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The Story of Pentecost Jesus’s apostles receive the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, and the startling effects quickly draw a crowd.

In two parts

AD 33
Roman Empire 27 BC - AD 1453
Music: Sir Charles Hubert Parry

© Karl and Ali, Geograph. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0. Source

About this picture …

The harvest is ready beneath the church of St Patrick in Preston Patrick, Cumbria. Pentecost (‘the Feast of the fiftieth day’) is both a beginning and an end. It is a Spring harvest festival, and so well-chosen as the first gathering of the Gentiles into the Church in accordance with God’s promises to Abraham. At the same time, it crowns Easter and brings it to completion. Whitsun fulfils God’s promise to send his Spirit, ‘the Comforter’, upon the Church after Christ’s resurrection and ascension into heaven, so that he can write his law on our hearts.

The Story of Pentecost

Part 1 of 2

In Jesus’s day, the Roman Empire did not enforce Jewish law but the authorities in Jerusalem did. They required all Jews to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for certain major feasts, one of which was the Feast of Weeks, fifty days after Passover.

THE Jewish Feast of Weeks was kept fifty days after Passover, so in Greek the feast was called Pentecost, from the word for ‘fiftieth’.* It celebrated both the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai and the first-fruits of Spring, and Jewish law required everyone to go to Jerusalem for it.

Jesus’s apostles, together with his mother Mary and other women from his entourage, had remained in Jerusalem since his death and resurrection. Now, on the Feast of Weeks, they were gathered, as had become their habit, in an upper-storey room for prayer.

Suddenly, a sound like a powerful wind filled the room, and forked tongues of fire flickered above the heads of Peter, John, and the other apostles (including Matthias, chosen in Judas’s place). And they began to speak: not in their accustomed Aramaic or Greek, but in the various languages and dialects of the milling crowd of pilgrims, visitors from all across the Roman world – an oddity which soon attracted attention.

Jump to Part 2

In Hebrew, it is called ‘Shavuot’. It marks the occasion when on the peak of Mount Sinai God gave to Moses the Law by which Israel was to live when she entered the Promised Land; and also the gathering of ‘first fruits’, i.e. the first ripe products of the growing season, which are then offered to God. For Christians, it marks the gathering in of the Gentiles, the first-fruits (so to speak) of the Apostles’ evangelisation of the world; and the coming of the Spirit marks the fulfilment of the prophecy of Ezekiel 36:26, renewing the Law by making it more internal: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.” See also Stone Tablets and a Golden Calf, and Passover to Pentecost.

Précis

The apostles used to gather in a room in Jerusalem, and on the Feast of Weeks, fifty days after Passover, they were met for prayer when the sound of a strong wind came, and flames appeared above their heads. Afterwards, they found they could speak dozens of languages, something which soon attracted attention to them. (55 / 60 words)

Part Two

Via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain. Source

About this picture …

A detail from an icon of the Descent of the Holy Spirit in St Sophia Cathedral, Kiev, dating back to the 11th century, or just before the Norman Conquest. St Sophia was founded in 1011 by Vladimir the Great, but built by his son Yaroslav the Wise, whose daughter Agatha appears to have married Edward the Exile, an English prince. The cathedral has been out of the hands of the Orthodox Church since 1934, when the Soviet Union confiscated it with the intention of blowing it up, but happily that never happened.

A NOISY crowd quickly gathered. Those who could not understand what was being said dismissed it all as drunken babble, but dozens of others assured them that those strange flames had turned unlettered Galilaean fishermen into wise and persuasive speakers of every language of the world.

Amid the hubbub, Peter rose to address them. With a smile, he countered that you can’t get that drunk by nine in the morning. No, what they were seeing was the fulfilment of a prophecy. For generations, Jews had longed for the day when God would act to save his people through his Anointed servant. That day, he said, had come.

Jerusalem’s crowds were witnessing the gift of God’s Spirit, promised in Scripture, a gift offered even to them - the same crowds that had so shamefully demanded Jesus’s crucifixion fifty days before - if they would only repent, and be baptised. Some three thousand stepped forward. The wise fishermen were drawing their net around the whole world.

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Précis

When people heard the apostles speaking in strange tongues, some thought it was drunken nonsense but others recognized their own languages. Then Peter stood up, and told the crowd that what they were witnessing was the prophesied gift of God’s Spirit, and if they repented of their part in the crucifixion of Jesus, they too could share in it. (59 / 60 words)

Source

Based on Acts 2:1-41, by St Luke the Evangelist (?-c. 84).

Suggested Music

Symphony No. 5 in B Minor

2: ‘Love’ (Lento)

Sir Charles Hubert Parry (1848-1914)

Performed by the London Philharmonic, conducted by Matthias Bamert.

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