Ken Overberg, S.J.

Pentecost, May 31, 2009
 
   Throughout the Easter season, we have been reading selections from the Acts of the Apostles and from John’s Gospel.  In Acts, Luke presents an idyllic view of the development of the early Christian community. Whatever exactly happened, we know that people came to believe in Jesus through the preaching of the disciples.

And this process remains the same today: we hear God’s word and then proclaim it in our day-to-day lives.  Indeed, this dynamic reveals our basic identity: hearers and proclaimers of the Word.

Pentecost was originally a Jewish spring harvest festival.  Later, Pentecost, celebrated 50 days after Passover, memorialized the formation of the covenant through Moses at Mt Sinai.  Luke, in his Acts of the Apostles (our familiar first reading), uses the feast to symbolize the formation of a new covenant community.  A major theme of Acts is the work of the Holy Spirit in the growth and spread of early Christianity.  This new community is the gift of God and the work of human beings.

John uses different images and time-sequences to describe the marvelous works of God.  As we hear in John’s gospel, resurrection, ascension, and the coming of the Spirit all occur on the same day, Easter.  These differences remind us that our Scriptures are not giving us exact historical accounts, but rather faith proclamations about the mystery of encounters with God.

In the second reading Paul tells the Corinthians––and now us––that we all have been given some gift of the Spirit for the sake of the common good.

Let’s listen to God’s word!

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         “To each is given some manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”

        The gifts of the Spirit are clearly experienced and expressed here in our Bellarmine community in many ways, some extraordinary, most ordinary.  For these gifts, we give thanks!

        One gift of the Spirit, mentioned in the gospel and essential for the common good, is forgiveness. In moments of sober realism, we recognize that forgiveness is a gift we all need: to forgive others, to ask for forgiveness, to forgive ourselves.

        But how do we speak accurately of forgiveness? Theologian Stephen Pope puts it this way.  Christian forgiveness is a focused moral act based on the religious conviction that God loves and affirms the worth of all human beings.  “To ‘forgive’ in the Christian sense, then, means to make a twofold decision.  Negatively, it means to renounce hatred and the desire to destroy; positively, it means to will what is morally good to the one who has been harmful.” This does not minimize the evil that was done nor give tacit approval to hurtful behavior.

        Forgiveness breaks the “chain reaction of evil” (Martin Luther King, Jr), the insidious tendency of evil to gain momentum by co-opting its victims through inspiring hatred for their oppressors.  Just look at our world today.

        Forgiveness is not easy.  It demands a deliberate decision and sometimes a long process of airing feelings of anger, betrayal, and outrage.  Without forgiveness, however, there is “no future” (Desmund Tutu) for us as individuals and as communities.

        Forgiveness is the gift of the Spirit and the work of human beings.  This Pentecost, where is forgiveness needed in your life?

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P.S. to my homily (with other announcements at end of Mass): Stephen Pope’s thoughts on forgiveness (some of the best that I have read) can be found in a short article in America magazine, November 18, 2000.  The context was multiple cases of child abuse by a lay staff member of a Catholic parish in Boston.  The article is entitled “Can One Forgive a Child Molester?”