No ration of the Spirit: Homily for Thursday, May 1, 2025

For the one whom God sent speaks the words of God. He does not ration his gift of the Spirit. Readings for Today.

No ration of the Spirit

A while ago there was some controversy when the vice president, I would argue wrongly, identified a way in which we are to kind of ration our love. That it’s a series of concentric circles and we only have a limited amount, so we have to be careful that we don’t waste it until we have taken care of first the people near us and so forth.

But the reality is it’s fundamentally a misunderstanding of the notion of love. Love is not a consumable. You know, I was in education and you have consumables. Basically, especially in foreign languages, you had consumables.

You had worksheet books and kids would do the worksheets and hand them in, but they would be able to tear them out. You could not make copies of them. That was a copyright violation because they were consumable, designed for one use and then not to be used again.

But love is not a consumable. Love is infinite. And that’s really what Jesus mentions in today’s gospel. God does not ration his gift of the Spirit. God doesn’t just give a little bit because he has to make sure we all get some. It’s infinite.

The premise of our gift, our reception of that gift, and what we do with it, is that there are certain things that have limits for us. And this is really what St. Thomas Aquinas was getting at. We can’t spend all of our money helping the poor if it means our family is not fed. But it is not the case that we can only do one or the other at the same time.

And so what we experience sometimes is that we do that with God and this life of the Spirit as well. We can sometimes think that, well, you know, God doesn’t have time to hear my prayer. There’s all these people in the world praying. But that’s absolutely untrue.

God is infinite, without limits. We can sometimes think that, you know, God isn’t going to listen to me. I’m such a little person. That’s not true. God listens to all of us. One of the quotes that I really like from Pope Francis that I used last night was this idea that Jesus was always attentive to the people around him. His heart was always big.

There was, for example, the way he looked upon Jerusalem and wept for Jerusalem. He tells a story where the Samaritan is a hero because he not only notices the man who fell in with robbers, but he does something about it. God notices you and me. God notices everyone.

And the reality is that I think sometimes we don’t fully appreciate God’s love because life is busy. And sometimes we wish, like the people in Jesus’ time, that God would simply take charge and take care of the world and eliminate evil.

But what we celebrate during this Easter season is that God had a better solution. God didn’t simply just say, “Well, I’ll eliminate evil now.” God’s solution was that Jesus would eliminate evil for all time by dying for us on the cross.

It is sometimes hard to see how that is impacted when we look around and see a world that is so broken. But God’s love is infinite. God does not ration his gift of the Spirit. There still is an opportunity that people will be inspired by the dwelling of the Holy Spirit to do and to live the way God wants them to live. That it is possible for us to imitate Jesus not only some of the time, but all of the time.

I have a soft spot, I said a while ago for Thomas, I do have a soft spot for Joseph as well. Part of it is, in a little humorous way, “My gosh, he lived with the Incarnation and the Immaculate Conception. How do you live up to that kind of family?”

But he was a good and dedicated father. He protected the Holy Family. He trusted in God even when he didn’t understand. Let us ask the Lord today to give us that same kind of trusting faith. That knowing that God does not ration the gift of the Holy Spirit, let us ask God to help us to receive it in full measure.

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