Most Christians think of Pentecost as the day the Holy Spirit came upon the early Christian disciples. The story is that there were huge crowds of people in Jerusalem to celebrate Shavout.
But of course most Christians have no idea what Shavout is. Anyone here care to enlighten us about the festival all these Jews were thronging to Jerusalem for?
Luke tells us in Acts, that there were literally people from all over the globe in the city. “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia…” and the list goes on.
So what were they there for? They were there for Shavout, or as the Greek-speaking Jews called it “Pentecost.” The word Shavout means “weeks” and the word Pentecost means “50 days.”
Of course Jesus was Jewish, so he knew all about Shavout, the Festival of Weeks. But for us, it requires some “‘splainin.’
Well first we have to step back to Passover. That’s the day the people of Israel were freed from their enslavement to Pharaoh. It is the festival Jesus was in town to celebrate with his fellow Jewish disciples when he was put to death on the cross.
So we start with Passover. Then we look at some sacared numbers. Like the number seven. The world was created in seven days in Jewish Torah. The number seven was the general symbol for all association with God. It was the number of holiness and sanctification. The candlestick had seven lamps, and the acts of atonement and purification were accompanied by a sevenfold sprinkling. There are many more examples. The number 7 is the Divine number of completion.
What foes that have to do with Pentecost? Hold on with me for a minute here. It will all make sense.
If seven is your divine number for all association with God, seven TIMES seven is even better. So seven weeks – with seven days in each week – pass between Passover and Shavout. Passover celebrates that the divine is at work in the freeing of Isreal from the Pharoah. And Shavuot commemorates the anniversary of the day God gave the Torah to the entire nation of Israel assembled at Mount Sinai.
So Shavuot occurs 50 days after Passover, Hellenistic Jews gave it the name “Pentecost” (“fiftieth day“). For Jews, Shavuot and Pentecost are the same thing.
So all the action in Acts 2 takes place during the Jewish celebration of Shavuot, or Pentecost or the Festival of Weeks – it’s all the same. The festival celebrating the giving of Torah to Israel is very important and the reason people are in town. It is also a day of feasting and merriment, which explains the fact that people thought all this “speaking in tongues” was the result of too much wine consumption.
So what does all this have to do with Christian Pentecost? First it is a reminder that Jesus was Jewish and that Passover and Pentecost were Jewish religious traditions. Jesus did not seek to start a new religion, but to bring a new understanding to old laws and traditions about the relationship between the human and the divine. These holidays were celebrations of God’s presence in human life. God’s redemption. God’s love and God’s covenant.
Jesus was preaching a renewed, reborn, refreshed covenant with a living God. This was no longer the God who confounded language when humans dared to build the Tower of Babel. This was a universal God known to all people of all races and nationalities and languages. God’s truth could no longer be confounded by hypocrites who claimed to be righteous but refused to feed the hungry or clothe the naked or give drink to the thirsty.
God’s relationship with people could no longer be perverted by men and women who would walk on the other side of the road and ignore the injured man on the side of the road because he was not one of the chosen.
God’s new covenant relationship with humanity insisted that if someone was in need of healing, the Sabbath provided no excuse for refusing God’s healing power.
The Jewish Pentecost was a celebration of the receiving of God’s law through Torah. The Christian Pentecost is a celebration of receiving God’s presence through the Holy Spirit. It was the revelation that the Christ was risen and present and powerful. The divine spirit blew through the people and cleared their minds and created visions of a new and Holy relationship with what is sacred. It spoke to them with the Gospel message of redemption and new life for all people.
The songs says the people received the Spirit of the living God on the Rush of the Wind. The question God asks of us is whether we feel that rushing wind. Are we capable of sensing God’s presence in out church in our community, in our families and in our own relationship with the divine within us? In short, do you feel the Spirit.
Many times we don’t. We are wrapped up in other things and aren’t paying the slightest attention to the divine breath of God. And if we do sense it, we’re a little bit frightened by it. We think God just might be too big of a challenge to deal with. That God will expect too much from us.
The thing is, God’s only expectation is for us to be the people we were created to be. To use all the physical, mental and spiritual gifts we have been given to. Jesus said, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.”
It seems to me that taking a few minutes this morning to understand the Jewish tradition and faith journey that surrounded the celebration of Pentecost in that first religious holiday following the death of Jesus helps us grasp what this experience was really about, and give us some deeper insight into what God is still trying to accomplish through us. It is a celebration of God’s covenant with Creation: God’s covenant with you and with me.
So how do we respond to the Holy Spirit today. Does it soothe and heal? Does it bring us to action? Can we even put the love of God into words?
Probably not. But, language is more than words. What the people gathered in Jerusalem heard was the language of the Holy Spirit blowing through them and transforming them, and moving them to proclaim the truth that God lives in them and through them. So we are called to ask ourselves this morning: Does the Spirit move ME?
May it be so. AMEN
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