The Advent of the Advocate, Vigil of Pentecost, June 3, 2017

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York
Vigil of Pentecost
June 3, 2017
Gen 11:1-9, Ps 33, Ex 19:3-8.16-20, Ps 19: 8-11, Ezek 37:1-14, Ps 107, Joel 3:1-5, Ps 104, Rom 8:22-27, Jn 7:37-39

To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

Waiting for the Spirit

God gave us a great gift before Mass began tonight. Everyone was jammed here in this Upper Room chapel of Visitation Convent, three people to pews that normally fit two, and what did we do? We waited. We waited patiently. We waited with prayer. It was a little bit by mischievous design. I knew four of you were coming from something at 6 pm, but I set the time at 6:15 even though I thought there was little chance you would make it on time. I did it precisely so that the rest of us present, and you vicariously through us, would be able to experience one of the essential aspects of the Vigil of Pentecost a small taste of what the apostles and Mary experienced 2000 years ago, namely waiting.

On Ascension Thursday, we pondered how Jesus, at his Ascension, 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 said, “you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” The apostles and the other followers of Jesus huddled around Mary in the Upper Room and “devoted themselves with one accord to prayer.” They prayed and they waited. Jesus hadn’t told them how long they were to wait in prayerful expectation for the promise to be fulfilled. So their first holy hour stretched into a day of recollection. They eventually went to bed and awakened and prayed a whole second day. They might have thought that, just as God the Father had had them wait until the third day for Jesus’ resurrection, the Holy Spirit would come after three days that seemed like an eternity. But he didn’t come. So they prayed a fourth day. A fifth day. Now this was taking on the form of a retreat. A sixth day. They were doubtless wondering if the Holy Spirit would come on the seventh day, the day of divine rest. But they were thwarted again. The eighth day. Were they going to have to do this forever? The ninth day. They kept praying and waiting. The tenth day. And it was finally on the eleventh day, the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit burst through the windows of the Upper Room like the noise of a strong driving wind, came down upon each of them as tongues of fire, filled them with himself, and sent them forth to renew the face of the earth.

Every December we enter into the liturgical season called Advent, when we recapitulate the waiting of the Jews for the coming of the Messiah and the ardent waiting of the Church for Jesus’ second coming. And just like that liturgical season helps us to prepare for Jesus’ coming in history, mystery and majesty, so what we can call the “Advent of the Advocate” is similarly important for us to prepare for the Holy Spirit’s coming in the past and in the present in order to help and guide us to live forever. In many places, this period of prayer is referred to as a Novena, but it’s only a novena — a nine-day period of prayer — if you don’t pray on the Feast of the Ascension. In many parts of the Church, it’s called rather a “decenarium,” to refer to the fact that we pray for ten straight days. And I think understanding this period of prayerful expectation as a decenarium allows us to grasp a little bit more easily the liturgical structure of this Pentecost vigil, which I know many of you are attending for the first time.

The Express Decenarium

Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta used to have the practice of what she termed an Express Novena. Whenever a huge need came up in which she didn’t have the time to do a traditional nine-days of prayer — for example, while a child was dying, or a sister needed a visa immediately, or a cease fire had to be declared in a war zone in which she was caring for the wounded, or food needed to arrive almost miraculously to feed more homeless people than expected — she would devoutly pray ten consecutive Memorares on the spot, the first nine for the novena, and the tenth confidently to thank our Lady for having successfully interceded for the favor to be received. Well we could say that the Pentecost Vigil is an Express Decenarium of prayerful waiting for the Holy Spirit. In the ten readings — four readings and four Psalms from the Old Testament, the Epistle and the Gospel, given by Jesus about the Holy Spirit who would come — the Church forms us to get ready for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit tomorrow. The readings increase our expectation and longing. They retrace our need for the Holy Spirit and are meant to increase our longing for him. As the Church instructs us in the Opening admonition before the Liturgy of the Word sets the stage of how we, in this Express Decenarium, recapitulate the experience of Mary and the apostles. “Dear brothers and sisters,” the liturgy tells us, “we have now begun our Pentecost Vigil, after the example of the Apostles and disciples, who with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, persevered in prayer, awaiting the Spirit promised by the Lord; like them, let us, too, listen with quiet hearts to the Word of God. Let us meditate on how many great deeds God in times past did for his people and let us pray that the Holy Spirit, whom the Father sent as the first fruits for those who believe, may bring to perfection his work in the world.” And so tonight with “quiet hearts” it’s key for us to observe both the “great deeds” and the “perfection” of those deeds brought about by the Holy Spirit. We can examine it in six stages.

