Pentecost, The Gift of the Holy Ghost and Promises Fulfilled
Third Glorious Mystery
🔥 Pentecost
Veni, Sancte Spiritus — The Gift of the Holy Ghost and Promises Fulfilled
In the Third Glorious Mystery we see the first of Christ's promises fulfilled after His Ascension into Heaven. The Holy Ghost descends upon the Apostles and the Blessed Virgin Mary as they pray in the upper room on the day of Pentecost.
One thing often overlooked: those nine days of prayer in the upper room are what is called the first novena. A novena is simply the act of praying for a particular intention nine days running. The Church keeps many such novenas in her calendar, prayed in the nine days before a feast, and among the most beloved of them all is the Pentecost Novena, which prays the very days the Apostles prayed.
But what really happened at Pentecost? It was an act that revealed the Holy Trinity to the world. Think of the great theophanies of the Gospel: at the Baptism of Our Lord, the Spirit descended as a dove while the Father spoke from heaven, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:17). At the Transfiguration the Father's voice came again from the cloud, adding a command: "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him" (Matthew 17:5).
Now at Pentecost the Spirit comes not as a dove but as fire. Look at the image above and you will see the little flames, the tongues as of fire that rested on each of them (Acts 2:3). Dove and fire alike are symbols of the Holy Ghost.
Fire carries a weighty meaning in Christianity, and chief among its meanings is purification. Fire purifies what is impure in order to make it holy. Isaiah was purified when an angel brought a burning coal from the altar and touched it to his lips, so that he might prophesy to the people (Isaiah 6:6-7). And of the great prophet it is written, "Then the prophet Elijah arose like a fire, and his word burned like a torch" (Sirach 48:1). The flame points always to the presence of the Holy Ghost, and it is the same fire we met on Mount Tabor, the light that both glorifies and burns clean.
There is a reason St. Luke pauses to list the nations: Parthians and Medes and Elamites, Mesopotamia and Cappadocia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and Libya, Rome and Crete and Arabia. He is telling us that something ancient is being reversed.
At Babel, human pride tried to climb to heaven and was answered by the confusion of tongues and the scattering of peoples. At Pentecost, God descends to men, and the gift of tongues gathers what pride had scattered.
What sin divided, grace reunites. The Church is catholic, universal, from her first morning; the many tongues of the world are not erased but healed, each hearing the mighty works of God in the language of his own mother.
The Holy Ghost is known as the Sanctifier, for it is through Him that we are moved toward God and drawn into the life of the Trinity. Our faith in Christ, stirred by the Holy Ghost, brings us to the Father.
And He does not come empty-handed. The Church numbers seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, drawn from the prophecy of the Spirit resting upon the shoot of Jesse (Isaiah 11:2-3, in the Church's traditional enumeration; see also CCC 1831):
On the day of Pentecost the Catholic Church is born, with Peter as her Rock, as Our Lord declared (Matthew 16:18). On this day the Church was born and confirmed in the grace of God, and on this day she grew by thousands: about three thousand souls were added at Peter's preaching (Acts 2:41).
We too share in the grace of Pentecost when we receive the sacrament of Confirmation, where the Holy Ghost confirms, conforms, and strengthens us in the faith. What the Apostles received in the upper room, the Church hands on at every confirmation: the same Spirit, the same gifts, the same sending out.
The fruit of this mystery is the love of God, poured into our hearts by the Holy Ghost who has been given to us. To meditate on Pentecost is to ask for that same fire: to be purified by it, gifted by it, and sent out by it, so that the tongues of flame that rested on the Apostles may rest on us, and the love of God may burn in us for the life of the world.
Pray each verse, then the Ave Maria, letting the Acts of the Apostles carry the decade. (Scripture here follows the RSV-2CE.)
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