Homily

As we continue to live the mystery of Easter in this time, the holy liturgy gathers us together in prayer so that we may prepare ourselves, as the Apostles had, to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The passage from the Acts of the Apostles tells of Peter and John who went down to Samaria among those who had accepted the Gospel in order to invoke upon them the Holy Spirit: “For as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit” (Acts 8:16-17). This is the first account of what we call “Confirmation.” Today, the Word of God descended amongst us, as Peter and John did, to prepare our heart to receive this wonderful gift. Next Sunday we will celebrate the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. From that day on the disciples would not see the teacher they had followed, listened to, touched for three whole years anymore. As a continuation of the reading from last Sunday, the Gospel takes us to the evening of the last supper, when Jesus spoke about leaving them and saw them quickly become sad. His words quickly took on a consoling and hopeful tone; those men, whom he had kept together with some toil, were his. They belonged to him. He did not want them to become dispersed, much less lost. He was about to “leave.” And it was not to be taken for granted that they would remain together. It was not in the least bit obvious that even if they remained together, they would have continued to announce the Gospel to the extreme ends of the earth. “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you,” Jesus said.
No doubt, foremost in Jesus’ mind was his concern for the future of that small group he had gathered. He had had that concern from the beginning, but that evening it was manifested in all its clarity and drama in the words with which he had started the supper: “I have ardently desired to eat this Passover with you.” The desire to get together with the disciples was buttressed by his wish to leave them his testament, his legacy, to be perpetuated in the coming times. That supper marked the crowning point of that desire. And every Sunday liturgy enables us too to relive that moment. Moreover, in that supper all the holy liturgies which would be celebrated on every point of the earth and in all times were already present, including the one we are celebrating today. It is not by chance that Jesus, turning to address the Father, prays not only for that small group of disciples “but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word” (Jn 17:20).
There is a trait of our spirituality and pastoral ministry that must be more clearly reclaimed: a concern for the future of the communities. As disciples of the Lord, we may not allow the immediacies of our daily work consume us. In the present we must already cultivate the future we desire. Jesus taught as much that night. Before Jesus’ eyes is a small group of fragile individuals; he looks at them with affection and dreams of all of humanity gathered together around that table. Certainly, it is truly naïve to entrust his legacy into their poor hands. But this is the very naiveté of God who trusts in and entrusts himself to the little ones and the weak. Jesus says that he will not leave them alone, like abandoned orphans. The term orphan has strong Old Testament connotations, where the orphan is the archetype of one who is at the mercy of the powerful, against whom many injustices are committed. Jesus will not leave his own defenceless.
He announces the nearness of a “consoler” (literally a “helper”), who is the “Spirit of truth.” The term “helper,” applied to the Holy Spirit, indicates one who helps in every circumstance, especially in the most difficult. All the time Jesus was with them, he had helped, instructed and defended them himself. “While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost” (Jn 17:12), Jesus says in the prayer to the Father. From now on, the Spirit will be their permanent helper. Jesus says he will remain with them forever. We need Jesus’ Spirit because it is not found in the world; it is a Spirit which the world does not see or know; it is foreign to the logic of this world, to the ideologies of deceit, to those perverse systems which oppress humankind and perpetuate violence. Jesus’ Spirit is also not found in the many spirits that possess our hearts and minds. I am referring to the spirit of indifference, to the spirit of self-love, to the spirit of pride, of enmity, of jealousy, of lies, of arrogance. And how many other spirits are there still! There is no need to make recourse to an old-time demonology, which then becomes so easily removed from our rationality, to speak about demons. Nor do we believe with disconcerting, if not harmful, ease in possession by diabolic spirits. We must recognize, with the utmost sense of realism, that there are many evil spirits circulating about. But these spirits are not strange. They clothe themselves in normalcy. Believing in their existence as mere exaggeration is a cunning expedient that allows us to remain tranquil as we are. Each one of us ought to recognize that we are, in reality, possessed, tranquilly by evil spirits and we do not offer them much opposition. They are the ones that cause harm and create violence, loneliness, hostility and wars. All of these things arise from saddened hearts turned bad.
Let us not examine exceptional cases. Certainly, they make us worry, but they are only the tip of a far vaster reality. What truly renders our life infernal are these spirits of ordinary egoism that subjugate our hearts and guide our behaviours in a distorted manner. This is why we need Pentecost again today. With the rigid and closed walls of our heart, we prevent the Spirit of the Lord to come down and make us tremble, in a spiritual earthquake. We need a new flame to descend on each of our heads and to shake us from our laziness and fear. At the vigil of the third millennium we are asked to relive, for ourselves and the world, the miracle of that first Pentecost which transformed the heart and life of the disciples. But where does the miracle of Pentecost begin? This is not very complicated. The miracle begins with love for Jesus, from love for the Gospel. This love is the first little flame which descends on the head of the disciples and warms their hearts. Love for Jesus is therefore the start of every Christian religious experience. Jesus, in at the last supper, turning to the disciples, told them: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” It is the first time in the Gospel that Jesus asks his disciples to love him. Until then he had asked them to love the Father, the poor, the little ones, and to love one another. Now, a short while before dying, he asks them to love him. It is certainly a request for affection, but love for Jesus does not end with him. Instead, it returns abundantly to us. Jesus says: “Those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.” This little flame of love, which the Spirit puts in the heart of each one of us, is the strength that sustains us along the path of life and makes us grow into the image of the Lord Jesus. It is the energy that will renew the world.