They Were Out Of Their Minds Series

Pentecost Sunday 2025

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and enkindle in them the first of your love. This prayer was one of the first I learned back in grade school, and, of course, I had no idea the depth of richness of its meaning. We rarely do understand what prayers mean down deep inside the words. Remember that when we talk about the divine, or pray to Almighty God, we always have a failure to communicate well. God is entirely other, and so when we talk about Him—see, I used a human word to describe the Trinity, three persons in one God, and none of us can visualize the reality we are trying to articulate—we always fall short. God’s works are always greater than we can describe.

When St. Luke was relating the scene in the upper room, he fell short even telling us when it happened. The Greek text says “when the day of Pentecost had fully completed.” In Jewish practice, Pentecost involved each one of the days after Passover. That’s seven times seven days plus one. That’s human language describing the divine. Seven is the number of days of creation, six of work and one of rest. So we describe a complete number done a complete number of times—PLUS ONE! You don’t get more complete than that. That last day of Pentecost was a commemoration of the giving of the Law to Moses. It was done on Mount Sinai with a great theophany—wind and rushing wind and fire. So in the upper room with Mary and the apostles, a hundred twenty in all, a great sound from heaven, like a rushing wind, and something like tongues of fire, one for each, liberating their tongues to praise God in languages they didn’t know. God’s gifts are never given half-baked.

Ah, but the people in the streets around the house heard the racket and began to hear their own language praising God from a bunch of Galilean throats. They were devout Jews, so they got the connection to the giving of Torah two thousand years earlier. They were, in the Greek, existemi. That means something like astonishment, but deeper than that. They were feeling out of their minds. This, then, was the setting for Peter giving his first sermon, and in the end, thousands had felt the presence of God and had repented of sin and presented themselves for baptism.

When we then hear the Gospel given for the day, we realize that Jesus had shared the Holy Spirit fifty days earlier, on the day of Pasch, the Resurrection. ‘Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”’

Why two givings of the Spirit? Like two Pentecosts, one at the beginning, the other at the end of the fifty days? The Resurrection gift was limited to the apostles, and so was a gift to the whole Church to be administered by the leaders. It was a gift of forgiveness, but with discretion. Those who presented themselves as repentant sinners could be forgiven and brought into the community of disciples, but only under the authority of Christ’s special twelve. For the whole faithful, who are all called to spread the Gospel of Christ, we have the more general gift of the Holy Spirit celebrated as the fulfillment of the fifty-day Pentecost season, in fire and thunder like the theophany at Sinai. There we see the many, many manifestations of the Spirit’s presence in the Church, and that is the general celebration we have today as a community of faith, hope and love.