Pentecostes Sunday John 20,19-23

Today we celebrate the feast of the descent of the Holy Spirit, which the Scriptures say occurred on the Day of Pentecost, 40 days after Easter. Why after such a long time? Because every remarkable moment of human life must not only be experiencedourexperienced couldcould, they but lived, and that takes time; otherwise, we are always on the surface. We always seek new experiences, but we do not live life; we experience it and let it flow. And how to really live life? First of all, through honest work and prayer, we follow the well-known motto of the Benedictines: ora et labore (pray and work). This is precisely what the apostles did together with the Virgin Mary, and then the Holy Spirit descended on them.

And the Holy Spirit is difficult for us to understand, because we live in the time of the Holy Spirit. How is that? I will explain. In the OT, God the Father, the first divine person, appears first, but only Jesus Christ in the NT shows us who God the Father really is. How is that? People in the OT understood the Father as a contentious, heart-hardening God and a strict judge, and only Jesus Christ showed us who the Father is. That God so loved the world that He gave His Son, that we can pray to Him, Our Father, etc.

And it was similar to Jesus, because the Jews were expecting Him as a military or high-priestly messiah, and He died for us on the cross, and even though Jesus told the apostles during His life what kind of Messiah He was, they were unable to understand Him. Only after Jesus’ death and resurrection could they say, ” Ah, so that’s how it is. And we live today in the time of the Holy Spirit’s activity. Therefore, this third Divine Person remains the most mysterious of the three to us, because His public activity has not been fully completed, as with God the Father in the OT and with Jesus in the Gospels.

But we do know something about Him. We know that the Holy Spirit is the one who mediates forgiveness and that without forgiveness, a person cannot even receive this Spirit. Why? Whenever I come across the topic of forgiveness, I ask myself: for whom does a person need forgiveness? Most of the time, people answer correctly: for themselves. And I ask again, why? And here the answer is not so clear-cut, because we are already a bit confused about this. But even here, the answer is not complicated: if I am hurt by something and do not heal it, I transfer my hurt to others. So if I have bitterness, hatred, or dislike within me and I do not work with these tendencies and emotions, I transfer them to others, especially those I care about the most, because I can hurt those I am closest to much more easily.

I met a man who was bitter towards the whole world, and those who wanted to help him took it out on him the most because he hurt them with his wounds. In the end, everyone more or less left him, and he literally created hell on earth for himself out of his unlove and unforgiveness. And even God cannot approach such a person because that person has closed himself off from him. That is why we should also forgive, so that we can not only receive forgiveness but also give it. Forgiveness cannot be received if we cannot forgive ourselves. What I do not have, I cannot only give, but also receive. Yes, to the extent that we open ourselves to the Spirit of God, or close ourselves off, to the extent that we can draw from it.

And it is certainly no coincidence that the fullness of the Holy Spirit is to be manifested in a person after confirmation, when on the path of life he freely decides that he will receive this sacrament and not only receive it, but that thanks to this received sacrament he wants to help the growth of the whole church, because if he does not do this, he resembles someone who received a certain hryvnia from the Lord, which he later buried. And instead of longing for the fullness of living from the Spirit, at baptism I encounter this – and the godfather must actually be confirmed? And could it not be otherwise? And I do not want this sacrament, because I do not have time for it!

This is how we behave towards God’s gifts. Then we are surprised that we do not feel any acceptance from God when we are not willing to come out of ourselves and our self-centeredness. In essence, even in adulthood, we have the faith of little children when I ask myself the question, “What will I get from it?” But then I do not live my Christian life; I only experience it to the extent that I open myself to God, to the extent that I can draw from His love and grace. And then here we have the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. And they will also work in our lives to the extent that we open ourselves to them. The first gift is the gift of wisdom. Wisdom is not about how smart I am, how intelligent I am, but it is about being able to distinguish between things that can be solved and things that cannot be solved. For example, someone has had a broken marriage in their family for many years and is still struggling with it, but it is no longer possible to reconcile it; there are children and grandchildren, and they are constantly being told what happened to those parents, and everyone is hurting each other. So the gift of wisdom is about recognizing the unsolvable facts, coming to terms with them, and the solvable ones, and with what needs to be done.

The gift of reason is about penetrating things. Finding the root of why this and that happened, and either looking for a solution or learning from what cannot be solved. The gift of counsel to make the right decision: if I realize that a given matter can be resolved, for example, if it was not possible with children, then at least I will convey the gift of faith to my grandchildren; then it is necessary to find appropriate means with which to resolve the matter, and the Holy Spirit will help me. The gift of strength is primarily about perseverance in goodness. It often happens that a person feels a bit overconfident, but after a while, it somehow fades away.

The gift of strength is about persevering in good; if we do not see things through, what is the point? The gift of art, or in every human endeavor, is to discover God’s presence. The goal is to become more and more an instrument of God. That is the beauty of the Benedictine rule: pray and work. Strive in everything as if it were your only concern, and always entrust it to God’s care. And another gift of the Holy Spirit helps with this: the gift of piety. Despite all our efforts and good discernment, many things do not work out for us, but I can always ask the Lord for help. So Lord, help me where my strength fails. Help me do the good I want to do, despite all my efforts to the contrary, and transform all the shortcomings that I sincerely surrender to you. It is the gift of piety to trust the Lord to correct my shortcomings if I surrender them to Him and transform them into something beautiful.

And the last is the fear of God. Fear is not fear; it is God’s sovereignty when I should first realize that, despite all my efforts, despite all my prayers, the Lord can decide that things in my life will be different from what I planned, and I should accept it. Accept that God knows far better than I do why this and that happened in my life and those around me, even though I tried so hard to make it different and to surrender it to the Lord. And if I can do that, then the Spirit of God can fully manifest in me, just as it fully manifested in those apostles, and everyone was amazed and wondered where that power came from in them. And so, Lord, we ask you to teach us to open ourselves to Your Spirit and not to be satisfied with just the little that we somehow stumble on along that path to You. Set our hearts on fire, just as You set the hearts of the apostles on fire, so that the Spirit You sent us can also manifest in us. Amen.
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