Let’s think about what Pentecost means to us. This feast day, so minimised when the Mass was changed at the end of the 1960s, has the same rank as Easter itself. Before the changes, Pentecost had an octave of eight days, similar to the extant Christmas and Easter octaves of days. And standing fifty days distant from Easter/Passover – ten days from Ascension day – Pentecost has in the past been characterised with Easter as ideal for Christian initiation – Baptism and Confirmation, and even Ordination.
The books we presently use (our lectionaries at Mass) have an extended Pentecost vigil, similar to the prolonged Easter vigil, and those of us with missals can see all those readings and may be thinking either, Why don’t we ever use these? or indeed, Thank heaven I don’t have to sit through all these readings… perhaps we shall begin to have a longer Pentecost vigil in the future. But let’s have a quick flight through these vigil readings for Pentecost, shall we? Then we can look at the Mass readings this weekend.
First we have the story of Babel – you know, the story of building of the tower, when men thought they had enough science and technology to build a tower and conquer heaven. That sounds familiar perhaps, for we live in a time when men have begun to place all their faith in technology, and are not afraid of declaring that God is dead – so that atheism is the most prevalent religion.
“Hitherto, the world had only one way of speech, only one language. And now, as men travelled westwards, they found a plain in the land of Sennaar, and made themselves a home there; ‘Here we can make bricks,’ they said to one another, ‘baked with fire;’ and they built, not in stone, but in brick, with pitch for their mortar. ‘It would be well,’ they said, ‘to build ourselves a city, and a tower in it with a top that reaches to heaven; we will make ourselves a great people, instead of scattering over the wide face of earth.’ But now the Lord came down to look at the city, with its tower, which Adam’s children were building; and He said, ‘Here is a people all one, with a tongue common to all; this is but the beginning of their undertakings, and what is to prevent them carrying out all they design? It would be well to go down and throw confusion into the speech they use there, so that they will not be able to understand each other.’ Thus the Lord broke up their common home, and scattered them over the earth, and the building of the city came to an end. That is why it was called Babel – Confusion – because it was there that the Lord confused the whole world’s speech, and scattered them far away, over the wide face of earth.”
Book of Genesis, 11: 1-9 [link]
We have indeed built our towers again. If we remember that the sin of Adam and Eve was pride, and a desire to uproot the moral authority God had over them, then the story of Babel is similarly a desire to snatch at God and oppose His authority. The reaction of heaven is similar – with Adam and Eve it was expulsion from the Garden, with the men of Babel it was the confusion of their language, so the tower project came to nothing.
The Tradition of the Church has seen in Pentecost the reversal of Babel, for when men are prepared to unite their wills to God again in Christ, the curse is undone, and they sing together the Catholic confession with one voice. But first, how would God return the hearts of mankind to their right place of subservience to His authority? He would elect and choose a people and give commandments to these children of Abraham – the Hebrew nation, later subsumed into the Jewish nation. They would be a seed community by which faithfulness to the Creator would return to all mankind.
“Here Moses went up to meet God, and the voice of God came to him from the mountain, ‘A message to the race of Jacob; to Israel’s sons proclaim it: You have seen for yourselves what I did to the Egyptians, how I carried you as if on eagle’s wings, and took you up into my care. Listen, then, to My voice, and keep your covenant with Me; and I, to whom all the earth belongs, will single you out among its peoples to be My own. You shall serve me as a royal priesthood, as a consecrated nation; tell the Israelites this.’ So, when Moses came back, he summoned the elders of the people, and told them what message it was the Lord had entrusted to him; whereupon the whole people answered with one voice, ