Bishop Barron's Pentecost Sunday sermon on the Holy Spirit, fiery speech, and the birth of the Church
A solo sermon by Bishop Barron on the Feast of Pentecost, exploring the meaning of wind, fire, and tongues as symbols of the Holy Spirit.
Summary
In this Pentecost Sunday sermon, Bishop Barron traces the Jewish origins of the feast and its fulfillment in the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles. He argues that the two central images of Pentecost — wind and fire — reveal something essential about the nature of God: a power that can be felt but never controlled, demanding surrender rather than mastery. The sermon's central claim is that the first and most important gift of the Holy Spirit is fiery speech — the compulsion to witness to the events of Christ's life, death, and resurrection — and that this capacity for proclamation is what fundamentally constitutes the Church across all twenty centuries of its history. He illustrates this through a line of fiery speakers in the Church's tradition, including figures such as Ronald Knox, Maximus, Peter Damian, Bernard of Clairvaux, and John Henry Newman, among others. He closes by connecting the geographic list of nations in Acts to Luke's deliberate literary design, showing that Pentecost was always intended as the seed of a universal mission.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The Jewish Origins of Pentecost
Bishop Barron: Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the great Feast of Pentecost — along with Christmas and Easter, the most important feast of the Christian year. The celebration par excellence of the Holy Spirit. It's also the birthday of the Church, so all of us who are filled with the Holy Spirit and members of the mystical body of Christ, the Church, are meant to see ourselves in this feast and see ourselves in these readings. So they're exceptionally important.
First of all, that term Pentecost — from pentekoste in Greek, having the sense of the fiftieth day. So the fiftieth day after Passover in the Jewish calendar was indeed a very high feast, also called the Feast of Booths. What they celebrated that day — and it's interesting — was the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. So think of those accounts in the book of Exodus, of the giving of the commandments and the Torah, accompanied by flame and earthquake and wind, these dramatic signs. Well, they're duplicated, if you want, on this later day of Pentecost — the giving of the Torah, the giving of the law, and now the giving of the Holy Spirit. So there's a link between ancient Jewish Pentecost and now the Christian idea of Pentecost.
Anyway, it was also a day of pilgrimage when Jews came from all over the world. By Jesus's time, there were Jews in the diaspora in many nations — north, south, east, and west. And this is one of the great pilgrimage feasts where they're meant to come to Jerusalem to sacrifice and to worship. So there are big crowds in the city. That's the point.
Wind: The Symbol of a Power You Cannot Control
Well, on this day we're told the apostles have gathered in one place. Typically it's imagined as the upper room, the place of the Last Supper, where they met the risen Jesus. They're gathered there. And then we hear this: "Suddenly there comes the sound of a driving wind." So a first great image of the Holy Spirit — and of course that's what the word means. Spiritus sanctus just means holy breath. The first symbol here is wind.
Now, how come? I'd recommend going back to John chapter 3 and that famous conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. Remember Nicodemus coming at night so he wouldn't be noticed. He has this intense conversation with the Lord, and the Lord says there, "The wind — you hear the sound of it, but you don't know where it's coming from or where it's going." And he says, "So is someone born of the Spirit." That's the interpretive key, it seems to me, to this wind as a symbol of the Spirit.
The wind — you feel the power of it. I'm from Chicago, the Windy City. I live in Rochester, Minnesota, which is also known — I think I read someplace — as actually the windiest city in America. When you're in the wind, you know the power of it for sure. My ancestral home of Ireland — I've walked around Ireland on very windy days. And just a few weeks ago here in Rochester, a pretty major tornado touched down. Talk about the power of wind — lifting a roof right off a house, blowing a house to smithereens. That's the power of the wind.
But controlling it, knowing where it's coming from and where it's going, thinking you can manipulate it — we can harness it to some degree, but imagine trying to control a tornado. That's why it's such a great image of the Holy Spirit. Because we feel the power of God. But if you're dealing with God, everybody, don't think for a second that you can control things. On the contrary. When you are in relation to God, you're in relationship to something you cannot control. You don't know where it's coming from or where it's going. You feel its power in your life, but the whole game, really, is surrender.
Remember St. Paul says, "There's a power already at work in you that can do infinitely more than you can ask or imagine." Now, mind you, the Spirit of the Lord is not like a destructive tornado — it's always about love, because that's what the Spirit is. The Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son. Surrendering to the Holy Spirit is not a matter of self-destruction. On the contrary. But your life is not about you. I've used that phrase a lot to sum up the Christian spiritual life. You're not in control. The whole fun and drama of the spiritual life is that surrender to the power that's greater than you can ask or imagine. That's the Holy Spirit.
Fire and Tongues: The First Gift of the Spirit Is Speech
So first wind, and then fire. Listen: "Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them." So here are the apostles — here's the core of the Church, Jesus's followers. They receive the Holy Spirit, this uncontrollable power. And what's the first thing that's made manifest to them? Tongues as of fire. What's the first gift, if you want, of the Holy Spirit? Speech. Indeed, fiery speech.
