A Reflection for Die II infra octavam Pentecostes — Dies Octavæ I. classis
On Acts 10:34, 42–48 and John 3:16–21
The Church, having yesterday received the rushing wind and the parted tongues of fire, does not rest from her joy. The Octave of Pentecost is no mere prolongation; it is a sustained contemplation of the great gift bestowed, that the soul might taste each day a fresh draught of that same Spirit. Spiritus Domini replevit orbem terrarum — “the Spirit of the Lord hath filled the whole world” (Wisd. 1:7) — and the holy liturgy holds us within that fulness for eight days, as though the Apostles’ chamber had become the dwelling of the whole Church.
On this Monday, vested in red and crowned with the dignity of a feast of the first class, the Roman Rite places before us two pericopes which together disclose the mystery of the Spirit’s mission ad gentes. From the Acts of the Apostles, the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the household of Cornelius; from the Gospel of St. John, the colloquy with Nicodemus concerning the Light which is come into the world. The one is the historical fulfilment; the other is the eternal cause. The one shows the Spirit acting; the other shows the Father giving and the Son sent. Together they form a single mystery: Sic Deus dilexit mundum — God so loved the world.
I. The Spirit Falls upon the Gentiles
In the Lesson, St. Peter stands in the house of the centurion at Caesarea, having only lately been instructed by the vision of the linen sheet (Acts 10:9–16) that what God hath cleansed no man may call common. He opens his mouth and confesses what the Gospel had always implied: quod non est personarum acceptor Deus — that God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34, Douay). And while he yet speaks, the Holy Ghost falls upon the hearers, and the faithful of the circumcision who came with him are astonished, quia et in nationes gratia Spiritus Sancti effusa est — that upon the Gentiles also the grace of the Holy Ghost was poured out.
The Venerable Bede, in his Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, marks the wonder of this moment: the same Spirit who at the first Pentecost rested upon those gathered in the Cenacle now rests upon a Roman centurion and his household, that it might be made manifest that the Church is catholica by the working of the Spirit, not by the calculation of men. Bede observes that this second Pentecost in the house of Cornelius answers to the first as the proof to the prophecy: what was promised in Joel that the Spirit would be poured out super omnem carnem (Joel 2:28) is now visibly accomplished in flesh that bears no mark of the covenant of Abraham. Grace anticipates the rite; the Spirit precedes the water. Peter therefore reasons rightly: Numquid aquam quis prohibere potest, ut non baptizentur hi, qui Spiritum Sanctum acceperunt sicut et nos? — “Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, who have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?”
St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on the Acts, dwells on Peter’s astonishment with his accustomed pastoral acuity. The Apostle, he says, did not bring the Spirit by his preaching as though by his own power; rather, the Spirit fell while the word was yet on his lips, that no man might glory and that the door opened to the Gentiles might be seen to be opened by God Himself. The Chrysostom remarks that this is the order of divine economy: God sends, the Apostle preaches, the Spirit descends, and only then is the sacrament of water administered — not as something superfluous, but as the visible seal of what grace has invisibly begun. Sacramentum and res sacramenti are here held together: the inward gift demands its outward sign, and the outward sign is no empty form, for it incorporates into the Body of Christ those whom the Spirit has already chosen.
This is the apostolic faith which Trent would later define against every spiritualist confusion: that the sacraments truly confer the grace which they signify (cf. Conc. Trid., Sess. VII, can. 6), and that Baptism is necessary even for those upon whom the Spirit has already moved, because the Lord Himself commanded it (Matt. 28:19). Peter does not say, “These have the Spirit; what need of water?” He says rather, “These have the Spirit; let water not be withheld.” The Apostle is at once docile to the divine initiative and faithful to the divine command.
II. The Light Come into the World
The Gospel turns us from Caesarea by the sea to the night of Jerusalem, where Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the dark. And here the Lord unfolds the cause of all that Acts will later narrate: Sic enim Deus dilexit mundum, ut Filium suum unigenitum daret: ut omnis qui credit in eum, non pereat, sed habeat vitam æternam. “For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son: that whosoever believeth in him may not perish, but may have life everlasting.”
St. Augustine, in his fierce and tender Tractatus in Ioannem (Tract. XII), seizes upon the participle sic — “thus,” “so” — and bids us measure, if we can, the depth which it conceals. Tantum dilexit, ut Filium daret — He loved so much, that He gave His Son; and what He gave was not less than Himself, since the Son is consubstantial with the Father. The world, says Augustine, was sick unto death; the Physician came, not because the world had merited Him, but because love is the cause of all the goods which God bestows. Non quia digni eramus, sed quia ille dignatus est. The Son is given not to a deserving world but to a perishing one; and herein is the measure of love, that He comes not to judge but to save.
Yet Augustine will not let us soften the verses which follow. Qui credit in eum, non judicatur; qui autem non credit, jam judicatus est. He who believes is not judged; he who believes not is already judged. The Doctor of Hippo observes that the Lord here distinguishes between two judgments: the judgment to come, at the end of the age, and the judgment which already weighs upon the unbelieving heart in the present. The unbeliever is not judged because Christ has come to judge him — for Christ has come to save — but because by his refusal he has set himself outside the salvation freely offered. The condemnation is self-incurred: jam judicatus est, quia non credit in nomine unigeniti Filii Dei. To reject the only Son is to choose the night.
St. John Chrysostom, in his Homiliæ in Joannem (Hom. XXVIII), takes up the imagery of light and darkness which crowns the pericope. Hoc est autem judicium: quia lux venit in mundum, et dilexerunt homines magis tenebras quam lucem. “And this is the judgment: because the light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the light.” The Chrysostom observes a profound psychology of sin: men do not first hate the light and then commit evil; rather, they first commit evil, and only then hate the light — for the light reproves their works. Omnis enim qui male agit, odit lucem. The morally upright soul welcomes the lamp set upon the lampstand; the soul corrupted by hidden vice flees the candle, lest its corners be exposed. Thus unbelief, says Chrysostom, is not principally a failure of the intellect but a perversion of the will: men refuse to believe because they refuse to repent.
