Homily for Pentecost Sunday, 2021
On the evening of that first day of the week,
when the doors were locked, where the disciples were,
for fear of the Jews,
Jesus came and stood in their midst
and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side.
The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you.
As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,
“Receive the Holy Spirit.
Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them,
and whose sins you retain are retained.”-John 20:19-23
“Receive the Holy Spirit.” These few words convey deep truths about God and our relationship with him.
The Holy Spirit, like the two other Persons of the Blessed Trinity, has some proper names that are applied to him with strict aptness. St. Thomas Aquinas, gathering from the words of Sacred Scripture and the Church’s tradition of worship, tells us that the proper names of the Holy Spirit, in addition to the expression Holy Spirit itself, are the names Love and Gift.
So, when the Savior miraculously enters the Upper Room through its barred doors in the power of his super-agile risen body, he says “Receive the Holy Spirit”; that is, “Receive my Love, my Gift.”
If you think about it, you can see how appropriately Love and Gift are objects of the verb receive. What do we receive, in the strictest sense? It is something that we did nothing to obtain; that is, no money, no property, no work, no action was offered in order to receive it. A gift is not part of an exchange as when we receive our wages. Receiving a gift means passively being endowed with some good thing we did nothing to earn. A gift is always freely given, if it is precisely a gift.
Many good things can be given as a gift, even if they can also be bought or earned. But if the gift cannot be bought or earned, if it is priceless and cannot be merited, then it is only, solely, and essentially a gift. No one can earn or merit something that is utterly beyond all human effort or possession, and there are many such things that so surpass us and our abilities. Then there is One who, were we to receive him, would be the greatest of gifts, a gift, the Gift: God himself.
But there is a level of being a gift that is even more perfectly a gift than this. What if in God himself, not in his creatures, but in himself, there is a gift he gives? A gift that is God given to God.
The Holy Spirit is this gift that in God himself is God’s gift to himself. From this truth, the heart immediately perceives that for us to receive from the Father and the Son their Holy Spirit, their Gift, is not only to receive a pure present that we cannot earn; it is to be given the same life, the same endowment as God has in himself.
To possess God as God-who-is-the-Gift is to be made, as St. Peter says, “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4).
So what could this possibly mean? To have some slight understanding (which is all we will ever have, short of the vision of God in heaven), we should consider what God’s nature is.
St. John the Divine, the Beloved Disciple, tell us “God is Love.” The Holy Spirit, who is the Gift, is Love. There are all his proper names.
Love has many forms, but the most radical, basic, and essential kind of love is like a pure gift. Love in its deepest form precedes all thought or motivation; it is the simple, pure, all-encompassing desire of a thing for its own perfection and fulfillment, and if the thing is a person, this means a desire for his happiness. It means to be moved, to be drawn by our deepest nature. That is what love is in God, and his love in himself and for himself is what he gives himself and us as a gift.
If all this seems too deep for you, that is because it is; it sure is for me. God’s nature is utterly beyond us, and he reveals truths about himself in our language just to give us a motive for being open to him.
The Holy Spirit brings to completion the divine Persons in God, proceeding from the Father and the Son as their Gift of Love to each other, eternally and all-powerfully.
We learn today that that completing, confirming work of the Holy Spirit, poured out on us in the holy sacraments of grace and pardon, is nothing less than God’s own life and God’s own happiness in us. Truly St. Paul’s words are true, that “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of anyone, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9).
Let us then receive the Holy Spirit, and with this Love and this Gift let us be sure of all God’s other gifts to us—even the Father and the Son and their eternal bliss. God is Love, the “giver of every good gift.” All he does is love and give. And, sharing his life, we are meant to be like him, loving and generous. What could be better?