Pentecost: The God Who Comes Again (1)
We have just celebrated
Jesus’ ascension to the Father to take up his royal rule on the heavenly
throne. Before we can catch our breath from that, though, he’s coming back
again!
Pentecost is really
Jesus’ second coming in the biblical narrative. He’s not the incarnate Son in
this coming, to be sure. But it is the “Spirit of Jesus” (Acts 16:7). The form
of his continuing presence in the world as he pursues God’s ultimate purpose.
God never
intended to leave his creation alone. From the first moments when he walked
with our fore-parents in the Garden of Eden (Gen.3:8) God purposed to be near
and dear to his human creatures. And that’s the story line of the Bible punctuated
a key points with events hastening and deepening that divine nearness.
Pentecost is another of those moments tracked by the church’s calendar.
Luke story of Pentecost
in Acts 2 is a rich telling of this key events. In my several posts on it we’ll
explore a few aspects of it. In this first post I want to focus on Pentecost as
an event of wind, fire, and word.
Word,
Wind, and Fire
2 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in
one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a
sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where
they were sitting. Divided
tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to
speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. (Acts 2:1-4)
Word
The Day of Pentecost for Jews
celebrated the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. In other words,
Pentecost is about God’s Word. Christmas focused on the coming of the Word in
person; Pentecost on the coming of the Word in the Spirit.
Pentecost fulfills what Sinai
promises: a new relationship expressed classically by the prophet Jeremiah:
31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house
of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I
made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the
land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will
make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write
it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No
longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of
them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember
their sin no more. (31:31-34)
This (Pentecost) is that (Jeremiah’s prophesy). God’s Word,
his Spirit, takes up residence within us, present among us in power, creating
community, instructing, and energizing the people of God who declare and demonstrate
Christ’s victory and blessing to the world. Dynamic, creative, powerful is this
word celebrated in this transformation of old Pentecost to new.
The church father Irenaeus called the Spirit and the Word the
two hands God the Father uses to accomplish his work. Differentiated but never
separated, Word and Spirit are inextricably bound together as here in Luke’s
Pentecost story.
Wind
The dynamism of Pentecost Luke captures through the images of
wind and tongues of fire. First, wind. Connection of wind with Spirit is easy
since the same word in both Hebrew and Greek means both. The ruach of God blows
over the unformed waters of creation (Gen.1:2). Christians naturally interpret
this as the Holy Spirit at work in creation. The wind blows pushing back the
waters of the Reed Sea at the Exodus. God promises the wind of the Spirit to restore
the people of Israel in Ez.37.
Jesus links the two in John 3 likening the Spirit to the
freedom and unpredictability of the blowing wind. We can’t tell where it comes
from or where it is going but we surely feel its effects. Several weeks ago my
part of Longview TX was hit with straight-line winds of 90 mph. It came up seemingly
from nowhere and did frightful damage in its path. A most dynamic image for the
Spirit for unexpected power that rearranges or reorients things.
When the wind whips up in the Upper Room that first Pentecost
those gathered there knew something was up, a God-something, though they had no
idea what!
Fire
Fire also bears
several connotations for Jews. God’s presence (Ex 40:34-35; 1 Kings 8:10-11);
divine judgment, past and future (Is 66:15; cf. comment on Lk 3:16); the giving
of the law on Sinai (Ex 19:18); or part of the metallurgical refining process.
Fire’s association
with tongues suggest its connection with the Word and its proclamation. Here
the gift of the Spirit enables such proclamation in all the languages represented
by the multitudinous crowds in Jerusalem for the festival.
Word, wind, and
fire – unruly, unpredictable, uncontrollable forces unleashed by Jesus on his
world through his people. His Spirit, that unruly, unpredictable, uncontrollable
Spirit, by whose presence and power Jesus did what he did, filled his followers
so they might replicate his work in their world.
In the next post
we will look more at the tongues of fire and their significance for us.
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