Pentecost shows us how the Holy Spirit makes believing possible

 PENTECOST | 8 JUNE 2025

When we say in the Creed, “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life”, we’re articulating not just one of the things we believe, but that which is presupposed to everything we believe. As our visual field is to our seeing, so the Holy Spirit is to our believing. The Holy Spirit makes believing possible. 

And yet, though a profession of belief in the Holy Spirit appears in the earliest credal formulae, it wasn’t until the end of the fourth century that a full article explicating what we believe about the Holy Spirit appeared in the Creed we most often use at Mass, the Nicen0-Constantinopolitan Creed, formulated in 381. 

That time gap between the events of Pentecost, the Jewish Feast of Weeks, described in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, and the Nicene Creed reminds us that, just as God revealed himself in time, so the saving truths of faith come to us through time, by the working of the Holy Spirit. Jesus explicitly promised that the Father would send us the Holy Spirit to bring to our minds all that he had taught us: “…the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name…will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” The saving truths given to us in faith here on earth will be, in other words, forever unfolding under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. 

Thus, it took time for the Church to understand that our communion with God and one another in Christ, through the gift of charity, which St Thomas describes as friendship with God, is made possible precisely through the Holy Spirit, who is the love that unites the Father and the Son and the love that unites us to the Father and the Son, and one another. The Spirit testifies that only genuinely selfless love leads us directly into the mystery of God, who is Love Itself. Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. 

The actual events themselves that took place on that occasion have much to teach us. Pentecost is sometimes spoken of as Babel reversed. If the cacophonous babble of the Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis represented the fragmentation of the human race, epitomised by our failure to understand one another, the reversal at Pentecost was represented by the fact that everybody to whom the apostles preached understood what they had to say: not, however, as the text is at pains to say, in the same language, but in their own language. What they heard was the same truth, expressed in many different languages. Under the inspiration of the Sprit, in other words, both unity and diversity flourish. Indeed, diversity in unity and unity in diversity, as one of the marks of genuine, respectful love, is the distinctive gift of the Spirit, a God-given, defining characteristic of our humanity, intrinsic to our very being, made as we are in the image and likeness of God, the Blessed Trinity, three Persons, one God. 

The raw human experience of the disciples at Pentecost also has much to teach us. Ever since Jesus had been physically removed from them, they had withdrawn into a timid, self-protective huddle, locked away in an upper room, looking to the past and longing to have their old lives back, wishing that things had turned out differently. 

But the gift of the Holy Spirit dispelled their debilitating nostalgia and paralysing reticence: once fearful, they were now fearless; formerly silent, they now enthusiastically proclaimed what God had done in raising Jesus from death. The text is explicit on this point: they were like men “drunk on young wine”, a sentence, along with Peter’s defence that it was too early in the day to be drunk, rather preciously omitted from today’s first reading. These diffident, regretful, bowed individuals had changed beyond all recognition: they now burst forth from the upper room, alive in the Spirit. 

Their former state of paralysis is all-too familiar. Feeling powerless to bring about the changes we yearn for, we often put our lives ‘on hold’, waiting for that ‘something more’ that will make the crucial difference and missing here and now, through our timorous caution, myriad movements of grace and promptings of the Spirit. 

Pentecost powerfully reminds us that the really important changes in our lives come, not from circumstances outside of ourselves, but from grace working within, from the influence of the Holy Spirit, ‘the Lord, the Giver of Life’, who is permanently and more intimately and inwardly present to us than we are to ourselves. His indwelling is the life by which we live, the light by which we see, and the love by which we love both God and one another, the love that enfolds us in the Father’s love for his Son and his Son’s love for the Father. It is by the gift of the Holy Spirit that we share in God’s own life and love. 

When we pray, “Come, O Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and enkindle within us the fire of your love”, we are praying to him who is within us already. To use a modern metaphor, the programme is already downloaded and installed, it only needs our consent to be ‘activated’. God’s courtesy, however, like his love, is infinite: he does not demand but invites our consent to come alive in the Spirit. And the only fail-safe signs of genuinely coming alive in the Spirit are what St Paul lists (Galatians 5:22-23) as the “fruits of the Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control”. These are the defining gifts that change us decisively. 

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent 

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. 

G. M. Hopkins, God’s Grandeur