Pentecost Sunday (Year C)

Homily

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Sunday 8 June, 2025
St Mary's Cathedral, Perth

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The celebration of the Sacrament of Confirmation is a celebration of fidelity, of commitment, and of mission. These are three words which I would invite not just our candidates for Confirmation this morning but all of us present here in the Cathedral to reflect on.

Confirmation is a celebration of fidelity because this morning, for each of our candidates, the Lord Jesus will be faithful to the promise He made to His first disciples that when He returned to His Father in heaven, which we celebrated last Sunday in the Feast of the Ascension, both He and His Father together would send the Holy Spirit to lead us all forward into the fullness of the truth about who God is, and about who we are as God’s beloved children.

This fundamental truth, without which we can never live our lives to the full, gradually reveals itself to us in and through our life in the Church. If we want to move more deeply into the beauty of the truth of God’s love for us, we will continue to be faithful to the community of faith to which we belong - to the Church.

This is the commitment we make at Confirmation in response to the Lord’s fidelity. It is the commitment our candidates will make today, and it is the commitment that most of us here in the Cathedral this morning also made at the time of our own Confirmation. In the end, commitment to the Church is really commitment to God who has given us the Church, His Church, as the place where we will most surely discover what He is asking of us and what He is calling us to do and to be – as long as we, as the Church, are faithful to God.

At its heart, of course, God’s call to us is a call to mission, to action. God does not intend that we should live our lives turned in on ourselves, worrying only about what is best for us and turning away from the needs of others. Jesus did not live this way and, as His disciples, we also must not live this way. Every page of the gospel tells us something more about the way Jesus lived His life, but if we had to choose one thing which sums up the life of Jesus, we might well choose the Last Supper, where Jesus takes bread and breaks it and tells us that it is His body broken for us; where Jesus takes a cup of wine and tells us that it is His blood poured out for us; and where Jesus then tells us that as His disciples, we should do what He has done. The bread and wine of the Eucharist, which become the body and blood of Christ which we receive each time we come to Mass, are the Lord’s reminder to us that in imitation of Him we should make our lives a gift for the life of others. How we do this will depend on our own particular situations, but that we should do it is essential if we are to be disciples of Jesus.

Today our candidates for Confirmation will receive the special gift of the Holy Spirit who in a new and special way will accompany them, as He accompanies all of us, in our journey of life and faith as we seek to be faithful as God is faithful, to be committed to the Church as God asks us to be, and to make our lives a gift for others as Jesus made His life a gift for us.