The Feast of Pentecost

Last updated on: May 11, 2008 at 12:00 am by Henry Karlson

The Feast of Pentecost 2008-05-11T00:00:59-05:00 Henry Karlson

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On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, `Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.'” Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive; for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. (John 7:37 – 39).

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. (Act 2: 1 – 4)

Pentecost is one of those great events which we Christians know and experience, and yet we cannot quite understand or explain it. The glory of Pentecost is the giving of the Holy Spirit to the Church. The history of the Church is the history of Pentecost, the history of the Spirit in the world. But that is the problem – we receive the Spirit because of the glorification of Christ; we experience the eschaton in all of its glory, and yet find ourselves still of the world, living in and through world history. The end of all things is fulfilled in Christ and experienced by us in our participation in Christ, and yet the world has not ended. The glory of God is over all the earth and yet that glory appears as if it is hidden. What are we to make of this?

Before Christ, the world was divided upon itself. The effects of the fall found itself manifesting in history as humanity became incapable of unity. The greatest manifestation of this is found in the story of the tower of Babel. Because we tried, like Prometheus, to lift ourselves all the way to divinity, to become gods, not by grace but by essence, we found out that we could not bring ourselves to such great heights and remain there unaffected. We fell back to the earth, broken, divided amongst ourselves, constantly fighting one another like the Greek gods, each one of us trying to make the world and all that exists within our image, contending against all who will not bow before our own ego. And so, because we exist in our own unique way, with our own unique thoughts, with our own unique desires, with our own unique experiences – even if we speak in the same language — we cannot understand one another. The meaning behind the words we speak, even if we think they should be obvious, never is clear; those who are closer to us might understand and appreciate what we say better than those who are further away from us, but even they will never completely comprehend what it is we are trying to tell them. How can they? There is so much which lies behind the words we speak, hidden not only from those we try to communicate with, but even ourselves. Post-modernism radically proves the truth of Babel; because of it, Christians, far from rejecting its insights, should learn from the post-moderns and see how they clarify the human situation and the difficulty we must face. We are placed into the world as individuals, and unless there is something which can overcome our individualistic existence, we find ourselves living alone without any true way to break through our egoistic shells.

What makes Pentecost special, what makes it one of the key events of salvation history, is that the Holy Spirit, who once spoke impersonally through prophets, is now given to us in such a way that we know the Spirit as the Spirit of Unity and Love. We know the Spirit – not just as an impersonal force guiding human history — but as a person, as one of the Holy Trinity. We know the Spirit and are open to it, finding ourselves in true personal communion with the Spirit; we find our egoistical shell broken through by the power of love. And it is the Spirit which, opening ourselves up to grace needed for sanctification and deification, that unites us to Christ, and in Christ, to one another. The earthly barriers of fallen humanity are overcome; in Christ we become one body, working together, capable of understanding each other – capable of transcending ourselves and speaking to others in ways which they can truly hear us and understand. The Spirit, the “Heavenly King” is also the “Comforter” and the “Spirit of Truth,” for it is a comfort to be able to overcome the division in humanity and to know one another in true love – that is in Christ, who is the truth which transcends all propositional attempts to ascertain truth. In Christ we become co-Christs, anointed of the Spirit, united one to another and to all humanity because we find our one common human nature allows for true communion.

It is communion in the Spirit which allows us to overcome the difficulties of language, for it is that one Spirit, who is in all of us, who unites us and is capable of overcoming the barriers of sin. We experience these barriers every day in the world so much that we believe them to be natural, but that cannot be: they exist only in the closed-off, fallen mode of existence we live in after the sin of Adam. We are no longer who we are supposed to be by nature; the fall has made our very existence unnatural, and this is what makes for hermeneutic difficulties when we try to communicate with one another. We live in our ego, and by its nature, our ego and its experiences cannot be experienced by others. Only when we die to the self, to our ego, can we find our true existence.

It is in the Spirit, the Spirit of Life who gives us true life, a life we experience as much as our self has been overcome, that we encounter the Word behind all words, the Truth behind all expressions of the truth. Pentecost is the day of the Spirit, the day of love manifest on earth, the day which shows us the glorification of Christ because it shows us the love which unites Christians one to another, a love to be shared with the world, a love which can and will transfigure all creation. In the end God will be all in all, but in Pentecost, we already experience the reality of this: time, the last dividing line, has already been transcended. But time must not be denied; eternity is the foundation for time, and in the Spirit, we have found our place in eternity; our life in time, when we are in the Spirit, points to eternity and thus, to the eschaton which showed itself at the Cross. And thus the Church, which exists in eternity (as the Shepherd of Hermas beautifully shows), finds its birth in time at Pentecost, and finds itself, as the Body of Christ, as the continued presence of Christ in the world, the bearer of salvation to all, the pillar and ground of truth who is capable of overcoming all partial truths because, as the continued presence of Christ in the world, she is the Spirit-bearer who speaks the truth to all and is capable of meeting people where they are, even in their egoistical shell.

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