"When
Jesus ascended into heaven forty days after His resurrection, He
instructed the Apostles to wait in Jerusalem for the sending of the Holy
Spirit. Ten days later the eleven Apostles, together with the Blessed
Virgin Mary, were praying in the Upper Room on the Lord's Day. The Holy
Spirit descended upon them as tongues of fire, as recorded in the second
chapter of Acts. Jews from distant lands were gathered in Jerusalem for
the feast of the harvest of the firstfruits, which was the closing
festival of the Pascal season. The Apostles, filled with the Holy
Spirit, began to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the various
languages of the people. Scripture records that through this
miracle 3,000 souls were baptized and added to the Church that same day.
Because of this, Pentecost is considered the birthday of the Catholic
Church."
And this is also 50 days after the last symptoms of my CVS (Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome) - praise God for answered prayers!!!
The scripture passage today is Acts 2:1-11. What struck me the most from reading this account again was a fresh understanding of the purpose of the "tongues". In these verses:
"When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability."
"Tongues" were actually used to describe the visible phenomenon of the Holy Spirit - "as of fire". The effect on the apostles (and presumably on our Blessed Mother Mary also), began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability". It was the Holy Spirit who gave the disciples the ability to speak to the "devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem" (i.e. people from "Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs"), in their own languages, telling them "about God’s deeds of power."
What was happening that day was not so much about the special gift "of tongues" given to the disciples, but about the work of the Holy Spirit to enable the disciple to preach the Good News to the many nations (Matthew 28:19-20)!
I learned from another preacher (also David) to set an alarm on my watch to go off at 10:02 every Monday to Saturday (not Sunday because it would be quite interrupting during the Sunday Mass) to remind me of Luke 10:2 "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.". It reminds me to offer my prayer to ask "the Lord of the harvest" to send out laborers into HIS harvest. I follow the prayer-calendar from Operation World which sends me a daily email information about one or two countries with specific prayer needs.
What I learned also today is the meaning of this harvest. According to this BibleTools article:
"Christ provides a clue as to when it was the best time to cut the grain in John 4:35: "Do you not say, 'There are still four months and then comes the harvest'? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest!" Obviously, in an agricultural year, there are many more crops to be harvested after the barley, which would take as many as four months to accomplish. However, Christ refers to the early harvest of His church, which He says is ready to harvest... His statement gives us information about when the harvest began in those days: The cutting, no doubt, began when the crop was "white." This is the transition color between the green of immature grain and the golden brown of fully ripe grain. At this stage, when the grain is still white, a reaper, using a very sharp sickle, cut down the standing grain.". The BibleTools reference gives a lot of useful background information about harvesting in Jesus' day.
Finally, it was really helpful to be reminded of my "Life in the Spirit" in Romans 8. I was having some difficulties praying last night with a small prayer group concerning our adult children. The verse in Romans 8:27 is a great reassurance of the work of the Spirit in my prayer life:
"The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what he means, and that the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God."
