We celebrate the great feast of Pentecost, the birthday of the Church, the day on which the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles in Jerusalem and transformed them from fearful and traumatized disciples to fearless witnesses to the Gospel and animated beneficiaries of the new covenant.

The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Most Holy Trinity. He proceeds from the Father and the Son, he is equal to, yet distinct from, the Father and the Son. In Old Testament Hebrew, He is Ruach Yahweh, the breath or wind of God who was present with God at creation (Genesis 1:26), He is the initiator of Divine order (Genesis 1:2), the Sanctifier, the One who affects renewal, the Advocate, our light and guide, the One who empowers all that the Father chooses. In the second account of creation, when God made man, it was by breathing His Spirit into him that God bequeathed life to Adam (Genesis 2:7).

“GO, THEREFORE, AND MAKE DISCIPLES OF ALL NATIONS.” We celebrate this weekend, the feast of the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ into Heaven. This feast is ordinarily celebrated forty days after Easter on the Thursday of the sixth week of Easter, but in most Dioceses in the United States, the feast is moved to Sunday in order to lend this important feast the Grace of the Day of the Lord: Sunday.

Acts of the Apostles from where we have our First Reading provides a concise account of how the day played out. Within the forty days after the Resurrection, Jesus made multiple appearances to His Disciples and, through the Holy Spirit, instructed them.

Today we celebrate the Sixth Sunday of Easter, and in two weeks we shall be celebrating the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles on Pentecost. This is precisely why the Readings at the liturgy this weekend revolve around the effects of the coming of the Holy Spirit on members of the early, and post- Resurrection, Church.

History is full of attempts by human communities to bridge the gap between the physical and the spiritual, the human and the Divine, through building of physical structures called temples. One of such temples was built in Jerusalem by Herold the Great, being completed in AD 66 and razed by the Romans in AD 70. The early Christians, and particularly the authors of the New Testament texts in this weekend’s Readings, were very familiar with this Temple, yet they were profoundly convinced that God had begun the construction of a new and greater dwelling for Himself in their own time, consisting not of gathered stones but of an assembly (ekklesia) of human beings, with Christ Himself as the cornerstone. This is why the Readings of this weekend revolve around the theme of the building of the Church, the new sanctuary that is founded on the Apostles with Christ as the cornerstone and all of us as members.