The Gospel today is the promise that Jesus makes to send the Holy Spirit, and Pentecost is the fulfilment of that promise. At Pentecost the apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit and were able to proclaim the truth of Jesus. Jesus also teaches the connection between the gift of the Spirit and the truth. Without the Divine inspiration that comes from God we are unable to fully express the richness of God’s being and love.
This giving of the Holy Spirit takes place on two levels, the collective and the personal. At the collective level the Spirit is given to the whole Church, starting with the apostles. The Spirit empowered the apostles to speak in many different languages the truth about the love and goodness of God. On an individual level we receive the Spirit at baptism, and we are given the gifts of faith, hope and charity. As St Paul puts it, we become temples of the Holy Spirit. We are empowered to know and love God and to bear witness to the saving truth. At Pentecost the Holy Spirit hovers over the Church to give birth to the mystical body of Christ. At our baptism the Holy Spirit comes to us to empower us.
We live the life of Pentecost primarily through participating in the sacraments, through a life of prayer and good works. The Holy Spirit gives us what are known as the seven gifts, to empower us to pray, to enter ever deeper into the life of the Trinity. As well as the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit there are also the fruits of the Holy Spirit. This, as given in today’s second reading, is a beautiful list of the results of living a life in the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control.
The Holy Spirit dwelling in us does not make us puppets but empowers us to be genuinely free and achieve our potential as children and co-workers of God. There is one very concrete way in which we can bear witness to the truth of Jesus and the Gospel. Guided by the Spirit, we can speak of the things of God, we can speak honestly, speaking the truth in love. This can go from explaining our faith to others, to saying kind and encouraging words to each other, the sort of words that build up, and not those that destroy. So, the Holy Spirit makes us children of God, but also helps us mature in Christ to the fullness of truth; as an ancient hymn puts it, the Holy Spirit is the Father’s promise, “teaching little ones to speak and understand.”