Today’s readings: Acts 2, 1-11; 1 Corinthians 12, 3-7.12-13; John 20, 19-23.

Celebrating the richness of Pentecost today, we read in the gospel how the moment Jesus touched ground again among his disciples “behind closed doors for fear of the Jews”, he mended their lives. It was for them a resetting, a fresh start, transforming their anxiety and fear into joy and courage.

In computer language the concept of ‘reset button’ means turning a computer off and on again to make it work correctly after encountering difficulties. What the Church now needs is precisely what Jesus did on that great day of Pentecost, a resetting in order to correct whatever is dysfunctional in the way it operates. Too much has accumulated with time and has become a burden that impedes the Church from functioning properly.

What always happens whenever fear takes over is that the Church seeks security in uniformity, that diversity is seen as threatening, and that it becomes more and more ‘self-referential’, as Pope Francis loves saying. When these attitudes dominate, the Church struggles more for its own survival, rather than for the survival of whatever gives life to humanity. It ends up more concerned with its own well-being than with mending lives.

The reading from Acts, giving account of that first Pentecost happening, highlights mostly the gift of speech the disciples received, which enabled them to be clearly understood to people coming from different ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds. The gift of speech was very much needed then and is much desired today.

It is so important to know how and when to speak; it takes uncommon courage to discern when to speak and when to remain silent; it is such a gift to speak intelligibly to different audiences. We live in a multicultural and multi-faith society. We live in so many different and alien worlds not only in the world at large but even in our faith communities and in our own families.

To speak of Jesus was once so easy and natural. It is no longer the case. In the second reading to the Corinthians St Paul writes: “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ unless he is under the influence of the Holy Spirit”. Without knowing, we may still speak of God under the influence of the traditions we received rather than that of the Spirit. So we risk speaking without connecting, because the Spirit is lacking. The Spirit is something radically different from simply our religious past.

Throughout history we have absolutised the Christian narrative and lost the broader perspective of the vast cultural and religious horizon of humanity. We sought to narrow down every other perspective to fit our mentality and vision of reality. We lost the dimension of the other, and the idea itself of diversity was disturbing. As Ibn Arabi, a 13th century Sufi mystic, poet and philosopher very influential beyond the Muslim world claimed: “No single religion can fully express the reality of God”.

The Spirit teaches us to speak adequately of God but also gives us a deep understanding of humanity. The Spirit is the wisdom that speaks the richness we all carry inside us and creates harmony between all different versions of spirituality. When, according to the Acts account, different peoples, cultures and languages tuned in miraculously to the message of the disciples, that was evidence that the good news of Jesus Christ is truly a universal message.

Truth is symphonic, and the rainbow of voices, cultures and faiths that makes the fabric of our society today in no way hinders the search for the truth. Truth should never become a weapon in the hands of some against others and can never reduce the rainbow to mono-colour. Unfortunately, many a time we nailed down truth to sterile doctrine, impoverishing the richness of the Spirit.

Jesus breathed his Spirit on the disciples to tune them in to the real needs of humanity, not to create a new religious fundamentalism such as the type he constantly condemned among his audiences. Like the disciples on that first day of Pentecost, we are faced with a challenge that demands uncommon courage to explore and discover more common ground in the depths of human hearts. This is not simply religious talk and, among other things, it provokes us to seriously question our perception of religion, of culture, and of the world at large, which is not necessarily as we have always believed it to be.

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