Building God’s Kingdom not our own

The first is what God did in ancient Babel, which are words that all of us in New York, surrounded by so many skyscrapers, need to take particularly seriously! The residents of Babel said, “Let us build ourselves a city … and so make a name for ourselves.” They were coordinating not to allow God to build them up as a people — something he had been doing since creation and the second chance with Noah — and glorify his name but to try to establish a relationship with God on their own terms and let his name (signifying his person) wane in importance to the glory of their own name, ingenuity and engineering. And so God responded by confusing their speech so that they wouldn’t understand each other and be able to conspire in such a way. The Responsorial Psalm draws a contrast between the way God will often frustrate our plans when they would harm the fulfillment of his own: “The Lord brings to naught the plans of nations. He foils the designs of peoples. But the plan of the Lord stands forever. The design of his heart through all generations.” Because God has “fashioned the heart of each, and knows all their works,” he’s able to do this adroitly. But God was confusing their speech only for a time. He was waiting for the time in which we would use our speech to speak to God and about him, to use our ability to communicate to bring us into communion with God and others. We prayed in the Collect of the Mass that God would grant that “from out of the scattered nations the confusion of many tongues may be gathered by heavenly grace into one great confession of your name.” And at the end of this first of four Old Testament cycles of reading, psalm response, and prayer, we talked about the fulfillment of that one confession and reestablishment of communication that would happen on Pentecost, begging God, “Grant… that your Church may always remain that holy people, formed as one by the unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” and “manifest to the world the Sacrament of your holiness and unity and leads it to the perfection of your charity.” We needed new wine skins to receive the new wine of God in order to collaborate not to build the city of man to our own personal fame but to build the kingdom of God to the glory of God’s name and the joy of every Christian. That’s the first thing we long for during this Advent of the Advocate.

Receiving with Joy God’s New Law

The next lesson happens with the Jews in the desert exodus on the top of Mt. Sinai, which focused on the covenant God seeks to establish with us. God tells Moses to say to the people, “If you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people. … You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.” After the people said, “Everything the Lord has said, we will do,” the Lord sealed the covenant, wrapping Mt. Sinai in a cloud and smoke symbolic of his mysterious presence, coming down in fire, in the midst of thunder, lighting and trumpet blasts. These were all signs of how we would renew that relationship with his people on Pentecost, shaking the walls of the upper room, coming down as tongues of fire, and giving us the new law, which the Catechism of the Catholic Church says is “the grace of the Holy Spirit given to the faithful through faith in Christ (1966). If in response to the Covenant given on Mt. Sinai, we responded in the psalm, saying, “Lord, you have the words of everlasting life” and treating the law of the covenant as perfect, refreshing, trustworthy, wise, right, joy-filled, clear, illuminating, pure, true, just, precious, and sweet, how much more should we thank the Lord for giving us the Spirit of everlasting life! That’s what we pray we will have the ability to do in the collect that concludes this second Old Testament Cycle. “O God, who in fire and lightning gave the ancient Law to Moses on Mount Sinai and on this day manifested the new covenant in the fire of the Spirit, grant, we pray, that we may always be aflame with that same Spirit whom you wondrously poured out on your Apostles, and that the new Israel, gathered from every people, may receive with rejoicing the eternal commandment of your love.” This is what we’re waiting for. This is what the Spirit wants to do!

Coming to Life

The third lesson is given to us through the Prophet Ezekiel. God tells him to prophesy twice. The first time is to announce to desiccated, fleshless skeletons, a symbol first of how the House of Israel was dried up, with hope lost and cut off from God: “Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!” and then to say, “I will bring spirit into you, that you may come to life.” God announced that he was going to raise them from their graves, bring them back to the Promised Land and put his own spirit in them so that they might live. The second prophecy was to the Holy Spirit Himself. God tells Ezekiel, “Prophesy to the Spirit, prophesy, son of man, and say to the spirit: … From the four winds come, O Spirit, and breathe into these slain that they may come to life.” This is a prophecy not just of the return from exile or even of the resurrection, but it also refers to a spiritual condition. We’re often like walking cadavers, just full of dead men’s bones. We have bios, biological life, but not zoe, or the life of the soul. But God doesn’t leave us there. As we responded in the Psalm, we give thanks to the lord for he is good and his mercy endures forever, for he rescues us, redeems us, gathers us when we’re lost, hungry, thirsty, in distress, peril, when our life is ebbing away, he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with goods things. That’s what God the Father has done for us in Jesus and that’s what the Father and the Son continue to do for us in the Holy Spirit. That’s why we pray in the Collect that synthesizes the third cycle, “O God, who have brought us to rebirth by the word of life, pour out upon us your Holy Spirit, that walking in oneness of faith, may attain in our flesh the incorruptible glory of the resurrection.” The Holy Spirit helps us to attain in our flesh, even right now, a down payment on the incorruptible glory of the Resurrection, because he breathes into us the life of Christ! That’s what we pray and long for. That’s what the Holy Spirit seeks to deliver!

