Whoever prays for the Holy Spirit to come to us, into our hearts, into our community and to our earth does not want to flee to heaven or be removed to the great beyond. They have hope for their hearts, for their community and this earth. We do not pray ‘Let your kingdom come…’ we pray ‘Your kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven. Magnificent unbroken affirmation of life lies behind this prayer for the divine Spirit to come to us fragile and earthly human beings.
Jurgen Moltmann ‘Pentecost and Theology of Life’
The wild ways of God
Pentecost refuses to let us remain bystanders – to observe the event or story from some critical and safe distance, we are caught up in the very real moving, live and dangerous drama of God in the world.
With the coming of the Spirit upon the gathered few, who met in safety and collected holiness – they are shed out into the streets. They begin to live a life hinted at by Christ – they begin to put flesh on the bones of his words. They live out a life that they have had limited preparation for. They commit themselves to a wildness and vulnerability that will cost them dearly: the contour of their lives will change; their reputation will be endangered; their possessions will transfer ownership and take on new meaning; their lives will become open to the pain and suffering of others as well as the hope of something so profound; they will suffer themselves and many will lose their life; they are on the cusp of something new.
This is their story and it is ours too. We are called to enter into the continuing drama of God’s new creation in the world. To enter into the realities of this world with all its hopes and greatness and all it suffering and disaster
It is the moment when God the Breather and Creator, who in his first breath we read of in Genesis, moving over the waters of creation gives life and breathes his image into humanity, so again at Pentecost, his Breath comes in the sound of rush of air from heaven. That same breath of God, which hovers over the womb of Mary bringing to reality that mysterious and beautiful conception of the Incarnate Son. The same breath that Jesus gave to his disciples in John 21, in the privacy of a room, this same breath breaks down walls and barriers and no longer contains them in an upper room, but pushes them onto the streets of Jerusalem.
This evocative image, of the breathing God giving breath again to his creation and his people connects so many images and metaphors in scripture, it transforms the tired and timid disciples into a people full of confidence and boldness, it ushers in a new movement in history which will overturn empires, it contains language and reality that overcomes prejudice and narrowly held views, it ignites a hope that unites humanity and crosses once long held divisions, all this and more.
And yet it is so often ignored in our liturgy, songs, creeds, and sometimes in our well worked out theologies. Pentecost is reserved for one day in the year and then gets stuffed back on the liturgical bookshelf until the next.
In our re-telling, re-imagining and re-membering of Pentecost we need to take into account all that went on before, the life experiences the disciples had, the teachings they heard Jesus give, the miracles they saw and were part of themselves, the life they witnessed, the death they saw, the doubts they encountered, the exuberance and confusion of the resurrection, the challenge of the ascension.
Pentecost was a vivid moment in the life of the church and the disciples, but not the sole point of transformation. Theologically, as we reflect on the coming of the Spirit, as Paul sought to grasp what that meant in his letters, we begin to see that Pentecost is another step in the way of God in the world. A way that continues the wild teachings of Christ and begins to reveal what God is doing beyond our own experience of Him.
It is the next step in the building blocks of the new creation.
The festival of Shavuot (Hebrew for Weeks) or Pentecost (Greek for fifty) was a pilgrim Temple feast at the time of the early disciples. An annual feast as part of one of three harvest celebrations, it becomes significant for the Jews of the day in different ways as they began to reflect on their encounter with God. It is a feast linked to pesach (Passover) – as the Jews celebrated the end of slavery and beginning of freedom in Pesach so the period after this became known as the counting of the Omer (an Omer was a sheaf of wheat) – seven sheaves were presented over seven weeks, the last being on the feast of Shavuot fifty days after Pesach. It also becomes significant as a celebration of firstfruits – the offering of the first of a new harvest, the beginning of a new gathering. Over time it became associated with the giving of the Law. So the movement from slavery to freedom and how that freedom is to be lived and experienced began to govern the celebration of Pesach and Shavuot1. It marked the end of spring and the beginning of summer. The end of slavery into the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey. The end of ha lachma anya2 (the unleavened bread of poverty) into the fullness of a new harvest and the full bread of a new era.
The celebration of the freedom promised in the Torah, the radical involvement and awareness of God being present and directing not just the grand affairs of state but in the minutiae aspects of daily life itself – even in the boring and monotonous routines of cooking or sewing, digging and planting, reaping and sharing – became a central aspect and interpretation of Shavuot.
The Laws of Jubilee and Sabbath, laws that overturned selfish gain and wealth being retained in families over generations, inherited wealth was not to be in the ideals of Jubilee and Sabbath. Each generation was to have a fresh start and opportunity in a risky world. The Year of the Lord, announced by Jesus, who showed a new way of life began to be seen by the disciples to be a central aspect to the model of the church and would be for generations. Church Father documents reveal the radical edge that many had in terms of wealth creation and possessions.
"While we try to amass wealth, make piles of money, get hold of the land as our real property, overtop one another in riches, we have palpably cast off justice, and lost the common good. I should like to know how any man can be just, who is deliberately aiming to get out of someone else what he wants for himself."
St Basil (4th Century)
"It is not for lack of miracles that the church is stagnant; it is because we have forsaken the angelic life of Pentecost, and fallen back on private property. If we lived as they did, with all things common, we should soon convert the whole world without any need of miracles at all."
St John Chrysostom
"How far will your mad lusts take you, ye rich people, till you dwell alone on the earth? Why do you at once turn nature out of doors, and claim the possession of her for your own selves? The land was made for all; why do you rich men claim it as your private property?"
"Nature produced common property.Robbery made private property."
St Ambrose
So immediately we as Christians can make some overwhelming connections with the meanings of Shavuot and the words of Jesus: “I am the bread of life” “Take eat this is my Body”; “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” These words of sustenance and resistance spoken in the context of a politically oppressive cocktail of Herodian tetrachs, ruling religious elite, Roman Governors, hearken back to the promises of a prophetic liberation, a time when God would step in to bring freedom; an expectant figure, who would not baptise with water, but with the Spirit; one who would announce good news to the poor; one who would bring the new reign of God.
They also bring into a fresh perspective of the words of Paul in Romans 8 of a creation groaning and longing and a witness of a people who have the firstfruits of the Spirit. A glimpse into the future by looking at the people shaped by the future. It may also shed some light onto Paul’s use of the age of the Spirit or the law of the Spirit. God is at work in a new and remarkable way and the Spirit, that same Spirit which raised Jesus from the dead, is at work in us.
So at the moment of this wondrous outpouring, the lavish flowing of God’s breath into his people and his world in ways hitherto never experienced before, the time of Joel prophecies were believed to have come true – the Spirit upon all, young and old, men and women, breaking barriers and creating a new way of seeing life and experiencing God in the world.
The new way of life was not limited to the amazing ability to speak in tongues, but to match the lavish outpouring of God, their lives become just as lavish in generosity. The Spirit helps the believers to overcome self-preservation and greed and leads them to live the way of Jesus, the politics of the Messiah, in an expression of communal living which still causes us a bit of embarrassment today when it is read and some creative hermeneutics to explain why we do not need to be like that now.
Speaking in tongues was in itself a moment where all who could hear could receive this new message, in their own language. Barriers are overcome. Yet the often overlooked aspect of this event is in v7. ‘Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans?’ This is not just a little line added in by Luke to help us imagine what sort of accents they spoke in. It is a quick reminder and snapshot into the quirky politics of the day, and a window opening onto the real and complex political, structural and religious context the Spirit comes.The Holy Spirit is a very political dove flying over national boundaries and interests, structures and differences to bring together a people, seeking to live in the power of the new creation; giving courage to ordinary people to break with traditions, to be open to the new, to let Truth invade into their own experiences of reality and offer a new expression of it to the world around them.
Such is the continuing call of Pentecost to us.
Footnotes
1More can be read on the Jewish feasts and their significance in Jonthan Magonet, From Autumn to Summer’
2From the liturgy of the Passover.
John is the Vicar of St Paul’s, Tupsley and St Andrews, Hampton Bishop in Hereford Diocese. He’s also currently doing Doctoral Studies at Kings College London.