Send your Spirit to renew us!

Fr. Chino Biscontin

The feast of Pentecost (which means “fifty days”; this year on 31 May) has remote origins. It was a feast for the beginning of the harvest. However, after the Exodus it was linked to the events of holy history within which God guided his people. Based on the accounts of Deuteronomy, the gift of the Law to Moses on Sinai took place on the fiftieth day after he came out of slavery in Egypt. This capital event was celebrated on the feast of Easter, and fifty days later the gift of the Law was celebrated, and this was also the case in Jesus’ time. At Pentecost, in the Upper Room, the Risen Lord gave the small community of his disciples, gathered together with the Mother of Jesus, the promised Holy Spirit. The Law, which alone cannot bring salvation, is written in hearts as Love that converts and transfigures. And in the power of the Spirit the tiny “Church” of Jerusalem inaugurates the proclamation of the Gospel of the Risen Lord Jesus. And the Word of the Gospel will no longer stop, it will reach to the ends of the earth. The order of the liturgical year, as it results from…