3. Isn’t the Holy Spirit being given nowadays, then, brothers and sisters? Anyone who thinks that, isn’t worthy to receive it. It certainly is given nowadays. So why is nobody speaking with the tongues of all nations, as people spoke who were filled with the Holy Spirit at that time? Why? Because what that signified has been fulfilled. What was that? When we celebrated the fortieth day, remember, I drew your attention to how the Lord Jesus Christ drew a sketch of his Church and then ascended. His disciples were asking, “When will the end of the world be?” And he said, it is not for you to know the times or moments, which the Father has placed under his own authority. He had still to promise what he has carried out today: You will receive the power of the Holy Spirit coming down upon you, and you will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, and in the whole of Judea and Samaria, and as far as the ends of the earth (Acts 1:7–8). The Church was then in one house, it received the Holy Spirit; it consisted of a few people, it consisted of the languages of the whole world.
There you have what it was pointing forward to now. the fact, I mean, that that small Church was speaking with the tongues of all nations, what else can it signify but that this great Church from the rising of the sun to its setting (Ps 113:3) is speaking with the tongues of all nations? Now is being fulfilled what was then being promised.
Augustine, “Sermon 267” in Essential Sermons, The Works of Saint Augustine. A Translation for the 21st Century, trans. Edmund Hill (New City Press, 2007), 316 (HT: Stéphane Simonnin)
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