Our Lady Of Perpetual Help

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Reflection - Week of May 24

Question of the Week:

Have I felt the Holy Spirit’s movement in my life in both powerful and gentle ways?

     The accounts of the coming of the Holy Spirit given by Luke in Acts and by John in his Gospel are markedly different. In John’s Gospel, Jesus gives his disciples the Holy Spirit himself the first time he appears to them after the Resurrection. In Acts, the Holy Spirit descends upon the disciples after Jesus has ascended to heaven. In John, the Holy Spirit arrives on the soft breath of Jesus. In Luke, it’s on a strong driving wind. In John, the disciples are silent. In Acts, the disciples immediately begin to speak in tongues loud enough to be heard outside. Why the contradictions? It might help to think of the coming of the Holy Spirit as a process, in stages, with the disciples slowly realizing the power they’d been given. Indeed, the Holy Spirit descended upon most of us in infancy, when we could not know what was happening, but appears

again and again in different ways, with different gifts and different workings, throughout our whole life.

     In between wishing his disciples peace and bestowing on them the Holy Spirit, Jesus did one other thing: he showed them his wounds. The disciples may have thought that this was only to prove to them that it was him, but it may have also been to show them that even with his glorified body the wounds remain. The wounds are a part of him now. The risen Lord is wounded, as are we all.