Sunday Reflection | the Lord has been merciful to us

There are countless – indeed infinite – reasons why this Feast Day of Pentecost is important. I want to focus on two:

The first reason is a person. Mary the Mother of God. I do not intend to overshadow the one day of the year that belongs to the Holy Spirit with Mary. But I cannot anyway since the Incarnate Lord was conceived precisely by Mary being overshadowed by the Spirit. I can’t circle a square, so I’m safe.

Many of you have had the privilege, as we do every day, of praying inside our beautiful chapel. At the center of the apse is a beautiful mural portraying the Pentecost scene with Mary, the Mother of God, at the center. We may speculate many reasons why Mary, although among the Apostles, is not numbered as one of the 12 in Church tradition. We can speak about “fittingness,” but we cannot know the specifics. What we do know definitively is that it was because she was too important to be – she is both greater than them and distinguished among them. The Catholic Church invokes Mary as Queen of the Apostles because she is both their spiritual mother and exemplar. And as Mother of the Church, she is our mother and exemplar also. By her purity and docility from the very beginning, she said “yes” to the Spirit and became the Mother of God. When all the apostles deserted Jesus as he hung on the Cross, Mary remained and was named the mother of the Apostles by the words of Jesus Himself: “Behold your Mother.” And now, in the upper room with the Apostles, she stands at the focal point of the Spirit’s descent as both the mother of all those present and as the spouse of the Spirit himself. As His spouse, Mary was the one who knew the Spirit that was to come more intimately than any other; this was not her first Pentecost.

The second reason, which follows from the first, is that the Holy Spirit reminds us of the Lord’s mercy. The second of the three feasts that the Israelites were commanded by God through Moses to celebrate as part of the Sinai covenant was “the feast of weeks,” or Pentecost. For 50 days after the feast of unleavened bread, this feast commemorated the greatest act of mercy to predate the Incarnation: the reception of the law, the birth of Israel as a nation, and the day when God came down in the form of fire from the holy mountain and claimed Israel “as his own possession.” It was a feast of commemoration in as much as remembrance. This was why the sin of the Golden calf was so serious. It was a simultaneous act of idolatry and failure to remember how God had led them by his Spirit out of exile and adopted them as his chosen people. There was no reason not to trust in the Lord’s mercy outside of a failure to remember.

By the power of the Spirit, we remember where we came from and who we belong to. This is not just a kind of intellectual memory. Jesus teaches that the Holy Spirit gives us the means to remember: “But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” John 14:26.

On this Holy Feast, let us together ask for the intercession of Mary, that the Holy Spirit bestow on us the grace to recall how the Lord has been merciful to us. And to deepen our trust in Him as His adopted children.

Greetings to all on this Holy Feast! Thank you for all the ways that you have listened to the promptings of the Spirit to pray and support the mission of Saint John's Seminary!

By Rev. Mr. Brian Daley, Transitional Decaon, Archdiocese of Boston