…it’s
the “Happy Birthday” of our spirituality…
Catholic
Church celebrates Pentecost as a solemnity, a day to commemorate
the descend of
the Holy Spirit upon Mother Mary and the apostles
The
upper room wasn’t exactly a nice place to hangout before the
Resurrection! No.
It was a refugee room for those who were afraid, lost, didn’t
believe, lacked
courage, who were hiding from the Roman centurions. It was a
dark and dead
place.
And then, Jesus appeared to
them in the same
upper room! What joy it must have been for the apostles and the
women and most
of all for Mother Mary! The upper room was now a place of
prayer, worship and
deep fellowship.
This
was what I call the ‘Jesus-encounter’ of the apostles. Do you
remember your own
‘Jesus-encounter’?
For
the next forty days Jesus stayed with them, teaching them,
encouraging them,
guiding them, and making them understand the mysteries of the
Kingdom of God (Acts
1:3). On the day of Ascension, he commanded the disciples to wait, for
the promised Gift
of the Father, which would empower them to bear witness to the
ends of the
earth (Acts 1:4-8). And whoosh! He was taken up to heaven.
So
what did the disciples do? They waited. And they prayed in one
accord
till the day came for
them to receive the Holy Spirit. On the glorious day of
Pentecost the Spirit of
God descended upon them like great tongues of fire, they began
speaking in
strange tongues (some even thought that they were drunk!), and
Peter stood up
before all those people (3000 actually) and spoke boldly,
bravely of Jesus and
what a speech he made (yes that fisherman dude), people actually
heard him and
asked him what should they do! He asked them to repent and to
get baptized. And
guess what, all those 3000 people sold their property, turned
from their sin
and really did get baptized (now that’s what I call mass
conversion!) and took
Jesus as their Saviour.
So
why didn’t this feat happen at the Resurrection? Or at the
Ascension? Why didn’t
Jesus directly ‘convert’ these Jews? And why didn’t Peter begin
his ministry
right after he saw the resurrected Lord?
Because,
Jesus wanted the disciples to carry on his work, and the
disciples needed the
Gift to carry out the work!
You
need a ‘Jesus-encounter’ to believe, the belief turns into faith
with more such
encounters and learning and deepening the faith, your faith
becomes your
spirituality, and your spirituality is incomplete without being
a witness to
the faith. To complete that spirituality you need the Gift.
