Feast of Pentecost: How does each of us hear them in our native language?”

Feast of Pentecost 2020

Parish of Holy Cross—St. John the Baptist
Midtown Manhattan

How does each of us hear them in our native language?”¹ 

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.

Dutifully learned in our youth, of course.  Do you any longer genuinely believe that?

On this great feast of Pentecost, we revel in an astonishing event.  Disparate peoples folded into shared understanding, concord of mind and heart beyond the barriers of language.  An eruption of Spirit fashioning the prospect of authentic communication.  A word of union and understanding.  A word of peace dispersing angry, hurtful words of division and rivalry.  

Words.

Holy Spirit.  Third person of the Holy Trinity.  The undying love between Father and Son.  The perpetual communication between Father and Son.  The ceaseless conversation shared by the Father who speaks and the Son who is eternal Word.  Spirit.  Holy Spirit.

That burst of Spirit amidst the earliest disciples signaled a new creation.  As once the Spirit hovered over the waters of chaos bringing forth creation, in Pentecost the Spirit hovers over the confused tongues of humanity bringing forth understanding and peace.  Spoken through the prophets in history, the Spirit of Pentecost brings forth truth and the witness of the church.

Words.

For a scant moment, consider the vast variety of words you negotiate on any given day – angry, insightful, confusing, thoughtful, instructive, deceptive, manipulative, healing.  Living here in the 21^st century, we are heirs to a technological inheritance that affords us the prospect of unparalleled communication – printed page, radio, television and, of course, digital media transmitted via the worldwide web.  Hence, you might imagine that we are engaged nowadays in a massive conversation across cultures and classes.  The evidence suggests otherwise.

Rather than broad conversation, what has emerged is a welter of slender, siloed discussions in which we tend to talk only to those with whom we are already in agreement.  The resultant social fabric is stretched both thin and threadbare.  This manifests daily here in our own culture, as well as in cultures flung around the globe.  Divides expand.  Assumptions calcify.  Facts fade.  Conversation withers on the vine.  Common engagement ebbs.  Community splinters.

A second more pernicious dynamic is correspondingly on display.  We witness more than a few   miscreants deliberately distorting our communication, falsifying the information available to us.  By stealth they pollute our pool of shared truths.  Some for personal gain.  Others for political clout.  Still others for global domination.  Make no mistake though, these exertions are tenacious, furtive, sophisticated and detrimental in the extreme – a wary world of deceit.

Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can break our spirit, our affiliation, our trust.

The vigil mass for this feast of Pentecost offers us the tall tale – literally – of Babel and its ill-fated tower.  A realm of confused speech, futile communication, scattered inhabitants.  I imagine the majority of us learned the anecdote as young children.  I can testify that as a child it vividly captured my imagination.  Here and now, I would like to set my imagination free.

I’d like to suggest reading the story of Babel in light of the larger Book of Genesis.  After creating human beings, the Creator gave them the mandate to multiply, spread throughout all the earth, and exercise stewardship over its manifest gifts.²  Enter Babel.  Migrants on their way to the ends of the earth make the choice instead to abort the journey. They settle down in one place to make a name for themselves, building a monument to the heavens to declare their sovereign rule.  In essence, they exercised an instinct toward empire.  Single rule.  Single word.

The story of Babel is the narrative of the interruption of the human vocation.  A failure to multiply and diversify.  A refusal to spread far and wide.  A botched stewardship.  

The Liturgy of the Word for the Eucharistic Assembly on this Sunday of Pentecost recounts the eruption of Spirit that restores and renews humanity’s vocation – renews the face of the earth.  The journey to the ends of the earth resumes.  Authentic communication revives.

How does each of us hear them in our native language?

Pentecost does not commence this earth-shattering, earth-healing conversation by virtue of the imposition of a single language, a single word.  Rather, the early disciples are equipped by grace beyond measure to enter into the many languages of their contemporaries: 

Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans?  Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language?  Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,  Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!³

That’s quite an assemblage, isn’t it?  Don’t fail to take notice of that inclusion of both Asia and Arabs.  Verily, an act of communication of immense magnitude.  Chaos and confusion melt away.  Vengeance and rivalry flee before the face of forgiveness.  A wary world of deceit collapses.  A nascent world of wonder and truth emerges.  The truth of G-D’s mighty wonders.

The wonders of G-D in our own tongues.

Pentecost returns us to the capacity for wonder, for marveling – awestruck by the mystery of G-D in our midst.  To sing of the raw beauty suffuse throughout the cosmos.  To marvel at the song and dance; the artistry, poetry and erudition arising from sundry human cultures across the span of time and space.  To bask in the G-D given, human capacity for compassion and heroic service – a divine gift to be deeply reverenced during this time of biological siege.

At the heart of all these wonders?  The revelation offered us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  This is the proclamation trusted to the Church brought into being by the Pentecost eruption of Spirit.  We, as disciples of the Crucified and Risen One, as bearers of the Spirit breathed out by Jesus Christ, carry this truth as we continue the journey to the ends of the earth.  

The truth of G-D’s wonders in the defeat of death and death-dealing.  The truth of G-D’s wonders in unmasking the victim mechanism that still harries human culture – the search for scapegoats upon which to erect a bogus common life.  The truth of G-D’s wonders in the raising of the innocent Victim who initiates a new history – one of forgiveness not retaliation. 
The truth of G-D’s wonders in the gift of the Holy Spirit bringing forth the church as witness to this fresh history fashioned in the grace and mercy poured out in Christ Jesus.  The truth of G-D’s wonders in delivering us living, efficacious words to proclaim all this.  

Such is the firm foundation in which we flourish.  To which we beckon others.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in them the fire of your love.

V. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created.
R. And you shall renew the face of the earth.

Let us pray. O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit, did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant us in the same Spirit to be truly wise and ever to rejoice in His consolation.
Through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Faithfully learned in our youth, of course.  Do you any longer genuinely believe this?  I trust so.

Michael J. Marigliano, OFM Cap.
 

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¹  Book of Acts 2:1-11
²  Genesis 1:26-28.
³  Acts 2:7-11.