University of Dallas
Acts 2:1-11
John 14:15-16, 23b-26
Christ has called us by name at the start of this academic year to celebrate the Eucharist as instituted by Him at the Last Supper. Our Gospel reading, proclaimed in this celebration of the Eucharist, is taken from the Gospel of John, where the action represented occurs in the context of Christ’s Last Supper discourse whereby Jesus is teaching and instructing His disciples to remain in the way he has taught them – to remain in Him.
Christ promises an Advocate who will remain with them, with us, while Christ departs. The Advocate (parakletos) is the one who will remind them, intercede for them, and plead their case. It is a legal term; it means "lawyer," or as we used to say in my neighborhood “mouthpiece.” It is a term that connotes what a good defender would do for a client. So the disciples will not be lost when Jesus departs. Yet, what is this case and what is this needed defense that requires an advocate? The answers to these questions unfold in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles.
The events of Pentecost relayed in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles reveal God’s continued undoing of the effects of sin. In particular, it is the undoing of the sinful effects of Babel. There human beings sought to make themselves like God establishing their lives on their own autonomously selfish initiative and behaving as if God did not exist. The result was chaos and disorder from the confusion of speech – the fomenting of distrust, the systematizing of discord between and among human beings, resulting in violent injustice.
At Pentecost, the initiation of the Church’s life, it is the Divine initiative that compels the apostles to understand and to speak in the languages of the then known world. Each nation heard the Gospel preached by the apostles in their own particular vernacular. The understanding they receive comes from above and it involves the active and graced response of human beings. There is a divine condescension, and a human participation in God's activity of gathering into one; it is the blossoming of the flower of salvation from the Cross, the tree of life. As we read the prophesy that foreshadows this salvific event in the 45th chapter of the Book of Isaiah – "Let justice descend, you heavens, like dew from above, like gentle rain let the clouds drop it down; let the earth open and salvation bud forth." Or in the Vulgate, "Rorate Caeli desuper nubes pluant justum, aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem."
That which humanity has previously inflicted upon itself as part of the chaotic result of the arrogant sin of Babel, the confusion of languages, is now redeemed by Christ’s victory over sin through the activity of the Holy Spirit in forming the Church. The unity of the Persons in love who pour out to each one all that each Divine person is, holds nothing back.
The Holy Spirit in animating the Church, unites each human person into the perfect love of the Divine persons of the Trinity. This is the authentic mission of the communion of the Church. So Pentecost is the righting of the wrongs of Babel – not simply forgiving the sins of Babel but rather redeeming them. In this we see the first mission entrusted to the Church as animated by the Holy Spirit: the drawing into the life of the Trinity in the unity that transcends distinction. So it is not humanly imposed uniformity based upon language, or culture, or any particular ideology; but rather our cooperation as the Church with the action of the Holy Spirit.
As then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, "The Church does not begin, therefore, as a club; rather she begins catholic. She speaks on her first day in all languages, in the languages of the planet. She is first universal before she brought forth local churches. The universal church is not a federation of local churches but rather their mother. The universal Church gave birth to particular churches, and these can remain church only by continuously losing their particularity and passing into the whole."
The cause that the Advocate pleads is the mission of communion of the Church. The defense is against the return of the distrust, chaos, and violence of Babel. The Holy Spirit is the advocate that will not allow the chaos of Babel to return to human beings through their graced membership in Christ’s Church. Again as then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, "Church is mankind being brought into the way of life of the Trinitarian God. For this reason she is not something that belongs to a group or a circle of friends. For this reason she cannot become a national Church or be identified with a race or a class. She must, if this is true, be Catholic in order to gather into one the children of God."
The same temptations of Babel remain in our fallen yet redeemed world of today. There are voices in education, politics, and the arts who reassert the arrogant claims of Babel as ideologies and programs that dehumanize persons by a systematized pretense that God does not exist. We are gathered here in this Eucharistic assembly to ask the Advocate again that we remain a stronger part of the Church’s mission through our educational endeavors; we seek the Advocate to protect us from the seduction of subverting the Church’s mission as our own selfish initiative – in the fields of our educational endeavors involving language, philosophy, theology, culture, literature, politics, and the arts. We pray that we be a part of Christ’s plan, not that He might be a part of our plan.
We have the guarantee of the defense of the Advocate who is given to us again in the same context in which He was first promised us by Christ in His Last Supper Discourse – the celebration of the Eucharist by which we share in Christ’s eternal sacrifice of redemption – the Eucharist – that makes all of us the Church.
