Bishop ’s Message for Pentecost 2007
A RADICAL INTERRUPTION FOR PEACE
The Feast of Pentecost is another of those important celebrations in the Church’s calendar that gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect. One of the elements of this reflection can be to ask the question ‘What does this event really mean for me today?”
The language of life today can be quite confronting. We are invited to participate in strategies and to subscribe to value systems. Our relationships are described as being a shareholder, or a stakeholder, or a partner. Our contribution is assessed in terms of outcomes and key results areas and our future is identified in negotiated outlooks. Our differences are corralled into structures, types and groups. Our preferences are identified as strengths and weaknesses. Our principles of life are compared and weighted by reference to terms like relativism and utilitarianism. There are some who construct a conflict between faith and reason, science and religion, principle and behaviour. Others will equate pleasant with good, pain with evil, moral with legal, achievement with good, and success with worth. In all this the human person can be relegated to being considered to be a resource or an asset. The same perspective on life believes that peace is created by negotiation, that conflict is resolved by compromise, and that ignorance is dispelled by arbitrary rejection or dismissal. Often, in this same perspective, ‘truth’ is a relative term that does not embrace any notion of objective definition but is a construct of acceptability.
Although the terms might not be the same, we can readily identify the same social climate in the Sacred Scripture. These elements of concern are all present in the Bible in both the Old and the New Testaments in various places. They were certainly the subjects of discussion in the time of Jesus and in the infant Church. We human beings are part of God’s wonderful creation. We are immersed in this world and we can and do influence what kind of world it is now and will be in the future. To bring proper balance to our reflection we sometimes need to give attention to the reality that each human person has an immortal soul. This dimension can be so easily overlooked because we become so busy with our involvement in the natural world. Many of the conflicts and contradictions we experience often have their basis in the disharmony that can develop because of our unbalanced view – we are dealing with only half the picture. We need to be people of both faith and reason, of both science and religion, of principle and behaviour. There are different dimensions to the reality that is our humanity.
The birth of our Lord Jesus Christ – the moment when God assumed human nature – is an event that changed everything. It has been described as a ‘radical irruption’ in human history. Humankind was radically, fundamentally and permanently different from that moment. As God, in the person of Jesus Christ, shared His divine life with us we too were given a share in the divine life. This brought to fulfilment the promise made at the very beginning of creation. God and human beings were now able to walk and talk together in the most intimate way again. Through that event our human understanding of life has been broadened to include the divine understanding of what life is and what it is all about. The questions of life that we all experience are now enlightened by the potential that the answer brings.
Jesus knew full well that the questions would continue and that we would need to constantly seek answers that satisfy and complete our lives. In his days with the Apostles and disciples he broadened their minds to understand the seeming contradictions and helped them to seek and develop the balance which provided them with something He called ‘peace’. It was not a peace that came from the world but one that came from Him. His gift of the knowledge and experience of the Father’s presence, love and hopes for us is His special gift. It is a peace that is not merely the absence of conflict or turmoil or worry or anxiety but a gift of sure knowledge and enlightenment that is deeper than our human experience. The promise to send the Holy Spirit from the Father is given in this context. With full knowledge and appreciation of our changed state comes the need for His peace in putting into proper perspective the contradictions we would experience as we tried to live our new life. Jesus promised that the Father would give us the permanent means to recognise and understand things from the perspective of living as daughters and sons of God.
The action of the Holy Spirit at the dawn of creation brought our world into existence. The action of the Holy Spirit at the moment of Jesus’ conception by the Virgin Mary brought the presence of Jesus into our world to change it forever. The action of the Holy Spirit on the disciples of Jesus at the first Pentecost fulfilled the promise of a gift of peace that flows from a constant awareness of God’s presence to teach us anew and to remind us of all that Jesus came to tell us. Things are certainly different. There has been a radical interruption in the path of human history. We can now experience the balance that Jesus’ gift of Himself – His Peace – brings to us. It gives us a renewed perspective and an enduring hope that sustains us especially in those moments when we are confused and confronted by the expectations of the agents of a world where truth and balance are hard to identify.
We look to the example of Mary to understand the power of Jesus’ gift of His peace. She, who consented and cooperated with the understanding and enlightenment the Holy Spirit brought to her, became the vital human link and instrument for this new dimension of human understanding and influence. She is wonderfully called ‘Help of Christians’ and, under that title, we entrust ourselves to her influence, care and example as we live up to the consequences of our changed state and seek true peace – a peace the world cannot give but which is her Son’s abiding free gift to us.
Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of the faithful and renew the face of the earth.
Mary, Help of Christians, pray for us.
+Max L Davis
Bishop
Feast of Pentecost 2007.