Tongues of Fire

Summary

In this Pentecost homily, Bishop Barron unpacks the two great symbols of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2 — the driving wind and the tongues of fire. The wind reveals the Spirit as a power we feel but cannot control, so the heart of the spiritual life is surrender. The fire is given as speech: the first gift of the Spirit is fiery witness, because Christianity is not a philosophy but news about real events that demands witnesses who speak. The scene of the nations hearing the apostles in their own languages is a microcosm of the whole Church, sent out to proclaim Christ to all the world.

Mass Readings: Acts 2:1-11 · Psalm 104 · 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13 · John 20:19-23

Key Points

Pentecost: The Birthday of the Church

• Pentecost — from the Greek pentekoste, "50th day" — ranks with Christmas and Easter as one of the most important feasts of the Christian year, the celebration par excellence of the Holy Spirit.
• In the Jewish calendar, the 50th day after Passover (the Feast of Weeks, or Shavuot) commemorated the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, accompanied in Exodus by flame, earthquake, and wind. Those same dramatic signs reappear at the Christian Pentecost — now the giving of the Holy Spirit rather than the Law.
• It was a great pilgrimage feast, so Jews from the diaspora — "north, south, east, and west" — had gathered in Jerusalem. The city was full of crowds.
• Because all the baptized are filled with the Spirit and members of Christ's mystical body, "we are meant to see ourselves in this feast and in these readings."

The First Sign — Wind: A Power We Cannot Control

• The text describes "the sound of a driving wind." Spiritus Sanctus simply means holy breath, so wind is the first symbol of the Spirit.
• The interpretive key is John 3 and Jesus' night conversation with Nicodemus: "The wind — you hear the sound of it, but you don't know where it's coming from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."
• Drawing on his own experience of wind (Chicago, Rochester, Ireland, even a recent tornado), Bishop Barron stresses that we feel the power of the wind but cannot control or harness it — and the same is true of God.
• Therefore the whole spiritual life is surrender. To be in relationship with God is to be in relationship with something you cannot manage. St. Paul: there is "a power already at work in you that can do infinitely more than you can ask or imagine."
• A crucial caveat: the Spirit is not a destructive tornado. The Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son, so surrender is never self-destruction — but it does mean "your life is not about you."

The Second Sign — Fire: The Gift of Fiery Speech

• "There appeared to them tongues as of fire... and came to rest on each one of them." The first manifest gift of the Spirit is speech — indeed, fiery speech.
• Why is speech so central? Because Christianity is not a philosophy or a vague set of moral prescriptions we conjure on our own. It is based on events: the long history of Israel culminating in Jesus the Messiah, who preached, healed, died, and rose. You cannot reason your way to that — it must be witnessed and then spoken.
• Christianity is euangelion, good news. "A philosophy might be true, but it's not news. A set of moral convictions might be edifying, but they're not news. News has to do with something that happened" — and so witnesses are required who speak.
• This speech must not be "mealy-mouthed" or indifferent, but fiery — the gospel events were so unexpected and unforgettable that they "grabbed these people by the lapels and compelled them to speak."
• Bishop Barron names a long line of fiery witnesses across the centuries — Peter and Paul, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Maximus, Peter Damian, Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, Anthony of Padua, Francis Xavier, Ignatius of Loyola, John Henry Newman, Ronald Knox, Fulton Sheen, John Paul II — all able to speak because they surrendered to the Spirit.
• He recalls his mentor Cardinal George: at the beginning there was no Vatican, no parishes, no Catholic hospitals or schools — "but by God, there were evangelists." That is still what fundamentally makes the Church the Church.

The Nations Hear: A Microcosm of the Church

• Filled with the Spirit and the desire to speak, the apostles rush into the streets of Jerusalem and proclaim the Lordship of Jesus — and the gathered Jews from around the world each hear them in their own language.
• Bishop Barron walks through Luke's geography — Parthians, Medes, and Elamites (far east, present-day Iran), Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Phrygia and Pamphylia (Turkey), Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene (North Africa), and travelers from Rome — noting that Luke draws a crescent of nations around Jerusalem.
• The point: this is the Church, "meant to go out to all the lands and all the nations." Christianity is never to be "whispered in little corridors" or kept as a niche philosophy. Jesus said, "Go and preach to all nations" — and Pentecost is the seed of that mission, realized over 20 centuries of preachers and missionaries.

The Gospel: Jesus Breathes the Spirit

• In John 20, on the night of the Resurrection, the risen Jesus greets the disciples with "Shalom," then breathes on them and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit."
• To this day the risen Jesus continues to breathe the Holy Spirit into his Church — the power we cannot control. If we surrender to it and accept the obligation of fiery speech, we continue the work that began at Pentecost.

Notable Quotes

"When you are in relation to God, you're in relationship to something you cannot control. You feel its power in your life, but the whole game, really, is surrender." — Bishop Robert Barron

"Your life is not about you. The whole fun and drama of the spiritual life is that surrender to the power that's greater than you can ask or imagine." — Bishop Robert Barron

"Christianity is euangelion. It's good news. A philosophy might be true, but it's not news. News has to do with something that happened — and so witnesses are required who speak." — Bishop Robert Barron

"There weren't parishes, there weren't Catholic hospitals, there weren't Catholic schools, but by God, there were evangelists. That still is what fundamentally makes the Church the Church." — Bishop Robert Barron, quoting Cardinal George

"The risen Jesus, to this day, continues to breathe into his Church the Holy Spirit — the power that we can't control. But if we surrender to it and accept this obligation of fiery speech, we continue the work that began on the day of Pentecost." — Bishop Robert Barron