WE round off the Easter Season with the solemnity of Pentecost. The coming down of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples is an essential component of Jesus’ victory. The gospel narration (John 20:19-23) underlines what the giving of the Spirit by the risen Lord means.
Christ’s total victory
John’s presentation of Easter is distinctly inclusive. Unlike Luke’s schema where Ascension was 40 days and Pentecost 50 days after the resurrection (which serialization the Church has followed for liturgical and pedagogical purposes), the Johannine version understands the resurrection as inclusive in one event of Jesus’ ascension and exaltation, as well as His giving of the Holy Spirit. On the same day of the resurrection His “hour” of glory and victory was complete.
And a dimension of this victory is the continuity between the days of His passion and death and the hour of His glory. His appearance to the disciples on the evening of that first day of the week was in the perspective of His passion. Jesus matter-of-factly showed them His pierced hands and His opened side stamped by His suffering. The evangelist would like to dispel the lurking Gnostic idea that regarded the earthly Jesus and His passion as irrelevant, and that all that mattered was His assumption of heavenly power. On the contrary, it must never be forgotten that the cross had been the road to victory. The disciples rejoiced seeing thus the Lord. The joy He brought them was not one out of the blue sky, but a fulfillment that came out of fidelity to God amidst the turmoil and resistance of darkness.
In a world of peace
The risen Jesus entered the assembly of His followers literally exuding peace—“Peace be with you!” Not merely a wish, it is the actuality of the gift of peace by the prince of peace. It is the peace founded on the explicit signs of his passion and death, the peace rooted in his act of self-sacrifice, his total abandonment to the will of the Father, the peace that is based on the Father’s compassionate and merciful love for humankind. It is the peace that reflects and echoes on Earth the peace and communion in the bosom of the Triune God in heaven.
The victorious savior is inaugurating the reign of peace. And He is entrusting it as a mission to His followers—“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” The master is relying on His followers to continue the campaign. God’s plan that there should be peace and reconciliation on Earth must be realized. The Son has already laid its foundation. It is namely a peace the world cannot give but can only receive from above. As the angels at the birth of the Son announced, it is the peace that begins with His coming, the peace He would plant in the world and wish it would bear much fruit. It is the peace that can only survive and prosper in the power of the Holy Spirit.
The breath of new life
SO Jesus breathed on His friends, saying “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retained are retained.” The other Paraclete as follow-up to Him is coming, Jesus earlier promised (John 14:16-17. 26), to carry on and lead them to the completion of what He has begun (John 14:27; 26:20. 22). He is the Spirit of peace and of forgiveness. In His power what is humanly impossible shall be reality, the reality of a new humanity in peace and in reconciliation as in a new creation.
God in the beginning breathed over “chaos,” and out of the waste life and light emanated in an ordered world. God breathed into the dust of the Earth, and His own likeness in life and love was imbued into it, and there was man and woman. John’s picture of the risen Jesus breathing over the humanity of His faithful ones is intended to remind us of the creative act of the Almighty as in Genesis (1:1-2. 26-27; 2:7), to inspire us in faith and hope of the new beginning, the new creation as the fruit of Jesus’ Paschal Mystery in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Alálaong bagá, the risen Jesus gifted His disciples with peace because He breathed upon them the Spirit of peace and of mercy. In the mission of peace and in the Spirit we are bonded to Him in the newness of life until He comes again.
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