Penticost Vigil – Where The Spirit Of God Is, There Is Unity.
It is quite a journey we have made! Remember we started in the desert. Remember we started with a lockdown – everybody back to their house; nobody could move. While we are still on lockdown, we’re no longer in the desert because on Easter night, we move from the desert to the Upper Room, and we have been traversing the Upper Room for the last fifty days, and through this experience, we have come to understand who Jesus is! We have come to understand the call of baptism and unless a man be born from above, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
We have come to understand that this call of baptism is a complete regeneration of our minds that calls us to live and to be in a very different way; that we can no longer be flesh because what is born of the flesh is of flesh, but what is born of the spirit can see the Living God present in all reality, in all life, in every aspect of their human dignity, and in every aspect of their living. We understand that by baptism we were born of the Holy Spirit, and born of the Holy Spirit means that we are the people that God intended to experience this fullness of the Spirit. We are not waifs and orphans! We have been given the Advocate as our guide; as our counselor; as the one who stands at our side to teach us everything that we need to know about Jesus Christ, and everything that we need to know about this God of ours. If we call on the Holy Spirit, we will experience power from on high, and that power will release inside of us, an energy, a dynamism, a creativity for the renewal of our families, of our communities, of our parishes, of our Church, and of our nation.
We journeyed in the Upper Rooms through the words of John around the Last Supper and around the bread of life discourse, and we see in those words, Jesus promised that he is real flesh, and he is real drink. We see that what we celebrate when we celebrate the Eucharist is the opening up of the heavens and the earth; the inter Communion and the angels of God ascending and descending before God, and that what we have is a mystical union with heaven and earth. When we say, “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” the angels in Heaven are bowing before the Lamb who is in Heaven and the earthly figure of the Eucharist, and the heavenly reality of the Lamb are one and the same. That what we have here on earth is what ‘no eye has seen no ear has heard’ and no one dare to speak because this is the stuff that is in Heaven itself and we have been invited there.
We have heard the prayer of consecration of Jesus, “may there be one as you and I are one,” and we hear in this prayer a call for unity, and a call to reconcile that which is divided and fragmented – a call to bring together again the human family into the one heart and one spirit that God intended us to live in. As Jesus consecrated himself, he consecrated himself for his apostles, and he also consecrated himself for those who would believe in him through the teaching of the Apostles; and that’s you and me – and we learned that too in the Upper Room. As we have tarried long in the Upper Room and we’ve come to this moment of Pentecost, this moment where the Church is born again, where God displays a unity that is apparent within the diversity of human people’s where God shows that unity was always his intention, and that where God is unity is there.
