Homily for Solemnity of Pentecost

Homily for the Solemnity of Pentecost

May 24, 2026
John 20: 19-23
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

Christ appears to the disciples
(James Tissot)

Our readings this morning/afternoon offer us 2 versions of Jesus’ bestowal of the Holy Spirit upon the Church.  The more dramatic version comes from the Acts of the Apostles—the 1st book in the New Testament after the 4 gospels, often called the Gospel of the Holy Spirit because of the Spirit’s prominence in it, guiding the 1st decades of the Church’s development.  This version of the Spirit’s coming shows his arrival as “a strong, driving wind” with a lot of noise, and as “tongues of fire” (2:2-3).  The Spirit empowers and emboldens the apostles, until then scared and uncertain, to go out and start preaching Jesus.

Less dramatically, in John’s Gospel Jesus comes to the apostles on the nite of the day he rose from the dead.  He comes quietly and mysteriously, entering a locked room.  He comes to bring them peace, and his presence fills them with joy:  “The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord” (20:20).

Jesus makes his peace concrete by giving them the Holy Spirit.  He breathes the Spirit into them, just as God the Creator had created the 1st man:  “The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being” (Gen 2:7); God put soul or spirit into him.  In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the word pneuma can mean either breath or spirit.  Jesus’ action is both symbolic and very real.

What makes a person Spirit-filled and alive?  Jesus gives his disciples the Spirit expressly for the forgiveness of sins (20:22-23).  When we’re alienated from God, we can’t be at peace.  The world is full of evidence of that.  When our relationship with God has been restored by the forgiveness of our sins, then we experience peace.  God’s own peace renews us.

Jesus has risen from the tomb.  His 1st action among his disciples is to give them his Spirit, the Spirit of peace and of joy, the Spirit who bonds them into his Church.  The Church’s purpose, the mission for which the Father sent Jesus and on which he now sends them is forgiveness and reconciliation:  “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (20:21).

The Church bestows the grace of the Holy Spirit on us thru Baptism and Reconciliation.  The words a confessor speaks over a penitent stress that:  “God the Father has reconciled the world to himself thru the death and resurrection of his Son, and poured forth the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins.”

That’s why Jesus came.  That’s why he gives the Holy Spirit to his Church—to renew us, restore us, put us at peace with God.