I’m sure many of you have heard in recent months about the severe flooding in California. There have been stories in the news about officials trying to manage the impact of flooding by strategically opening or closing floodgates in dams. If water is building dangerously above a dam, opening the floodgates can reduce the impact on those who live above the dam—while potentially increasing the impact on those who live below the dam!
Those stories brought me back to high school, when my family home was flooded. This was almost 40 years ago, in 1984. I remember the water coming relentlessly up the street, pouring into our yard, surrounding our home and ultimately flooding the whole ground level. Later we learned that we were downstream of a floodgate that officials had opened to prevent a dam from breaking or something.
The story of Noah and the great flood in the book of Genesis in the beginning of the Old Testament, talks about God opening the floodgates of heaven until even the highest mountains were covered with water. But there’s another kind of heavenly floodgate: In the last book of the Old Testament, the prophet Malachi, God talks about opening the floodgates of heaven to pour down blessings on his people. A flood of blessings is the kind of flood you want to be there for when the floodgates open!
St. Faustina, the Apostle of Divine Mercy, writes in her diary about Divine Mercy Sunday, the Second Sunday of Easter, six weeks ago, as a day when the “divine floodgates through which grace flows” are opened. But there’s another sense, an even more important and more basic sense, in which God opening the floodgates of heaven to let grace flow on earth is precisely we celebrate today, on the great Solemnity of Pentecost.
Pentecost means “50 days.” Fifty days from what? For the Jews in the first reading in Jerusalem, drawn together by the sound of the driving wind, Pentecost was part of their Passover season, 50 days after the Passover sabbath. Our Passover is Easter, and our Pentecost today is the 50th day of the Easter season and the final day. Today, in fact, we come to the end of a journey that we began 95 days ago on Ash Wednesday. A journey that began over three months ago with ashes and fasting, that came to a grand climax in Holy Week and the great Paschal Triduum, the commemoration of our Lord’s suffering, death, and resurrection, today comes to a kind of ending.
And yet what we celebrate today is no ending, but a beginning. Not a departure, but an arrival: the gift of the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus’ disciples. Something dawns today; something is born today: Pentecost is the birthday of the Church, the dawn of the Catholic faith. That’s why the next two Sundays are Solemnities devoted to two of the greatest mysteries of our faith: the Most Blessed Trinity and the Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus Christi. Our very understanding of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God in three Persons, flows from the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Our sacramental life, our celebration of the Holy Eucharist here today flows from the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The same is true the sacrament of Penance, of Confession, celebrated after this Mass—as today’s Gospel tells us with Jesus granting the apostles authority to forgive sins only after breathing on them as a token of the Holy Spirit in anticipation of Pentecost.
Pentecost is when the floodgates of grace open.
Without Pentecost, without the gift of the Holy Spirit, there is no Church, no priesthood, no sacraments, no Catholic faith. No access to what Jesus did for us on the cross. The ocean of God’s eternal love and mercy flows to humanity through our Lord’s Paschal Sacrifice—though the blood and water flowing from Jesus side, the living waters of Baptism and the Precious Blood of Communion—but the flood reaches us only after Pentecost: through the Church, through the Catholic faith, through the sacraments. Pentecost is when the floodgates open. St. Peter preaches the first Christian sermon; three thousand Jews are baptized; the gospel of salvation through Jesus begins to spread. Pentecost is when the floodgates open.
Every Catholic has been born anew, born from above, through water and the Holy Spirit, in Baptism. Every confirmed Catholic has been sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, completing their Baptism, equipped with special strength to bear faithful witness to Christ and to advance his kingdom amid the fallenness and sinfulness of the world. Jesus says the living water becomes within us springs welling up to eternal life. God wants to flood our lives with grace. It’s so easy for us to limit his grace to a trickle. To hold onto our sins: to grudges, to anger and resentment, to judging other people more than loving them. “I’m only human,” we tell ourselves. “It’s only natural.” The power of the Holy Spirit calls us to supernatural virtue: to love and bless and pray even for our enemies, and much more for one another.
Love, real love, is hard; it’s much easier to redefine love and hatred so we can tell ourselves we’re being loving instead of actually loving people in a costly way that they or anyone else can recognize. Jesus said people would be able to recognize us as his disciples by our love. Not by our beliefs, our Mass attendance, our prayer life—as vital as those are!—but by the fruit of all those things, which is love. Can they? Can they recognize us by our love? If not, then the spring of living water is not welling up in us to eternal life. At most there’s a trickle, not a flood.
Many of you, I’m sure, are familiar with a poem ascribed to St. Teresa of Avila that begins:
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours…
Those words are based on the passage in the second reading, from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Paul is clear that it’s because of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us that the Church is Christ’s body, Christ is our head, and we are all parts of his body—the same way that all the parts of your body are your body because of the living spirit in you. Christ our Head acts in the world through his body—through his individual members or parts, through you and me—if and only if we let his Spirit move in us.
Lord, open your floodgates for us.
Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love.
Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth. Amen.
Copyright © 2000–2025 Steven D. Greydanus. All rights reserved.