The Feast of Pentecost
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Readings: Acts 2: 1-21 and John 20: 19-23
Not everyone looks forward to being asked to read the second chapter of Acts in public, with the list of difficult and multi-syllabic place names. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, etc. – those who heard the disciples speak in their own tongues on the day of Pentecost. Much ink has been spent in trying to establish why Luke noted those particular nationalities, and not others. Perhaps they were all the nationalities to be found in the great crowd in Jerusalem that day. Another suggestion is that this list is almost exactly the same as an astrological list, known from other writers, in which each land corresponded to a sign of the Zodiac. We are being encouraged to understand that God’s deeds of power, being expostulated by the disciples, are far greater and more life-giving than any other system.
We talk about the disciples speaking in tongues, but it seems this was not ‘glossolalia’ – the phenomenon of speaking in an unintelligible language, since people from all those places heard the good news in their own language. So the gift of the Spirit is not designed mainly to fill us with religious feelings, or to give us unshakeable certainty, or to impress others with our power, though it may have those effects also. The gift of the Spirit is primarily to allow the disciples, and now us, to be Jesus’ witnesses.
The gospel for today takes us back to the evening of Easter Day, when Jesus first appears to the disciples after his resurrection. We may be surprised to see it being used today. But, in John’s gospel, it is here that Jesus bestows the Holy Spirit. Before breathing this gift on them, he twice says ‘Peace be with you’ – and when Thomas joins the others later, he says it a third time. This ‘is not peace in a political or economic sense’, writes Paul Kennedy, but the peace of forgiveness and wholeness.
Jesus then says, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” If this sounds like the giving of a blank cheque, it’s worth remembering that those disciples had betrayed and deserted their leader. They would know how much they had been forgiven, and were unlikely to take the power over sin lightly.
So the tremendous mission Jesus is about to entrust to them would be founded in the reality of who they are. There can be the temptation to see the gift of the Holy Spirit as something for insiders, to be jealously guarded and enjoyed. Rather, we should long for what Peter preaches in his speech, that all people should share in the forgiveness and new life that God has given to us. We rejoice when we find the gifts of the Spirit displayed in everyday human situations – where we see love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, to use St Paul’s list in Galatians 5. And those are the qualities to which we should aspire ourselves. ‘The Spirit of God fills the whole world. Alleluia!’