Pentecost Sunday

The Solemnity of Pentecost is celebrated fifty days after Easter. It is the feast on which we remember the gift of the Holy Spirit that overturns the confusion of Babel (see Gn. 11:9). In Jesus, who died, rose and ascended into Heaven, the peoples once again understand each other through one sole language, the language of love.

During the first half of the 3rd century, Tertullian and Origen were already speaking of Pentecost as a Feast that followed the Ascension. As the pilgrim Egeria attests, Pentecost was a Feast that was already celebrated in Jerusalem in the 4th century. It proposed the theme of the renewal that the coming of the Spirit works in the hearts of men and women.

Pentecost has its roots in the Feast of Weeks celebrated by the Jewish people. This was an annual agricultural festival surrounding the first fruits of the spring harvest and celebrated the year’s harvest. Later, it was connected with the revelation of God to Moses, the Ten Commandments. Then, for Christians, it would become the moment in which Christ, having returned to the glory of the Father, would make himself present in the hearts of men and women through His Spirit, the law given by God written in their hearts: “The new and definitive Covenant is no longer founded on a law that is written on two stone tablets, but on the action of the Spirit of God which makes all things new and is etched on hearts of flesh” (Pope Francis, General Audience, 19 June 2019). With Pentecost, the Church was born and her evangelizing mission began.


GOSPEL READING

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.”

Jn 20:19-23