Day of Pentecost | By the Rev. Dr. Justin Anthony

Acts 2:1-21

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

John 20:19-23

A wise man once said: “It is possible to be wicked by yourself, but to be truly sinful you need company.” Which seems like a strange way to begin a sermon in a convent… but bear with me…

Fifty Days On:

We have reached the end of the Great Fifty Days of Easter. Is it hard for you to remember back all that time? What has happened to you in the last fifty days? Do you see a pattern in the events of the last fifty days? Do you think that what we celebrate today has anything at all to do with Easter?

“Pentecost” comes from the Greek word for Jewish harvest festival of Weeks. That celebrated the wheat harvest, fifty days after the festival of Passover. Passover followed fifty days later by Weeks. Easter, followed fifty days later by Pentecost. In recent years the Church has remembered that Easter and Pentecost are intimately related.

The fifty days celebrating Christ’s resurrection were one great Sunday, according to St Athanasius, and Christ’s resurrection was the First Fruits of the end. That’s what St Peter tells us in his sermon on the day of Pentecost:

In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh [Acts 2:17a]

The last days, the Day of the Lord, will be the beginning of the end, and the death and resurrection of Jesus, are the beginning of that process. As St Paul says:

Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. [1 Cor 15:20]

We celebrate a harvest today. But not a harvest as usually celebrated in the countryside. This is a harvest with a difference. This is a harvest of the City; or rather, a harvest that begins with the City and ends with the World.

The Story of Babel:

To understand that, we have to understand the importance of Babel.

When I was a teenager, I had a picture of the Tower of Babel, painted by Hieronymus Bosch, on my bedroom wall. He painted the picture in the 1400s, and had great delight in showing the labours and agonies of thousands of antlike workers, toiling up the slopes and arcades of a fantastical, nightmarish construction. He expressed, imaginatively, the pride and the oppression that powered such an enormous effort of human will and human muscle.

The Fall Happens in The City:

For people could not make and burn bricks, extract bitumen, organise jobs and responsibilities to build an enormous tower, if they had not been gathered together into the community of the city. Civilisation started in the cities of what we now call Iraq; trade, craftsmen, writing, manufacture, law, art and literature. But with the gifts that come with a people gathered into a city comes a downside, comes a great temptation. As the people of Babylon said:

…let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. [Gen 11:4b]

When we gather together in a city, when we feel the strength of numbers, when we look around us and see that we are united with many others in common purpose, language and project, then it’s very easy for us to think that right, and God, must be on our side. In the words of the old advertising slogan, “50,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong”. That’s fine as long as it remains the certainty of Elvis fans. When it becomes 50,000 infantrymen, or 50,000 politicians, or 50,000 religious fanatics, then it becomes a much more dangerous situation. This is the great difficulty. Sheer force of numbers doesn’t necessarily mean right is on our side. Good and bad in humans are so intertwined, that our noblest aspirations can become the cause of our defiance of God.

As Bosch showed, the Tower of Babel was the symbol of humanity’s overweening pride in its own constructions, in itself. Such pride is no basis for growth or hope. Rather it is the beginning of destruction. The buildings might continue to rise, and the armies to grow, and wealth to accumulate, but to take such pride from the efforts of humanity, to think that the end-all and be-all of our time upon this earth is to “make a name for ourselves”, then that is the beginning of destruction, and along with the palaces and squares and skyscrapers, there begins to be built the battlegrounds and the internment camps and the gas chambers.

Salvation Comes From The City:

The consequence of the Tower of Babel shows that we have been separated from one another, thrown out from our original community of one nation, one tribe, by a sin that could only take place in a city. Pentecost demonstrates the solution, the antidote, that salvation has been found in a city. Babel tells of the break-up of humanity’s primeval unity, caused by humanity’s exaltation of ourselves. Pentecost is God’s healing of this. When men boast of themselves, destruction ensues. When we boast of God, we receive restoration.

The New City:

In the Acts of the Apostles we hear:

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. [Acts 2:5]

The crowds for the whole of the known world, for that is what the lists of languages spoken recorded by Luke means: EVERYONE, the whole world, is returning to the city. BUT:

This time,

·         not for the glorification of man, but for the glory of God;

·         not for the celebration of mankind’s cleverness, but for the celebration of God’s kindness;

·         not for the continuation of the Fall, but for the beginning of the Redemption.

Humanity’s Fall began in a garden, the garden of Eden. Humanity’s Fall was completed in a city, the city of Babel.

Humanity’s Redemption began in a garden, a garden in which we find an empty tomb. It continues in a city, the city of all the World, Jerusalem at the festival of Pentecost. It will be completed also in a city, the city of the heavenly Jerusalem: as John the Divine promises us, in Revelation:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. [Revelation 21:1-2]

The Holy Spirit:

And what is the role of the Holy Spirit in all this? Simply, without the Holy Spirit we wouldn’t be able to make the right choice between death or life, destruction or glory. The Holy Spirit is the only way that we can overcome the innate human tendency to choose death and destruction. As St John Chrysostom put it:

If the Holy Spirit did not exist, we believers would not even be able to pray to God. [St John Chrysostom, Sermons on Pentecost, 1.4]

So, we are gathered together by God’s Holy Spirit, called into the city from which salvation will be proclaimed, as a foretaste of the heavenly city in which salvation will be lived, the heavenly city where the Lamb prepares to marry His bride. We are called together so that, together, we can hear and respond to, the proclamation of salvation. We find our salvation in each other, by each other, with each other. In the company of others we hear God’s words of love and blessing spoken to us, in the very language which we need to hear—for those who are fearful, words of encouragement; for those who are self-absorbed, words of admonishment; for those who are in pain, words of comfort; for those who are alone, words of consolation; for those who are turned inwards, words of opening; for those who are overwhelmed, words of rescue.

God calls us to be saved together. The message of Pentecost is that God is with us: us. So perhaps we need to change the motto with which I started: it is possible to be wicked by yourself, but to be truly saved you need company.