Dreaming, Singing Witnesses

The fourth lesson comes in what God announces to us through the prophet Joel, that he will pour out his spirit upon all flesh, so that all his sons and daughters will prophesy. He graphically says that old men, who are normally prone to cynicism, shall dream, and young men who are generally not wise enough to perceive the things of God shall see visions of God, and that even the servants, who were considered not capable of much, will receive the Spirit. That’s what we pray for in the Psalm, when we beg the Lord to send forth his spirit to renew the face of the earth. We beg him in the concluding prayer, “Fulfill for us your gracious promise, O Lord, we pray, so that by his coming the Holy Spirit may make us witnesses before the world to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.” We’re all called to prophesy, to cooperate with God in announcing that Christ is alive, that he has saved us, that he continues his work of redemption in his Mystical Body the Church by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has been sent so that all of us might prophesy and that’s what he wants to do when he comes down as tongues of fire.

First Fruits and More

There are two other lessons, taken from the New Testament, which is a time of partial fulfillment through the coming of the Spirit, but also partial longing for the fulfillment of the Spirit’s work. In the Epistle, St. Paul tells the Christians in Rome and us that we have received the “first fruits of the Spirit,” the best of gifts but not the entirety of them, and that we and all of creation are groaning in labor pains awaiting the redemption of our bodies, to bring our bodies back into harmony with our souls and totally in harmony with God, offering our bodies and our blood with Christ to the Father for the salvation of the human race. The Holy Spirit, St. Paul continues, comes to the aid of our weakness in doing so, teaching us how to pray as we ought and interceding for us. Just as we’re waiting, so is the Holy Spirit, to give us all the fruits and turn our inexpressible groanings into effable and everlasting praise!

The Spiritual River 

The last of the lessons takes place in the Gospel. Jesus explicitly addresses the thirst, the desires, that people have for God and says, “Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink. For Scripture says, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me.’” But the means to quench that thirst, St. John tells us, was “the Spirit that those who came to believe in him were to receive.” Jesus had told the Samaritan woman at the well that if she were to ask him, he would give her a stream welling up within her to eternal life — and that gift was the gift of the Holy Spirit! The Holy Spirit is the fons vivus we sing about in the Veni Creator Spiritus. This Gospel is given to us at the Pentecost Vigil because Jesus said it well before his passion and as St. John commented, “There was, of course, no Spirit yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.” Well, there was, of course, the Spirit existing from all eternity together with the Father and the Son, but he had not yet been sent as that stream of living water. The culmination of this entire Decenarium of readings is for us to thirst more for the Holy Spirit whom Jesus wants to give us inside so that he can be constantly refreshing us, constantly hydrating us with holiness, constantly giving life to everything in us like the water trickling from the side of the Temple in Ezekiel’s prophecy brought life even to the desert and raised the Dead Sea from its lifeless state. Riga quod est aridum, we’ll sing in the Veni Sancte Spiritus, “Irrigate what is dessicated,” and that’s precisely what the Holy Spirit does. That’s the fulfillment for which we’re waiting.

