The priest Francisco José Delgado Alonso offers Exaudi readers this article about the feast of Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, a great ally, on the apostles and the Virgin.
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A few days ago, Pope Francis spoke of Pentecost as the birthday of the Church. Thanks to the coming of the Paraclete, the apostles had courage and courage to go out and preach the Gospel of Jesus. It is important to recognize the importance that the Holy Spirit has in the life of each of the Christians, of each of our communities, of our parishes. Thus, we can learn how He is the great ally to achieve our goal, holiness.
Pentecost is one of the most important solemnities among the celebrations of the Catholic Church. We celebrate the coming of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, that is, of the Holy Spirit. Jesus, after his Ascension to heaven, sent the Holy Spirit to his disciples.
Fifty days after Easter Sunday, we celebrate this Sunday the festival of Pentecost, maintaining the name and calendar of the ancient Jewish holiday, remembering the arrival of the people freed from slavery to Mount Sinai, where the Covenant in which Israel joined was made constitutes as a people and not just any people, but the people of God. “I will be your God and you will be my people” (Lev 26:12).
Likewise, on the first Christian Pentecost, the day in which the Spirit of the Risen Jesus comes upon the community of the Cenacle, the new alliance is completed, sealed with the blood of the Crucified, and a new people of God is born, his Church.
We could say that today is the birthday of the Church, if this party were a simple memory of that event in Jerusalem, when the apostles, gathered in prayer, with the Mother of the Lord, received the strength and gifts of the Holy Spirit, to be the witnesses of Jesus Christ and the columns on which the Church, people and family of those who hear the Word and put it into practice are based.
But more than a birthday, what we celebrate is a new birth, because Pentecost is not something that happened only in the past, it is not a nice memory, it is not the first page of the History of the Church. Pentecost did not “happen”, but “happens”, the coming of the Spirit, did not end in the Cenacle, nor does it end today, nor will it ever end, because the outpouring of the Spirit of the Eternal God cannot be limited to a space or a time .
That is why today we do not “remember” Pentecost, but rather we “celebrate” it. We do not remember that the Church was born, but that it is “reborn”, we do not remember that its history began to be written, but that it is republished. The Church lives “in a permanent state of Pentecost,” because the power of the Spirit makes us experience, every day, the presence of God and the love of his Father expressed in the one who gave his life, for those he loved.
In the new people of God, the Church, without the presence of the Spirit, God would remain in the distance; Jesus Christ would only be a character from the past; The Gospel would not be happy news, but a book that narrates beautiful and beautiful things, like so many other written works that delight our soul. The Church itself would be a purely human association, like any other, of people who sympathize with a certain ideology and can even become a kind NGO; the evangelizing mission would be pure proselytism; worship, a cluster of magical actions to obtain benefits from divinity… Only the presence and power of the Holy Spirit can vivify, energize, liberate and divinize all ecclesial and human activity.
