Colour Supplement

Articles by Christians around the world

Sunday 11 May 2008

 

Pentecost

A sermon preached by Katharine Smith - Reader at St. Andrew's - on

Sunday 11 May 2008

 

 

Michele Guinness is a writer, a Christian, a vicar’s wife.  She’s also Jewish.  She tells the story of a Passover meal she and her husband organised for their congregation.  As one man was leaving the hall he said to her, “Well that was very nice, thank you.  It’s good to know that the Jews use our psalms as well”.

 

Jesus was Jewish, he knew the psalms and he would have celebrated Pentecost as well because Pentecost was a Jewish feast long before the disciples started speaking in tongues.  Indeed, it still is a Jewish feast.

 

So let’s look at the Jewish day of Pentecost and its relationship to our Christian festival which is often regarded as the birthday of the church.

 

For Jews Pentecost celebrates the wheat harvest and the offering to God of the fruits of that harvest.  Its date is worked out from the Passover as follows:

 

“You shall bring the first fruits of your barley harvest on the day after the Sabbath after the Passover ….. Then you shall count seven full weeks and on the fiftieth day present to the Lord another new offering, this time of wheat”

 

So we need to go back in time to the day we call Maundy Thursday when Jesus and his disciples share the Passover meal in the upper room.

 

Since then Christians everywhere have shared bread and wine to remember him. 

 

The language we use about this event shows clearly the links with the Jewish faith:

 

Christ, our Passover lamb, is sacrificed for us.

This is my blood of the new covenant.

Moses led the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt

        to freedom in the promised land.

Jesus leads his people from the slavery of sin to

        freedom in his eternal life.

 

The Jewish Passover –

on what we call Maundy Thursday.

 

We then have the Saturday, the Sabbath, after Passover (our Holy Saturday) and the following day (the Sunday after the Passover) celebrates the barley harvest. 

 

That Sunday, of course, is for us the day of resurrection, Easter day.   Again links can be made between the Christian and Jewish faiths. 

When Paul talks about Jesus being raised from the dead, “the first fruits of the harvest of the dead” perhaps he made that link and used it to express his thoughts.

 

We then have seven full weeks and one day before Pentecost, the wheat harvest and perhaps the most popular and dramatic of Jewish festivals.

 

People would come from far and wide to Jerusalem to celebrate.  They would camp outside the city overnight – a sort of Holy Glastonbury without the mud! 

 

There would be an exciting festive atmosphere with plenty of new wine flowing and many different languages being spoken. 

 

Early in the morning, while it was still dark, the crowds would gather together and at dawn they would walk to the gates of Jerusalem itself singing one of their psalms:

 

“I rejoiced when they said to me,

let us go to the house of the Lord”

 

At the gate they would be met by the people of Jerusalem.

Again a psalm

“Our feet are standing in your gates, O Jerusalem”

 

The procession would continue to the temple where the final triumphant glorious psalm would be sung

 

“Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord”

 

Over time this festival came to represent not just the harvest of wheat but the giving of the law, the Torah, the ten commandments on Mount Sinai just after the first Passover.   

 

This festival became a celebration of the birthday of Judaism so we can begin to see links with our own faith and the birthday of the church.

 

Tradition has it that the disciples at this time were still locked away in a room somewhere but we know that from after the ascension of Jesus they were continually in the temple praising God. 

 

Michele Guinness points out that the Hebrew word used for “house” could also mean Temple and she suggests that in fact the disciples were in the Temple as all Jews would be on that day and they were therefore already part of the great drama that was unfolding.

 

Let’s hear how Michele Guinness imagines what happens next.

 

At nine o’clock silence falls for the traditional early morning readings.  First from Deuteronomy, an account of the giving of the Torah, God descending in fire, Mount Sinai wrapped in smoke and quaking, while the trumpet blast grows louder and louder.  Then from the first chapters of the book of the prophet Ezekiel.  “High above on the throne was the figure like that of a man.  I saw from what appeared to be his waist up he looked like glowing metal, full of fire, and that from there down he looked like fire.” 

 

Suddenly, to the congregation’s utter amazement, tongues of fire appear, and hover over the heads of Jesus’ followers.  

 

The priest, hoping he’s hallucinating, tells the reader to continue as if nothing has happened. 

 

“Then the Spirit lifted me up, and I heard behind me a loud rumbling

sound …” 

 

At which point a sudden loud whooshing sound fills the building.  Prayer shawls flap with its force, head coverings are lifted and debris scattered. 

And then the disciples begin to shout things in foreign languages, and roll around on the floor as if drunk.  It’s total pandemonium for a while and the priest, knowing when he’s beaten, sits down.

Michele Guinness

A Little Kosher Seasoning

 

Three thousand are converted, the first fruits of a human harvest, the birthday of the Church.

 

Crowds of people, celebrations, wine, drama, singing, tongues of fire, mighty winds, preaching in many languages.

 

What a contrast to John’s portrayal of a very quiet, intimate and personal experience of the disciples with Jesus who says “Peace be with you” and then breathes on them.

 

Perhaps we can see ourselves better in that sort of personal encounter in which we are in some sense “born again”.

 

God, who gave us the law on tablets of stone, now breathes his spirit into us to write his law on to our hearts from within so that we can present to him a harvest of the fruits of his spirit newly born in us.

 

Once again Paul picks up this idea of harvest and fruits.  He describes the fruits of the Spirit: 

 

        love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,

        goodness, fidelity, gentleness, self control. 

 

I’m sure we can think of others. 

 

But the greatest of these is love.

 

Let us pray:

 

Father in heaven

fifty days have celebrated the fullness

of the mystery of your revealed love.

See your people gathered in prayer,

open to receive the Spirit’s flame.

May it come to rest in our hearts

and disperse the divisions of word and tongue.

With one voice and one song

may we praise your name in joy and thanksgiving.

Grant this through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

 

(The Liturgy of the Hours)

 

 

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