I greet you cordially on the feast of Pentecost. It is the birthday of the Church. Christmas Easter and Pentecost are the three most important feast days of the Catholic liturgy. Since the holy Catholic Church was founded on the day of Pentecost we can consider this feast as the most important feast of the Catholic Church. If there was no great Christian event on that harvest feast of the Jews , if the apostles had not received the Holy Spirit behind the closed doors in the form of fire, if they had not preached the gospel convincingly, And had not given up their lives for the sake of their faith and experience there would not have been today perhaps Christians. Therefore we should be great full to those who have preached and handed over the faith for the last more than two thousand years and for the lively church through the work of the Holy Spirit. Today we pray for all who are actively proclaiming the faith of the Church and involve in humanising activities following the example of Christ.
To come to the message of the day I start with a small Witz. A Franciscan and a Salesian took turns confessing to each other every week. Once when the Salesian came to confess, the Franciscan said to him: My brother, as penance pray the rosary once and after each mystery of rosary a litany of All Saints. The Salesian Father was angry about this time-consuming penance; but he thought he would think of something when the Franciscan came to his confession the following week. When the Franciscan went to confession with the Salesian the next week, he said at the end in a very fatherly way, my brother, as penance you simply pray the Litany of All Saints once and a rosary after each saint.
You may laugh if you have got the joke. But today it is not self-evident that all our fellow Christians can understand this joke. In order to understand, it is not enough to know the language or to know the meaning of the words spoken, but you also have to know the meaning of terms such as the Rosary and the Litany of All Saint.
It is the same with speaking and language. A language is not just the words, sentences or knowledge of grammar, but it is the conveyance of the message, the willingness to listen to the person who speaks and to absorb his message, the understanding of him, his relationship with the listeners and vice versa. In my opinion, conveying the message through a person is understanding a language. I know married couples who understand and communicate with each other very well, even though both have to communicate in foreign languages because neither knows their partner’s native language and even though neither of them has a good command of the foreign language they use. Understanding a language is not just understanding the words and sentences, but understanding the message and accepting the message.
As we were celebrating the liturgy in Latin or Syriac or in Greek languages many of the faithful had not understood the the language, but they knew what was going on. Today the liturgy is celebrated in the vernacular. We know the meaning of the words and sentences. But it can happen that even though all the participants know the language some may not know really what is going on.
The acts of the apostles report about the great event of Pentecost. St. Peter preached in Aramaic language and the people from the different language zones understood his sprach in their own mother tongue. “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”
13 Some, however, made fun of them and said, “They have had too much wine.”(Acts2:10-13). That is, those who wanted to understand Peter or who opened themselves to the work of the Holy Spirit understood the message of his sermon and opened themselves to the person and message of Jesus and asked: “What should we do, brothers?” and allowed themselves to be spoken in the name of Jesus Christ and to baptise for the forgiveness of their sins. Some people couldn’t understand Peter and they thought St. Peter was drunk.
There is a beautiful story of an old lady who was over 2000 years old and never went to the doctor. Finally, once she went to the doctor, the doctor said that she should have come to the doctor earlier because her ears weren’t working well, her eyes weren’t seeing well, her nose couldn’t smell well, and her tongue wasn’t working well either to find suitable words. The lady replied that she can see what she really wants to see, that she can hear what she hears every day and wants to hear, that she can smell in her apartment and that she can talk as she wants. The author means the holy church with this old lady, but the same thing can happen to us in our everyday lives, that we no longer understand people’s language because we no longer get along with people and no longer want to understand people. As in the Pentecost event, all listeners of different nationalities understood Peter’s sermon, because not only Peter but also the listeners were filled with the Holy Spirit and everyone was ready to understand Peter’s message and receive it, the Spirit can also empower us to understand people.
We live today in a digital era with manifold possibilities of communication. Telefon, email, WhatsApp, television, different social media communications, etc. To we can communicate with people without being seen by the people and without personally meeting them. Such communications and meetings may not corresponds to the truth always.
But when people meet each other, even if they don’t understand each other’s language properly, when they see, feel, hear, look into each other’s eyes, then people understand better and more deeply. The Pentecost event is such an understanding.
We read the opposite of Peter’s sermon being understood by listeners of different language groups in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which although everyone spoke the same language and belonged to the same ethnic cultural and tribal group, there came a time when they no longer understood each other’s own language.
This means whether we can or cannot understand a person or his language, it happens suddenly, in a moment. During the construction of the Tower of Babel, they suddenly no longer understood their own language. At Pentecost, many people suddenly understood foreign languages.
I don’t want us in the community to have a city of Babel with its tower, where everyone speaks the same language but still doesn’t understand each other, but rather a city like Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, where people speak different languages and still understand everything.
Fr Joseph Pandiappallil MCBS