Fr Abbot Brendan OSB
Did you know that over 1 billion people worldwide drink coffee every day? After water and tea, it’s our favourite beverage. Almost everyone can tell the difference between the real thing and the decaffeinated variety. It may look like coffee and smell like coffee and even taste like coffee, but it lacks that all-important caffeine kick. Decaffeination removes about 97% of the caffeine.
Christianity without Pentecost is a decaffeinated Christianity. We go through the motions of what it means to be a Christian but we’re a little afraid to get too involved, so we cut down the edges, smooth off the places where it has touched our lives and then we wonder why there is no power left in it.
The disciples in the gospel were decaffeinated, locked away in their little room in Jerusalem, afraid that they too will be accused and imprisoned like Jesus their Master. They feel paralysed and lack courage. Literally, they are a team with no spirit! The Spirit, however, has slowly started to work in them. It didn’t all happen with a bang, the groundwork was laid first. Mary of Magdala, a very brave woman, brought her message: “I have seen the Lord”, while at the tomb itself, the beloved disciple “saw and believed”. These promptings begin to infect this frightened remnant.
On Pentecost the Lord himself came and stood among them in that room sealed off from the world by fear and the very first thing the Risen Lord does is give peace. This is important. When the Lord is present in a situation in my life, peace descends. Then Jesus blows his breath upon them, which is no longer a human breath, but the Holy Spirit. You remember the story of creation, God had blown into Adam the breath of life. In the new creation, God blows another breath, the breath of eternal life and every time he is present in the community of Christians, the Spirit continues to breathe.
With the breath of the Spirit comes real communication. When we fail to properly communicate the results can be disastrous. Language is a wonderful gift and we must use it well. The power to communicate, for Christians, has always been connected with the Holy Spirit and held in the greatest esteem. In the early sixteenth century a Benedictine monk called Pedro Ponce de Leon adapted the hand signs the monks used in his monastery to communicate with deaf children in the locality and so sign language was born. Real communication can change lives. It can heal rifts in families and communities, bring wars to an end and enable genuine progress in society. To communicate is to do something essentially human and divine. To communicate with God is to touch my freedom, my deliverance.
Pentecost is the feast of deliverance, the completion of the mystery of Easter, a deliverance that reaches out to our daily lives with their struggles, their downfalls and the evil that imprisons them. Deliverance from our own darkness, our homemade dungeons. Deliverance from war and oppression. Deliverance from our painful histories, our mistakes and our litany of bad choices. The Christian breathes the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit of God, and through this Spirit, we are sanctified. From what do you need deliverance? Ask the Holy Spirit for this now, in the silent communication of your heart…