During the general audience in the Paul VI Hall on 31 May, the Holy Father continued his reflections on the coming of the Holy Spirit.

1. "Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you" (Lk 24:49). After the announcements made by Jesus to the apostles on the day before his passion and death, we find, recorded in Luke’s Gospel, the promise of their proximate fulfil- ment. The previous reflections were based especially on the text of the "farewell discourse" in John’s Gospel, and we analysed what Jesus said at the Last Supper about the Paraclete and his coming. This is a fundamental text inasmuch as it records the announcement and promise of Jesus who, on the eve of his death, links the descent of the Holy Spirit to his own "departure". The former, he emphasizes, will take place "at the price" of his departure. Therefore, Jesus says: "It is to your advantage that I go away" (Jn 16:7).

The final part of Luke’s Gospel also contains important statements of Jesus on this subject after the resurrection. He says: "Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high" (Lk 24:49). At the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, Luke repeats this same admonition: "While staying with them he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father" (Acts 1:4).

Joel's prophecy

2. In speaking of the "promise of the Father", Jesus indicates the coming of the Holy Spirit, already foretold in the Old Testament. We read in the book of the Prophet Joel: "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even upon the menservants and maidservants in those days, I will pour out my spirit" (Joel 3:1-2). St Peter will refer to this very text of the Prophet Joel in his first discourse of Pentecost, as we shall see later.

Jesus also,in speaking of the "promise of the Father", refers to the announcement of the prophets, significant even though generic. Jesus’ announcements at the Last Supper are explicit and direct. If, after the resurrection, he refers to the Old Testament, it is a sign that he wishes to emphasize the continuity of pneumatological truth in the whole of revelation. It means that Christ brings to fulfilment the promises already made by God in the Old Covenant.

3. The Prophet Ezekiel (36:22-28) gives particular expression to these promises. God announces through the prophet the revelation of his own holiness which was profaned by the sins of the Chosen People, especially by the sin of idolatry. He also announces that he will again assemble Israel, purifying her from all stain. And then he promises: "A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you: and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes...You shall be my people, and I will be your God" (Ez 36:26-28).

Ezekiel’s prophecy, with the promise of the gift of the Spirit, makes more precise Jeremiah’s famous prophecy on the new covenant: "Behold the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah,...I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people" (Jer 31 :31, 33). In this text the prophet emphasizes that this "new covenant" will be different from the previous one—from that which was linked to the liberation of Israel from the bondage of Egypt.

4. Before going to the Father, shortly before the day of Pentecost, Jesus recalls the promises of the prophets. He has particularly in mind the eloquent texts of Ezekiel and Jeremiah which make explicit reference to the "new covenant". That prophetic announcement and promise of "putting a new spirit within them" is addressed to the "heart", to man’s interior, spiritual essence. The result of this insertion of a new spirit will be the placing of God’s law within man ("within them") and therefore a profound bond of a spiritual and moral nature. This will be the essence of the New Law infused into the human heart (indita), as St Thomas says (cf. I-II, q.106, a.1), in reference to the Prophet Jeremiah and St Paul, following in the steps of St Augustine (cf. De Spiritu et littera, cc.17, 21, 24: PL 44: 218, 224, 225).

According to Ezekiel’s prophecy, it is not merely a case of the law of God infused into the human soul, but rather of the gift of the Spirit of God. Jesus announces the proximate fulfilment of this stupendous prophecy: the Holy Spirit, author of the New Law, and himself the New Law, will be present and active in human hearts: "You know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you" (Jn 14:17). Christ, in fact, on the very evening after his resurrection, in presenting himself to the apostles assembled in the Upper Room, says to them: "Receive the Holy Spirit" (Jn 20:22).

5. The "outpouring of the Spirit", therefore, does not merely imply the "placing", the writing of the divine law in the depths of man’s spiritual essence. By virtue of Christ’s redemptive Pasch it also effects thegift of a divine Person: the Holy Spirit is "given" to the apostles (cf. Jn 14:16), that he may "dwell" in them (cf. Jn 14:17). It is a gift in which God communicates himself to man in the intimate mystery of his divinity, so that the latter, sharing in the divine nature, in the trinitarian life, may bear spiritual fruit. This gift is therefore the basis of all the supernatural gifts, as St Thomas explains (I, q. 38, a.2). It is the root of sanctifying grace which "sanctifies" precisely through "participation in the divine nature" (cf. 2 Pt 1:4). It is clear that this sanctification implies a moral transformation of the human spirit. Thus what was expressed by the prophets as "putting" God’s law in the heart", is confirmed, clarified and enriched in meaning in the new dimension of the "outpouring of the Spirit". On the lips of Jesus and in the gospel texts the "promise" acquires the fullness of meaning: the gift of the very Person of the Paraclete.

6. This "outpouring", this gift of the Spirit, has also as its purpose the consolidation of the apostles’ mission when the Church makes her first appearance in history, and later throughout the whole development of the apostolic mission. Indeed, when taking leave of the apostles Jesus tells them: You will be "clothed with power from on high," (Lk 24:49); "...you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you: and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth" (Acts 1:8).

"You shall be my witnesses": the apostles had already heard this during the "farewell discourse" (cf. Jn 15:27). In that same discourse Jesus had linked their human, firsthand and "historical" witness to him with the witness of the Holy Spirit: "He will bear witness to me" (Jn 15: 26). Therefore, "in the witnessof the Spirit of truth, the human testimony of the apostles will find its strongest support. And subsequently it will also find therein the hidden foundation of its continuation among the generations of Christ’s disciples and believers who succeed one another down the ages" (Enc. Dominum et Vivificantem, 5).

Then and later, it was a question of bringing into being the Kingdom of God as understood by Jesus. Indeed, in the same conversation prior to the ascension into heaven, he once again insists with the apostles that this Kingdom (Acts 1:3) is to be understood in its universal and eschatological sense, and not as a merely temporal "kingdom of Israel" (Acts 1:6) that they still had in mind.

7. At the same time Jesus charges the apostles to remain in Jerusalem after the ascension; it is there that "they will receive power from on high"; and there the Holy Spirit will descend on them. Once again the bond and continuity between the Old and New Covenants is emphasized. Jerusalem, the point of arrival of the history of the People of God in the Old Covenant, must now become the departure point of the history of the People of the New Covenant, that is, the Church.

Jerusalem was chosen by Christ himself (cf. Lk 9:51:13:33) as the place of the fulfilment of his messianic mission, the place of his death and resurrection ("Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up": Jn 2:19), the place of the Redemption. With the Pasch of Jerusalem the "time of Christ" is prolonged in the "time of the Church": the decisive moment will be the day of Pentecost. '"Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem" (Lk 24:46-47). This "beginning" will take place under the action of the Holy Spirit who, at the beginning of the Church, as the Creator Spirit ("Veni, Creator Spiritus") prolongs the work of the first creation when the Spirit of God "hovered over the waters" (Gen 1:2).