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.