Pentecost, 50 days after Easter is a forgotten holiday marking the date when twelve rather ordinary men were propelled to proclaim a message of hope in the face of violent opposition. What is the relevance, if any, for us today?
Happy Pentecost Family and Friends,
This letter is a follow-up to my letter sent on Easter day (April 21), and posted below, where we talked about recent historical evidence for the Resurrection published by Gary Habermas in his PhD thesis at Michigan State. He proposed “minimal facts” that religious and secular scholars of ancient history widely agree are true. Here are the first 3:
1. Jesus of Nazareth died by crucifixion.
2. Very soon afterwards, his followers had real experiences that they thought were actual appearances of the risen Jesus.
3. Their lives were transformed as a result, even to the point of being willing to die specifically for their faith in the resurrection message.
With respect to fact #2, it is recorded in the Bible (in the Book of Acts) that during the last of these post-resurrection appearances, Jesus instructed his disciples just before the Ascension “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized withwater, but in a few days you will be baptized withthe Holy Spirit.” Acts 1:3-5
The Spirit had also been promised to the bewildered disciples some 40 days earlier during the Last Supper, on the eve of his crucifixion.“But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” John 16:13
With respect to fact #3, my contention is that the disciples’ sincere belief in the resurrection is necessary but not sufficient to explain their transformation and the subsequent explosive growth of the church described in Acts. In the Bible, it is explained to us that the Holy Spirit is the agent that transformed them and propelled them.
Ten days after the Ascension was Pentecost, where we find an astonishing account by the physician Luke in the Book of Acts: “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tonguesas the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language?”Acts 2:1-8
This is some pretty wild stuff, to say the least! What are we to make of it, and what is the relevance (if any) for us today?
N.T. Wright is a prominent Scottish theologian and pastor who delivered a sermon about Pentecost that begins “The point about Pentecostis that it’s the point at which two worlds collide, and look like they are now going to be together for keeps. The two worlds are of course Heaven and Earth.” The sermon is too long for an email, so I clipped a few excerpts below and leave you the link at the end for its entirety – highly recommended!
Prof. Wright continues, “In the first century as in the twenty-first many people supposed that these two worlds were supposed to stay firmly and safely apart. We live on earth; God lives in heaven; we hope there may be some commerce between the two. In ancient Israel the place of that commerce was of course the Temple, the spot on terra firma where Heaven actually overlapped with Earth; and the Temple thus functioned to the rest of Israel rather like the fireplace functions in a living room, the place where that which is normally dangerous can be safely located and dealt with. But if you think of the Temple as the fireplace, providing warmth and light to the room while being in a safe spot, then the imagery of Pentecost stands out in all its starkness: here are the tongues of fire, touching down not on the Temple, or the priests about their normal activities, but on the disciples in the upper room! The fire has leapt out of the fireplace and seems to be setting light to the rest of the house!
…So the point of Pentecost is intimately linked to the point of the Ascension, ten days earlier. In Jesus the two worlds have met, without embarrassment and awkwardness – though we in our split-level western cosmology regularly feel that awkwardness and embarrassment at the story of the Ascension, and at the stained-glass pictures of Jesus disappearing into a cloud with his feet and ankles still just visible above the puzzled disciples. No: the whole point of heaven and earth in Jewish thought is that they are meant to meet and merge. And the point of the gospel story as Luke has told it in his first volume is that Jesus had come to bring the life of heaven and earth together. That is the meaning of the ‘kingdom of God’. Thy kingdom come, he taught us to pray, on earth as in heaven. The disciples, we may presume, had been praying that prayer, among others, in the fifty days since Easter. And now the prayer is answered: like so many answered prayers, answered not in the way they might have imagined but in the much greater way which takes up their prayers and welds them into a new reality, the reality God intended all along and towards which their prayers were advance signposts.
…The first half of Acts explains what happens when the Messianic announcement meets the resistance of the Jewish authorities; the second half sets out, mostly through the story of Paul, what happens when the announcement of Jesus as Lord of the whole world meets the resistance of economic, social, cultural and above all political forces of the wider world, Caesar’s world.” – “When the Spirit Comes” – a sermon for Pentecost by Dr. N. T. Wright.
As a grad student at Cornell, I began to read the Bible for the first time in my life. I was thrilled, saddened, terrified and humbled as I read the Book of Acts, feeling as if I was actually there as the fisherman Peter delivered his first sermon to the crowd that gathered around the disciples at Pentecost: “God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it.Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear…therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”Acts 2:32-33, 36
Like that crowd, I too was “cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’ Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off – for all whom the Lord our God will call.” Acts 2:37-39
I will end here as I ended the Easter letter. I believe that the risen Jesus is alive today and reaches out to me and you, to reconcile us to God, and offer a new and abundant life with him that will last forever. The apostle John records Christ’s words to us “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.”
Happy Easter and Happy Pentecost!