Now, how come tongues and speech are so important? Well, Christianity, everybody, is not a philosophy. It's not a vague set of moral prescriptions. Not something that we can kind of conjure up on our own — some spiritual convictions that we've come to. No. Christianity is based upon certain events. Yes, the long history of Israel, culminating in the arrival of the Mashiach, the anointed Son of David, who is the climax to the story of Israel. Jesus preached and healed, died, and rose from the dead. You can't conjure that up. You are a witness to it. It's news — unexpected, strange. You can't get it on your own. Rather, these events have to be witnessed to, and the people that witness them have got to speak them. That's why I think tongues are so important on the day of Pentecost, and why everybody up and down the ages, Christianity has placed such a great stress upon speech. The speech of witnesses.
Christianity is euangelion — it's good news. A philosophy might be true, but it's not news. A set of moral convictions might be edifying and might help you guide your moral life, but they're not news. News has to do with something that happened. And so witnesses are required who speak.
Now, more to it. They don't speak in a mealy-mouthed, diffident, indifferent, couldn't-care-less sort of way. You might be reporting something that's news, but it's so bland and ordinary — "Yeah, you hear about so-and-so?" So what? You announce it and promptly forget it. No. Christianity has to do with events that were so unexpected and are so unforgettable that they grabbed these people by the lapels and compelled them to speak — in a fiery way. Tongues, yes, but tongues as of fire. Not mealy-mouthed speech. We've had too much of that, by the way, in the Christian churches.
Twenty Centuries of Fiery Witnesses
I'm a student of philosophy and theology — I love all these people. But just think, over the centuries: Peter and Paul, Chrysostom and Ambrose, Augustine and Maximus, Peter Damian and Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua, Francis Xavier and Ignatius of Loyola, John Henry Newman and Ronald Knox, Fulton Sheen, John Paul II — up and down the twenty centuries of Christianity, speakers of the word, and more to it, fiery speakers witnessing to the same thing these first apostles witnessed to. How come they're able to do it? Because they've surrendered to the power of the Holy Spirit.
I think of my mentor, Cardinal George. At the beginning of the Church, there wasn't a Vatican, there weren't parishes, there weren't Catholic hospitals, there weren't Catholic schools. But he said, "By God, there were evangelists." You bet. And that still is what fundamentally makes the Church the Church — those upon whom the Spirit has come. Tongues as of fire, still true.
The Geography of Pentecost: A Microcosm of the Universal Church
So, filled with the Spirit, filled with a desire to speak, what do they do? They rush out into the streets of Jerusalem. All the Jews from around the world are gathered, and they begin to proclaim the Lordship of Jesus. And it's this scene which has beguiled Christians forever — though the listeners are from all over the world, they hear them speaking in their own language. Now, is it speaking in tongues as we know it? Maybe. Was it a specialized miracle of the moment? I don't know. But somehow all these people from different parts of the world understood through them the message of Jesus.
Here's what I want you to see. This beautiful scene is meant to be a microcosm of the Church. The Church are the followers of Jesus who have accepted the Holy Spirit — that they can't control, but they've surrendered to. They're now filled with a desire to speak in fiery language about Jesus, and they're destined to speak to the whole world. Christianity is not meant to be whispered in little corridors, nor is it meant to be a kind of niche philosophy. No. Jesus said, "Go and preach to all nations." It starts right here. And this scene is like a microcosm, like a little seed.
And then this detail — everybody, I love this — because they go to the extreme of naming where all these people are from, and we'll see why. Think of Jerusalem here in the middle. "We are Parthians, Medes, and Elamites." Well, where were those lands? They were far to the east — present-day Iran. Far to the east of Jerusalem. Then there are inhabitants of Mesopotamia. Where was that? A little bit further west, getting closer to Jerusalem. "We're from Judea and Cappadocia." Judea is the area right around Jerusalem. Cappadocia? That's up in present-day Turkey — to the north. "We're from Pontus in Asia." Now we go even a little further north, to the shores of the Black Sea. "We're from Phrygia and Pamphylia." Where were they? We go south from there — still in Turkey, but now on the Mediterranean coast. "They're from Egypt and districts of Libya near Cyrene." Now we're far to the west, across the Mediterranean, far west in North Africa. And finally, there are travelers even from Rome — now even further north and west.
Now look — look what's happened. Imagine Jerusalem here. Luke, who wrote this account, has drawn a kind of crescent all around Jerusalem from east to west. What's the point he's making? This is the Church. This is the Church, meant to go out to all the lands and all the nations. And it happened over twenty centuries. Think of all the preachers and missionaries and evangelists who have indeed spoken in practically all the languages of the world. That's the influence of the Holy Spirit. And that's realizing in fact what was anticipated on this day at Pentecost.
The Risen Christ Still Breathes the Spirit into His Church
So just a quick word about the Gospel. Jesus, on the night of the resurrection, sees the disciples, says to them, "Shalom," and then, strangely and beautifully, it says he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit." That's it, everybody. The risen Jesus, to this day, continuing to breathe into his Church the Holy Spirit — the power that they can't control. But if we surrender to it, and we accept this obligation of fiery speech, we continue the work that began on the day of Pentecost.
And God bless you.