Pentecostal Spring - Year B

This Sunday we celebrate the solemnity of the First Pentecost, the gift of the Spirit unleashed upon the world.  Those who knew themselves to be the recipients of that gift became newly identified as Church.  And so Pentecost is rightly called the birthday of the church.

By the power of the Spirit the first members of the church began to understand what it meant to be church in the world.  Being church meant bringing the good news of God’s love and forgiveness to all in the society.  Being church meant gathering for the breaking of the Bread, both of the Word and Eucharist. Being church meant living in the awareness of the risen Christ and offering the joy of that same awareness to others.  Being church meant belonging to a life-sharing community wherein no one suffered for lack of food, clothing, shelter, companionship or any of the  other necessities of life.  Being church meant being a people who no longer thought solely in terms of me and mine, but of we and us and ours.  Being church meant living and caring and sharing in such a manner that others were drawn to desire a similar belonging.

The Pentecostal spring of the early Christian church stands in sharp contrast to the icy rigidity of the Christianity of later centuries.  Eberhard Arnold, founder of the Bruderhof  Communities (fellowship based on Jesus’ Great Sermon) believed that the contemporary church has lost something of the fire and faith and unconditional love of its ancestral forefathers.  It was this awareness that made the insightful Pope Blessed John XXIII convene the Vatican Council II “to fling open the windows of the church in order to bring about a new Pentecost”.

What began with Peter and company almost two millennia ago in Jerusalem (Acts 2:1-11, 1st reading) and what was continued by Paul and the many members of the one body of Christ (1Corinthians 12:3-7, 2nd reading) can and must be continued by us today.