St. Cyril of Alexandria, ever the defender of the Word’s true divinity, marks how the passage joins Christology and soteriology in a single thread. Lux — light — is the proper name of the Word, as the prologue has already declared: Erat lux vera, quæ illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum (John 1:9). The Light who is come into the world is not a created illumination but the eternal Son of the Father; and to believe in Him is to believe in God Himself, while to reject Him is to reject the Father who sent Him. Qui facit veritatem, venit ad lucem — he who does the truth, comes to the light. Cyril sees in this the very pattern of conversion: he who has begun, even imperfectly, to do the works of justice is drawn by an interior gravity toward the Light, that his works may be manifestata, quia in Deo sunt facta — made manifest, because they are wrought in God.
III. The Two Mysteries Conjoined
How beautifully the Roman liturgy places these two readings side by side. The Acts shows us the works of God made manifest in Cornelius; the Gospel shows us the principle by which all such works are wrought. Cornelius is the type of every Gentile soul whom the Spirit draws to the Light: a man already devout, already giving alms, already praying — already doing the truth, in the language of John — and therefore already disposed by grace to come to the Light when the Light is preached. The angel had told him in the vision (Acts 10:4) that his prayers and alms had ascended for a memorial before God. The works wrought in Deo drew the man to the further illumination of faith and the sacramental gift of the Spirit.
Here we behold the great economy of the Holy Ghost. He who proceeds from the Father and the Son works secretly in the soul long before He is named there. The prevenient movements of grace — that gratia praeveniens of which St. Augustine speaks so often in his treatises against the Pelagians — stir the heart of every Cornelius who has not yet heard the Gospel. The Spirit is at work in him by interior inspiration, drawing him toward justice and prayer, until in the appointed hour the Apostle is sent, the word is preached, the Spirit visibly descends, and the waters of Baptism complete what grace had begun. Gratia non tollit naturam sed perficit eam, as the Angelic Doctor would later formulate (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 1, a. 8 ad 2): grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. And the Spirit does not contradict His own previous workings but crowns them in the sacrament.
Therefore the Sequence which the Church sings this day, the Veni Sancte Spiritus of Stephen Langton, is no idle poem but the very prayer of the Cornelii of every age: Veni, lumen cordium — Come, light of hearts. The same Light who came into the world in the Incarnation, who is given to the believer in faith, is now begged from heaven by every soul in pilgrimage. Sine tuo numine, nihil est in homine, nihil est innoxium. Without the Spirit’s indwelling, there is nothing in man that is harmless, nothing that is pure. With Him, the dry soul is watered, the wounded healed, the rigid bent, the cold warmed.
IV. A Practical Word
Three movements of the soul commend themselves to us upon this Dies Octavæ.
The first is wonder at the universality of the Spirit’s mission. The Church is catholica because the Spirit knows no boundary of nation or class. Let us never circumscribe in our hearts the reach of redemption. Cornelius the Roman was given the Spirit before he was given the water; how much more shall the Spirit move in the hearts of those whom we are tempted to count as far from grace.
The second is the searching of conscience in the light of Chrysostom’s words. If we love darkness, we shall find always a reason not to come to the light. Let us ask whether there is any corner of the soul which we have not yet brought into the candle’s circle — any work which we suspect would not bear examination. The remedy is not to extinguish the lamp but to open the shutters. The confessional is the wide-flung window of the soul, where the Light comes in and the works are made manifest, quia in Deo sunt facta.
The third is gratitude for the sacramental order. Peter did not despise the water because the Spirit had come; neither do we despise the sacraments because grace has already touched us. The Eucharistic Sacrifice, to which we now turn in this very Mass, is the perpetual descent of the same Spirit upon the same Body, that we ourselves might become an eternal offering — as the Secret of today so movingly prays: fac nos, quæsumus, tibi sempiternum munus.
A Collect for Private Prayer
Deus, qui Apostolis Sanctum dedisti Spiritum: concede plebi tuæ piæ petitionis effectum; ut, quibus dedisti fidem, largiaris et pacem. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum.
O God, who gavest the Holy Spirit to the Apostles, grant unto Thy people the effect of their faithful prayer, that to those to whom Thou hast given faith, Thou mayest also grant peace. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.
A Devotional Suggestion
During this Octave, recite each day the Veni Sancte Spiritus (the Sequence of Pentecost), pausing upon one petition for an examination of conscience proper to that line. Let “Wash that which is unclean” guide your tomorrow’s confession; let “Water that which is dry” guide your meditation; let “Heal that which is wounded” guide your charity toward your neighbour.
For Further Study
For those who would go deeper into the patristic mind of these readings, three works will repay every hour given to them: St. Augustine’s Tractatus in Ioannem (Tractates XI–XII upon this very passage), St. John Chrysostom’s Homiliæ in Joannem (Homily XXVIII), and the Venerable Bede’s Expositio Actuum Apostolorum upon chapter ten. The English reader will find them gathered in convenient form in St. Thomas’s Catena Aurea, that golden chain which binds the Fathers’ voices into one harmonious exposition of the Sacred Page. To traverse the Catena upon St. John during this Octave is to walk through the Cenacle in the company of the Greek and Latin Doctors at once — a fitting exercise for those who would love the Spirit by loving the books which the Spirit has inspired in His saints.
Veni, Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fidelium, et tui amoris in eis ignem accende.