Jijo Kandamkulathy, CMF
Claretian Publications, Macau
PENTECOST – B
Jn 20:19-23
The outpouring of the Holy Spirit is narrated very vividly in the Acts of the Apostles. The narration describing the tongues of fire, the thunder and the wind create a dramatic background for Pentecost. These images have their symbolic roots in the Old Testament. Very often the reader is far more drawn in by the dramatic narrative and the actual miracle fails to receive sufficient attention. The central phenomenon is the new-found ability of the timid and scared Apostles to confidently speak to a large crowd of varied languages in their Galilean-accented Aramaic and the gift of the crowd to understand them in their own familiar languages. The message of their preaching is the Ascension mandate: repentance and forgiveness through the risen Christ. With the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the Apostles are infused with an understanding of revelation with clarity, their fear disappears, and the Ascension mandate receives a new dimension and purpose.
The message transcends the chaos of many languages of the gathered crowd and everyone understands the message without confusion. The Old Testament narrative of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11: 1-9) is important to recall here. The project to defy God is represented by the Tower of Babel. It was disrupted when God so confused their language that they could not understand each other and the God-defying project came to a halt. During the Pentecost event, God gathers back his people, scattered in the Babel project, and begins the reconstruction of humanity by unifying them in a language of repentance and forgiveness under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
The miracle is not about the ability of people to understand a language. It is about the ability of people to understand one another. One of the foundational human tragedies is failing to understand others as one’s brothers, sisters and neighbors. Its antidote is to develop a spirituality of understanding one another. It is this understanding that can bring all humans together.
There was an attempt to create a language called Esperanto. After nearly 100 years of promotion, only about two hundred thousand people speak the said language now. The idea was that it would be easier for international communities to understand each other if they had one language. The language failed to capture the imagination of the people because the disruption and chaos in the world are not about language but about the quality of the mind to understand others. It is this understanding that the Pentecost inaugurated.
The Gospel passage we read today from John describes the outpouring of the Spirit immediately after the Resurrection. After he breathes his Spirit into them, Jesus empowers them, “Whose sins you forgive will be forgiven and whose sins you retain will be retained.” This passage is often misinterpreted as allowing a certain discretionary power to the disciples to cast unto people the status of sinner. The text has to be interpreted as the continuation of the topic of forgiveness that Jesus speaks of. These are the disciples who have learned from Jesus to forgive without limits. He taught them that if you do not forgive others their sins, you will block your own forgiveness from God the Father. The invitation to the disciples is not to let any sin remain without being forgiven, but rather to reach the whole world and forgive their sins. The hidden message there is if you cannot reach out to the last person in the world to forgive sins, this person lives in the pain of sinfulness. This is why forgiveness of sins is to be understood as an essential part of baptizing a person. A forgiven sin loses its sting to hurt the one who is wronged and the one who does wrong. The key to annihilate sin is forgiveness.
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