beloved sons and daughters who know that the Father who cares for us more than the lilies or sparrows will never give us a stone when we ask for bread. The Holy Spirit teaches us the Trinitarian shape of Christian prayer that St. John Paul II says is the source of a truly vital Christianity.
• Fourth, to receive the Holy Spirit means to cooperate with him as he seeks to convict us and the world of sin, righteousness and condemnation. Sin, Jesus defines, is the failure to believe in him; it’s ultimately the rejection of God. The Holy Spirit wants to help us and others to see the many ways we haven’t let him into our life. In the Gospel, right after Jesus says, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he sends the apostles out to forgive and retain sins in his name. The Holy Spirit, as the beautiful words of absolution in the Sacrament of Penance remind us, has been poured out by the Father “for the forgiveness of sins.” In order for our sins to be remitted, however, we must know what sin is and truly repent of all of those areas in which we haven’t united our lives to God, so that we might put to death in us whatever is earthly. That’s what the Holy Spirit helps us to do. The Spirit similarly convinces us of righteousness, which Jesus defines as his going to the Father, where he has prepared a place for us; he helps us, in other words, to long for holiness, heaven, eternal happiness, to seek the things that are above and to set our minds on the things of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit also convinces us of condemnation, which Jesus says refers to the prince of this world’s being condemned, so that we no longer need to fear the devil, but to renounce him, his evil works and empty promises.
• Fifth, to receive the Holy Spirit means to allow him to change the whole foundation of our life. Paul tells us in his letters to the Galatians and Romans that there are two basic ways to live, to live according to the Spirit or to live according to the flesh (Gal 5; Rom 8). To live by the Spirit means that we’re constantly seeking what God the Holy Spirit seeks. To live by the flesh means to place our heart, our treasure, in the things of this world, in money and material possessions, in carnal pleasures, in fame, power, influence, in superficialities. The Holy Spirit wants to renew us by helping us to put to death in us whatever lives by the flesh so that we may totally live by his inspiration, his in-breathing, as Mary and the apostles after Pentecost did, and as the saints have across the centuries.
• Sixth, to receive the Holy Spirit means to allow him to make of us a gift to others. In today’s second reading, St. Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit has given each of us a “manifestation of the Spirit” for the benefit of the whole. The Holy Spirit has given each of us “spiritual gifts” so that we may carry out the “different forms of service” and “different workings” necessary to make Christ’s Body the Church strong. The Holy Spirit wants to help us to recognize what our gifts are and, just as importantly, to use them to build up the Church both locally and universally and renew the face of the earth. The Father of the Poor wants to give us a true fatherly and motherly love for the poor and to use the gifts he has given us for the sake of others.
• Seventh, to receive the Holy Spirit means to receive his tongue of fire so that we may proclaim our faith to others with ardent love, even if we should have to suffer for spreading the love of God. We see how the Holy Spirit helped simple men like Peter and the apostles speak powerfully and effectively in front of vast crowds. He wants to do the same with us. By Baptism and by our Confirmation, we’ve all received the same Holy Spirit that the apostles received on Pentecost, so that, just like the apostles left the Upper Room, we might burst through the doors of rectories, convents, chapels and churches and use every means we have announce Christ’s kingdom.
• Lastly, to receive the Holy Spirit means ultimately to allow the Holy Spirit to come and change us and through us change the world. In the Responsorial Psalm today, we sing out repeatedly, “Lord, send out your Spirit and renew the face of the earth!” How much our world needs renewal! It needs renewal because of the ever-present problem of sin in all its forms that disfigures God’s gifts, our relationship to him, to each other, to ourselves and to the gift of creation. On Pentecost we implore God the Father and the Son to send the Spirit to renew us and renew his world — and God responds, but we need to long for that gift and receive that gift.
• John Paul II emphasized that Pentecost is not a past reality for the Church but an ever-present one. And we enter into that ongoing reality of Pentecost when we enter the Upper Room for Mass, surrounded by Mary and the apostles and the other members of the Church, and implore the promise of the Father. Pope Benedict said in Australia, “The Eucharist is a ‘perpetual Pentecost’ since every time we celebrate Mass we receive the Holy Spirit who unites us more deeply with Christ and transforms us into Him.” It’s during Mass that in the epiclesis we call down the Holy Spirit upon the priest and the altar totally to change bread and wine into Jesus’ body and blood, and then we call him down to change men and women into Christ’s mystical body. To receive the Holy Spirit means to allow him to do this work, to cooperate with the miraculous metamorphosis the Spirit wants to do in us as we receive Jesus.
• Today, in response to the Church’s ten days of insistent prayer, God the Father and God the Son send the Holy Spirit to fill us with fire to change us the way he changed the apostles on that first Pentecost, to give us and the entire Church a spiritual rebirth. Today is God the Father’s answer to the long vigil of the Church in the Upper Room throughout the centuries down to our own time! Let us receive the gift of the Holy Spirit at the life-changing depth he desires and the grateful love he deserves and cooperate with him as through us he seeks to renew the whole world! Lord, send out your Spirit! Amen!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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