Meditation of His Beatitude Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa for Pentecost Sunday, Year A

Below you can find the Meditation of His Beatitude Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, for Pentecost Sunday, Year A, on Sunday 28 May 2023.

Jn 20:19-23

On this feast of Pentecost, we listen to the Gospel passage of John’s Gospel that brings us back to the Easter evening, “On the evening of that first day of the week…” (Jn 20:19-23): the Risen Jesus visits His disciples locked in the Cenacle, and immediately gives them His Spirit, the new life that He received from the Father. As soon as He receives it, He immediately shares it with His own because that is precisely why He came into the world, just for this reason, went through death, thus fulfilling the Father’s work.

Not only. But at the very moment when the Risen Lord gives His Spirit to His disciples, immediately He sends them on a mission, dispatches them, enables them to be His witnesses. These few verses of John lead us to the heart of the new life, the life of missionaries and witnesses.

There is, at the center of these verses, the gift of the Spirit that makes possible what precedes it and what follows it.

What precedes it is precisely the mission.

If in the Synoptic Gospels much space is reserved to the sending of the disciples on a mission, and how must be carried out is described at length (do not to bring anything for the journey, no bag, no second tunic, no staff, etc…), here all this and, even more, is summed up in a phrase, is summarized in this “as”, “As the Father sent me, so I send you” (Jn 20:21). John does not feel the need to write anything regarding the conditions of the mission: This as is enough.

The mission of the disciples must be as that of the Son, must have the same attitudes, the same sentiments, the same intentions, the same thinking. And for John, this as can be summed up entirely in a single work of Jesus, the one He placed at the heart of the Last Supper, namely, the washing of feet.

What follows the gift of the Spirit is the invitation by the Risen Lord to go and forgive sins (Jn 20:23): this is the only content of the mission that the Evangelist John takes great care to record. 

We could say that the breath of Jesus which He breathes on His disciples and communicates the Spirit to them is like a new creative gesture, like that when, at the beginning of time, God breathed vital breath into the human being (cf Gen 2:7). 

But here, the life that man receives is the very life of God, the life of the Risen One, able to conquer death and sin. It is a new life, reconciled with God in the death of Christ, a forgiven life and, therefore, capable of forgiving.

The content of the mission cannot be other than this, that of mercy without limit which God revealed on the Cross, for all. Because the only way to overcome evil is forgiveness…

This news was originally published on the website of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Please click here to read the full text.