The Fiery Love of the Father
The Jews had three great annual feasts, and every male Jew living within about twenty miles of the Temple was legally obligated to come to Jerusalem to celebrate. These were Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles. “Pentecost” gets its name from the Greek Septuagint word πεντηκοστή (Pentecoste), meaning the “fiftieth” day because Pentecost came 50 days after the celebration of the Passover. The Jews called Pentecost שָׁבוּעוֹת (Shavuot), meaning weeks. The reason why is because the Old Covenant Pentecost was celebrated after 49 days plus one, or after seven weeks (seven sevens), plus one. Because the feast of Pentecost came roughly during June, traveling conditions and the weather were optimal. This resulted in many people, well outside of the 20-mile radius, traveling to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast.
The Jews celebrated Pentecost for multiple reasons. Firstly, this was the annual remembrance of the day that YHWH gave Moses the Torah upon Mt. Sinai. The Jews called Pentecost Zeman Matan Torahteinu, meaning “the time of the giving of our Torah.” Pentecost was also the day of celebration and gratitude for the harvest. Hence, the Jews also called it Chag HaKatzir, or the “Harvest Festival.” Since Levitical law called for no work to be done on that day, it became a source of greater reason to celebrate, hence the vast numbers that gathered at Jerusalem every year at Pentecost.
What happened during the Pentecost of the New Covenant, we really do not quite know, except that the disciples had such a powerful experience of the presence of the Holy Spirit completely transforming their wills like they never had before. We get the account of Pentecost from the book of Acts, and while we don’t have evidence to prove that Luke, the author of Acts, was present at that Pentecost, we do know that he had access to the Apostles who recounted those events to him. One of the most prominent points of Luke’s narrative of Pentecost is how he tells the story of the disciples suddenly acquiring the gift of speaking in foreign languages despite their not having access to or fluency in many of them. For Luke, a gentile doctor, this would be of paramount importance. Men don’t just gain linguistic mastery immediately, let alone the sheer diversity of the mastery, wherein everyone in Jerusalem heard the Gospel proclaimed to them in their own native tongue.
The New Testament feast of Pentecost is God’s providential work of reversing the evil of the tower of Babel. In the Babel account, the builders say to one another, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth.” (Genesis 11:4). This language of “making a name” is something to pay attention to. In the Old Testament, the “Name” signified the person’s essence. When God revealed Himself to Israel, He gave them His name, “YHWH.” The Israelites became known as the people of the Name or the Shem of YHWH. To seek to make a name for oneself is to essentially say, “I choose to reject the name of YHWH and want to make myself into an idol for worship.” This is why their evil left them scattered and divided.
By the New Covenant Pentecost, the Judeo-Christian people now have the revelation of the name above ALL names: Jesus Christ. While man seeking to make a name for themselves caused them to be scattered and divided, the one name of God made man became the sole cause of linguistic unity for all mankind across the nations and across time. This is proven by their attestation: “We hear them speaking in our own tongues of the mighty acts of God.” (Acts 2:11)!
St. Cyril of Jerusalem points out that it wasn’t just the fact that they spoke new languages that astounded the people of Jerusalem; he writes that “[they were] invested soul and body with a divine garment of salvation. They partook of fire, not of burning but of saving fire; of fire which consumes the thorns of sins but gives luster to the soul!” Something about the Apostles radiated a kind of divine fire, described only as tongues of fire resting upon them. This must have undoubtedly caused the thousands in Jerusalem to pay attention!
Paul exhorts us to remember that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit isn’t primarily about gifts of power but the transformation of the entire life of the person. “Now those who belong to Christ [Jesus] have crucified their flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24). When the Holy Spirit comes into our lives, we cannot help but experience so powerful a conversion that our whole lives are crucified of all evil and we seek only to live in sanctified virtue, reflecting the grace of the life of God within us. The Church echoes this message to us every year at Pentecost during the sequence by singing aloud, “Give them virtue's sure reward; Give them your salvation, Lord” (Veni Sancte Spiritu).
Every time we come to commune with God in prayer, in the liturgy, and in the sacraments, we experience Jesus doing to us what He did to the Apostles in the locked room, i.e., “he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the holy Spirit’” (John 20:22). The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is an ever-growing reality in our world. St. Thomas Aquinas speaks of the indwelling of the Spirit as “the indwelling of grace, and a certain renewal by grace.” (ST I.43.6.Res).
The Church tells us that His coming never ceases in our lives. The more we seek Him in prayer, asking the Father to fill us with more of the Holy Spirit, the more His grace lives in us and transforms our entire lives! The Holy Spirit is the person who makes the Kingdom of God come alive, first within our own hearts and then, through us, to the entire world!
The question is, “What does He do to us when He comes into us?” Christ Himself provides the answer, “But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth” (John 16:13). The life of virtue can be summarized by being immersed and transformed by Truth Himself: Jesus Christ. If the Holy Spirit leads us into all truth, it is so that encountering the truth of Jesus Christ will ever transform our entire lives to first receive, live, and then reflect this saving truth to all the world.
This is why, when Luke writes about the Pentecost event, he wants to show Pentecost as a new experience of the Old Covenant Sinai event. Except now, Pentecost is a New Covenant Theophany, where the Covenant with Israel is extended not just to all Israelites but to all the nations of the world. In the Sinai event, God comes down in a fiery manifestation and writes down the language of His Law upon stone tablets to induct Israel into His covenant family. In the Jerusalem Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes down in a fiery manifestation and, instead, writes down the language of His Law upon the hearts of believers to induct every person throughout the world into His covenant family. God’s New Testament family is truly universal, truly katholikos, or Catholic!
This is precisely why the Book of Acts is permeated with the proclamation of the Kerygma, the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Church, from her very inception, has been intrinsically Catholic and fervently evangelistic. The three thousand who converted to Christ at the end of Peter’s first homily were but precursors to the millions who continue to flock into the Church as ones broken and lost, seeking healing and direction. The world hungers for a savior; we know Him intimately: Jesus Christ.
As Pope Benedict XVI once preached, “In Pentecost, the Spirit, with the gift of tongues, demonstrates that his presence unites and transforms confusion into communion.” God alone, through His grace, can turn rebellion into rejoicing and fragmentation into family. That is the reason for this great feast of Pentecost. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, let us expand this wondrous covenant family of our Father that we are blessed to be a part of.
Deus Benedicat