The Fire

Christ had announced in the Gospel, “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” (Lk 12:39). These words were most visibly fulfilled on Pentecost when “there appeared to them tongues as of fire… and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2: 3-4). The Holy Spirit is that fire that Jesus came to cast on the earth, to cast in us, to breathe in us as he breathed the Holy Spirit on the Apostles the night of the resurrection. Back in 2009, Pope Benedict said, “At Pentecost the Holy Spirit is manifest as fire. The Spirit’s flame descended upon the assembled disciples, it was kindled in them and gave them the new ardour of God. … The Apostles, together with diverse communities of the faithful, carried this divine flame to the far corners of the earth. In this way they opened a path for humanity, a luminous path, and they collaborated with God, who wants to renew the face of the earth with his fire. …The fire of God, the fire of the Holy Spirit, is that of the bush that burned but was not consumed (see Ex 3: 2). It is a flame that blazes but does not destroy, on the contrary, that, in burning, brings out the better and truer part of man, as in a fusion it elicits his interior form, his vocation to truth and to love.” He went on to say that while “the flame of the Holy Spirit blazes but does not burn,” nevertheless “it enacts a transformation, and thus must also consume something in man, the waste that corrupts him and hinders his relations with God and neighbour.” For this reason, the “divine fire … frightens us; we are afraid of being ‘scorched’ and prefer to stay just as we are. This is because our life is often based on the logic of having, of possessing and not the logic of self-gift. Many people believe in God and admire the person of Jesus Christ, but when they are asked to lose something of themselves, then they retreat; they are afraid of the demands of faith. There is the fear of giving up something pleasant to which we are attached; the fear that following Christ deprives us of freedom, of certain experiences, of a part of ourselves. On the one hand, we want to be with Jesus, follow him closely, and, on the other, we are afraid of the consequences entailed.” For this reason, “we are always in need of hearing the Lord Jesus tell us what he often repeated to his friends: ‘Be not afraid.’ Like Simon Peter and the others we must allow his presence and his grace to transform our heart, which is always subject to human weakness. We must know how to recognize that losing something indeed, losing ourselves for the true God, the God of love and of life is actually gaining ourselves, finding ourselves more fully. Whoever entrusts himself to Jesus already experiences in this life the peace and joy of heart that the world cannot give, and that it cannot even take away once God has given it to us. So it is worthwhile to let ourselves be touched by the fire of the Holy Spirit! The suffering that it causes us is necessary for our transformation. … Enlightened and comforted by these words of life, let us lift up our invocation: Come, Holy Spirit! Enkindle in us the fire of your love! We know that this is a bold prayer, with which we ask to be touched by God’s flame; but above all we know that this flame and it alone has the power to save us. … We need the fire of the Holy Spirit, because only Love redeems.”

And so in the words of St. John Paul II from 1998, when he met with all the new movements in St. Peter’s Square, a Mass at which I was privileged to be present as a seminarian, when called down that Fire from heaven with words and a passion I have never been able to forget, we say: “From this upper room … a great prayer rises: Come, Holy Spirit, come and renew the face of the earth! Come with your seven gifts! Come, Spirit of Life, Spirit of Communion and Love! The Church and the world need you. Come, Holy Spirit, and make ever more fruitful the charisms you have bestowed on us. Give new strength and missionary zeal to these sons and of daughters of yours who have gathered here. Open their hearts; renew their Christian commitment in the world. Make them courageous messengers of the Gospel, witnesses to the risen Jesus Christ, the Redeemer and Savior of man. Strengthen their love and their fidelity.”

Perpetual Pentecost 

And the Holy Spirit’s work finds its source and summit here in the Upper Room. Pope Benedict XVI said in 2008 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 we have the epiclesis in which 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. This is the way the Holy Spirit seeks to bring his “first fruits” to a life of fruitfulness, to bring the longings of centuries to perfection. Since I started celebrating Masses here in this beautiful chapel 26 months ago, I’ve always been a little startled by the fact that the sculpture of the Holy Spirit over the altar is off-center. Symmetry, of course, is a principle of architectural perfection often used in Churches and Chapels to symbolize God’s perfection, and yet the Holy Spirit here is slightly off-center, something I notice every time I look up in prayer. But eventually, I think, the Holy Spirit gave me an allegorical interpretation that helps me to understand his work better during Mass and in my life. He’s off center lest I be tempted to box him into my previously conceived categories. He who blows where we wills doesn’t have to come straight down the runway, but can come from the right, from the left, from behind, from upfront, and blow us wherever he wills. Tonight as we look up to the image of him on the ceiling, we thank him for coming at us tonight from various angles in this Express Decenarium of the Pentecost Vigil and we thank him as well for what he’s about to do in the perpetual Pentecost of the Mass. With holy longing and grateful appreciation, we turn to him and pray, “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in us the fire of your love!” Veni, Creator Spiritus! Veni, Sancte Spiritus! Veni, ignis, caritas, spiritalis unction! We’ve been waiting for you. Do your thing!

The readings for tonight’s Mass were: