Thought for the Week

Sunday 31 May – Pentecost

Collect for Pentecost:	Almighty God, at this time You taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgement in all things and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour, Who is alive and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings	Ezekiel 37, 1 – 14 or Romans 8, 22 – 27
	Psalm 104
	Acts 2, 1 – 21
	John 15, 26 – 27 & 16, 4b – 5

Pentecost is the feast of Shavuoth, also called the festival of the first fruits, or the festival of reaping. It takes place fifty days after the feast of Passover, and we get the name Pentecost from the Greek for “fifty days”. In New Testament times, the Jews sometimes called it the “Feast of Weeks”, as fifty days is seven weeks plus a day. Shavuoth was one of the three great pilgrim Festivals; the other two are Pesach (Passover) and Succoth (Tabernacles). King David had established Jerusalem as the one place where the Jews were supposed to worship and sacrifice, and, by the time of Jesus, this had been their practice for a thousand years. Of course, its popularity dropped off a bit, the further out people lived from Jerusalem, but all adult Jews who could travel were supposed to come to Jerusalem to give thanks to God at the least on these three great Pilgrim festivals.

For the Jews, Salvation was closely bound up with the land and the seasons. Before the days of King David, the Custom was to keep three great solemn festivals, the Passover, the Reaping and the Harvest. Reaping and Harvest clearly refer to agricultural seasons, and it is possible that the Passover took place at the time of an Egyptian agricultural festival, perhaps the first shoots appearing through the soil.

Be that as it may, they certainly understood the agricultural seasons as pointing towards the story of their salvation. At the Passover, they were released from their slavery in Egypt. At Shavuoth, fifty days later, they received the Law of the Lord, at the hand of Moses. And at Tabernacles, they were reminded of the purer, simpler and holier nomadic life of the Patriarchs, before they went down into Egypt.

Perhaps many of the Disciples had gone home after the Passover, when Jesus was killed and then rose again, which we count as the first Easter. Most of them came from the North, from Galilee, and perhaps it was a bit safer up there, well away from the crowds, the Temple authorities and the intrigues of Jerusalem. But they, and indeed Jews from all over the known world would have to come back to Jerusalem for the feast of Shavuoth. Peter and the Apostles had stayed in Jerusalem, as they had been told, praying every day in the Temple. Perhaps the other disciples, coming back to Jerusalem for the Shavuoth, had sought out peter and the Apostles, but at any rate, we are told they were all together in one place.

Just before nine o’clock in the morning, there was the sound of a great rushing wind. The writer of Genesis tells us that before creation, there was just the Spirit of God moving over the waters, like a mighty rushing wind. Here is God just about to renew his creation, by bringing into being his church, so it is not surprising that his Spirit should again be there, with the noise of a mighty, rushing wind. Wind is dangerous, powerful, invisible and unpredictable, like God Himself.

Next, Saint Luke tells us came fire, which separated, and flames appeared to rest on each of their heads. From the very dawn of history, man had regarded fire as being of God. Fire is itself mysterious and powerful, and it can hurt you, but most of the time it helps make life better, or in colder places, even bearable. The Exodus story is full of fire, and in each case the fire is a visible symbol of God’s presence: Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush; the column of fire leading the children of Israel through the wilderness, the fire at the top of the mountain, where Moses goes to fetch the Law, and even Moses’ face glowing with the light of the Divine fire as he comes down the mountain with the tablets of the Law. Here is God doing a new Exodus, establishing a new community of Faith, not the Children of Israel this time, but the Church, and it should be no surprise to find God’s power made manifest in the symbol of fire.

Then there are the languages. Extraordinarily, all these people from different corners of the Roman Empire could understand each other’s words. In Jewish theology, it was God who had confused people’s language in order to defend his very throne, as they tried to use the tower of Babel to assault Heaven. Here at Pentecost, God is building not a tower, but the Church, and of course the people must be able to understand Him and one another in it.

Perhaps these three symbols remind us of the three persons of the Trinity, wind, fire and word - Holy Spirit, Father and Son.

They certainly have a great deal to say to the Church, at whose birth they were present.

The mighty rushing wind reminds us that we must all be open to the Holy Spirit. As it is written, nobody may know where the wind comes from, nor where it goes, but we do know both where the Holy Spirit comes from and where He goes. The Holy Spirit is God, comes from God the Father, and leads us to our heavenly Father.

The fire is a useful reminder that the Church is only provisional, and only a tool. What the Church, and we, are about is worshipping God the Father, serving Him, and drawing other people to Him. When it helps in this process of loving, teaching and serving, the Church is a most useful tool in the hands of God, but when it repels people by a lack of love, and a lack of understanding, it is not.

Not for nothing does the writer of the fourth Gospel refer to Jesus as the Word, or in Greek “Logos”. Jesus is the ultimate expression of God, and of his self-giving love. As members of his Church, born at Pentecost, we need to relate to God’s Word in that least three different ways. We need to receive the Word of God into our hearts and lives; we need to listen to what God has to say to us; and we need to study his Word, which we find especially in the Bible, but also in the teaching of the Church, and indeed in the whole of creation, for is he not Lord of all?

It is in the Logos Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, that these three come together. We receive Him into our hearts and lives in the great sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. We see Him in the faces of those around us, each of them, like us, made in the image of God. In serving them, we serve Him; in loving them, we love Him.

May God bless you in your loving and your serving, and may He fill your hearts with joy this Pentecost, as you celebrate with all the Hosts of Heaven, the Birthday of the Church. Amen.

Father Charles Howard: Anglican Chaplaincy of Midi-Pyrénées & Aude

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