Gospel (Jn 20,19-23) - On the evening of that day, the first of the week, while the doors of the place where the disciples were were closed for fear of the Jews, Jesus came, stood among them and said to them: "Peace be with you!". Having said this, he showed them his hands and his side. And the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again: «Peace be with you! As the Father sent me, I also send you." Having said this, he breathed and said to them: «Receive the Holy Spirit. Those whose sins you forgive, they will be forgiven; those whom you do not forgive, they will not be forgiven."

The commentary on the Gospel by Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia

We have read in the Acts of the Apostles the narrative of Pentecost which Luke places as a founding event of the time of the Church, a time that begins, precisely, with an irruption of the Spirit. The Baptist had already foreseen this by pointing to Jesus: "He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire" (Lk 3:16). The Church was born as a people gathered and guided by the Holy Spirit. It is born not from itself, but from Above. The Spirit pushed that small community to overcome their fear and go out into the square which - at the roar that had been heard - had in the meantime filled with a crowd of people "from every nation under heaven". All those present in the cenacle were filled with the Holy Spirit: "And they began to speak with other tongues" (Acts 2:4). We could say that it is the first face of the miracle of Pentecost: the transformation of that small group into a community united by a passion for the Gospel. The community is in the foreground, not individual disciples. It is no coincidence that Luke notes that before Pentecost the twelfth apostle had also just been elected. There is a new subject who is created by the Spirit and who is pushed to go out to communicate the Gospel to all the peoples of the earth. And they immediately began to talk about Jesus: the Father had raised that prophet who had been crucified from the dead. He is the heart of Christian preaching of all time. Then there is the second face of the miracle: the unity of the peoples of the earth who had gathered in front of the cenacle square, brought about by the preaching of the Gospel. Luke, with narrative effectiveness, has them introduced by name, as in an appeal, one by one: «We are Parthians, Medes, Elamites…, Cretans and Arabs… foreigners from Rome… and we hear them speaking in our languages». It is the first globalization brought about by the Spirit through the Church, that community, that "us" that wants to unite the peoples of the earth. Each of them retains their own name, their own identity but, at the same time, they all began to feel like a single people brought together by the one Gospel. Different yet united. Even today the world needs a new irruption of the Spirit. Conflicts have multiplied, injustices have widened... There is a need for a new Pentecost for this difficult and complex time. There is a need for that "breath of wind" to cause new upheavals starting from the hearts of believers.