Pentecost: The God Who Comes Again (2)

Tongues of Fire

The tongues of fire and the speaking the gospel to all the visitors to Jerusalem in their own languages obviously grab every readers attention and interest in Luke’s Pentecost account. We considered some of resonances of fire for Jewish hearers in the first post in this series on “Word, Wind, and Fire.” What resonances, however, would the proclamation of the gospel is all the different languages represented in the crowd have for them?

First, we need to notice that the “crowd” present at this event is Jewish visitors to Jerusalem for the 

festival not all Gentile nations. Pentecost is an inner-Jewish event though certainly with significance for the wider world of nations. Too often, we apply it directly to the nations but a careful reading of Acts constrains us at this point. The “all flesh” of Joel’s prophecy that Peter uses to interpret what is happening (Acts 2:17) refers to the indiscriminate outpouring of the Spirit on all Jews not on every human being. It is Jews who are equipped at Pentecost for this next unfolding of God’s work.

Second, the “tongues” here are known languages from all the places the Jews gathered in Jerusalem were from. These are not the ecstatic utterances directed to God Paul deals with. These tongues are intended for human communication.

What they are equipped to communicate, thirdly, builds off the ministry of Jesus (remember he is the one who will baptize his disciples with the Holy Spirit and with fire, Luke 3:16). The primary burden of Jesus’ ministry was to reconstitute Abrahamic Israel and call to nation to embrace his way of being Israel rather than ways other were proposing which any careful observer could see would lead to disastrous conflict with Rome (which it did in the war of 66-70 a.d.). Failure to embrace his way would lead to the destruction of the nation and the end of its service as the bearer of God’s promise of blessing to the world (Gen,12:1-3). God is not throwing the Jews “under the bus” here, it is important to note. They still have a role to play in the historical outworking of God’s purpose and an honored place in his kingdom as Paul struggles articulate in Rom.9-11).

This is spelled out in Joel’s prophecy (2:30-32):

I will show portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke.  The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the Lord has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls.”

Heavenly upheaval is stock prophetic idiom for national disaster. But those who “call on the name of the Lord (embrace Jesus’ way) shall be saved” and escape the disaster to befall the Jews who do not follow Jesus’ way.

Fourthly, this Spirit-equipped people who follow Jesus’ way will bless the world (a lá Gen.12:3) in the first place by being the community in which the Gentiles too may receive the Spirit of God and become a part of the people who model the life God intends for his world (as the story in Acts relates) - a part of God’s great building project.

Babel and the Church

Pentecost is often interpreted primarily as a reversal of God’s curse on Babel of the confusion of their tongues and the consequent inability to understand each other (Gen.11:1-9). And it is that, just not primarily. I think the primary message of the Pentecost story is that God has defeated the great building project of sinful humanity begun at Babel and advanced his own creational building project (turning the world into a great temple for God and humanity to dwell in). That’s really what the Bible’s story is about – two rival building projects vying to run the world and shape its destiny!

Babel organizes itself as one human community speaking the same language, consolidated in resistance and opposition to God’s intent for a world full of diverse and different peoples and languages. They marshalled their growing technological skills to fashion this work of their hands which the Babelians hoped would achieve the significance and security they sought (Gen.11:4).

“The reason for building this tower was not only to reach the heavens, but to honor heaven and its angelic host.

“The word "unto" suggests an offering, and this tower was an offering to heaven and its host. It would serve as a temple, a central altar, where (humanity) could offer sacrifices and worship.

“This tower would dominate the city. It would be the crown jewel, architecturally, culturally, socially and spiritually, of the empire. It would be a symbol of (humanity’s) unity and strength” (http://www.israel-a-history-of.com/tower-of-babel.html).

Thus Babel shows humanity worshiping the works of its own hands. Not a bad description of what Adam Seligman calls “modernity’s wager,” the attempt, indeed, the arrogance, to establish human life and society without God. A direct affront and challenge to God’s temple-building project described in Gen.1-2.

God begins his post-fall effort to reassert and critique humanity’s Babelian conceit with Jacob in Gen.28. The patriarch has a dream one night while asleep on a stone of a ladder from heaven to earth on which angels went up and down. This ladder set up on earth and reaching into the heavens (as Babel’s tower attempted to do) provides a connection between heaven and earth (as the Tabernacle and Temple would later do, the latter as the “navel” of the earth connected it with heaven).

Human empires continued to come and go, each with similar divine aspirations. It is in conflict with the Roman Empire in the 1^st century a.d. that God brings his Temple-building project to it definitive and decisive culmination in Jesus of Nazareth. Reflecting on Jacob’s experience Jesus tells Nathaniel that he will “see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (Jn.1:51). Whereas Jacob called the place of his ladder dream “Bethel” (house of God) Jesus tells Nathaniel that he himself is now that place. He confirms this in Jn.2:19-21 when in dispute with Jewish leaders Jesus says: “’Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ The Jews then said, ‘This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking of the temple of his body.” In him his people become an extended temple (Eph.2:19-22; 1 Pet.2:1-10). Finally, at the end, John the Seer pictures the triumph of God’s building project when he sees the new creation as co-extensive with the New Jerusalem. The latter is cubic-shaped like the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple, the only other cubic shaped structure in the Bible. The whole world of the new creation is not just a temple, then, but a most holy place, the place where God dwells. So his people will live and work in his presence continually and their lives will be worship.

Pentecost tells us Jesus has come into to his people in a way that they can be indwelt by him and participate in him in God’s great anti-Babel building project which is, in truth, the hope and destiny of the world.