Pentecost, Year C (2025) - Fr Robert Krishna, OP

Once while saying a requiem Mass for a dear friend, I realised that my words, “This is my body” didn’t just refer to Christ’s resurrected Body offered to the Father for our sins. Of course, that is its primary reference. But we are united to Christ as members of his body by baptism, and receive his Body, the Eucharist, so that we can share Christ’s life and become ever more truly parts of his Body, the Church. Therefore, I can say “This is my body” not just because I speak Christ’s words in his place to do his work, but also because I belong to Christ’s body. And just like me, my friend too is part of the Body of Christ I hold in my hand. And like her, so is everyone in the Church. The feast of Pentecost is about the formation of this Body of Christ, the Church, the body of Christ that we are.

Because if Pentecost is about the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit points back to Christ. He “reminds us of all that Christ has said to us.” He enables us to call Jesus, “Lord”, and to address God the Father as our Father. And so, the Spirit always points to and unites us to the Father and the Son. Yet, as we see in today’s first reading, the Spirit is indeed incredibly powerful and active in the work of the Church. The key to understanding this hiddenness of the genuine power and activity of the Holy Spirit is recognising that, unlike us, the members of the Trinity aren’t in competition with each other. There is no greater or lesser in God. There is only mutual love, knowledge, and revelation. The Father reveals himself to us only through the Son and the Spirit whom he sends us. The Son only speaks the words of the Father who sent him, and unites us to the Father by giving us the Spirit. The Spirit will complete what Jesus says and does, leading us to the full truth and teaching us everything, and making us members of the Body of Christ. As the Catechism puts it, the Spirit reveals to us a “properly divine self-effacement.” He shows us how the members of the Trinity point beyond themselves to each other.

And this corresponds to that in us which needs to be fixed so that we can grow fully into the body of Christ which the Spirit wishes to make us part of. Because, sin divides us from each other and within ourselves. It makes us desire our own way, our own greatness, against the people around us. A great symbolic representation of this is the division of humanity in the story of Babel in Genesis. People aim to attain the heavens by their own strength, and in doing so find themselves divided in the most fundamental way possible to human beings, in how they speak to and interact with each other. But Babel captures something else essential about human beings. We are social creatures and even when we divide ourselves against each other, we divide ourselves into little groups, tribes or languages or nations. Within such tribes, we are at home. But we are at war with everyone outside. God overcomes this. The Father reveals himself through his Son. The Son lays down his life for the world, and gives way to the Spirit, and the Spirit points back to the Father and the Son. God invites us and draws us into his own self-effacement, calls us to be similarly self-effacing, putting each other’s needs before our own, and glorying in each other’s achievements rather than resenting them. Father, Son, and Spirit reveal to us the ideal of the Christian community as co-workers in the Truth. They show us too that self-effacing doesn’t mean denial of who we are as individuals. The great witness to this is that the Apostles don’t speak in one language. They speak so that each can understand them in their own language. And so too, we don’t lose who we are in the Body of Christ, any more than the Spirit loses who he is by pointing to Christ.

But this is not a mere invitation: And just as well, because we all know there are things we can cling to which prevent us from being full members of the Body of Christ – our sins, our desire to dominate over each other and to use each other as stepping stones to our power and our pleasure, our determination to turn away from God and from each other and find our happiness, our fulfilment, in ourselves. And these are genuinely hard to overcome. What today’s feast announces is that this overcoming of ourselves, this self-effacement that we are to practice, first comes to us as a gift from above. God can and does change even our desires. He is able not merely command us to do what he wishes us to do, but also to give us what he commands. Today’s sequence celebrates the Spirit for filling our heart, enlightening us, warming and softening the hardness of our heart, making straight what is crooked. The Spirit even prays on our behalf, as parents interpret the utterances of their children, to produce sense from our often confused and self-defeating prayers. And in our turn, we need to choose every day, as long as we are in this life, to love Christ and keep his commandments in the simplest of ways: in being faithful to prayer even when we would rather not, in doing good even when we aren’t rewarded for it instantly, in putting up with insult and derision and misunderstanding and betrayal and disappointment as Christ did. In doing all this, we are not alone: the Spirit continues to enable us to act in union with Christ. Let us pray for each other that we may indeed come to be what Christ calls us to be, members of the Body of Christ, the Church.

Fr Robert Krishna, OP is undertaking postgraduate studies in Sacred Scripture, assigned to St Stephen's Priory, Jerusalem.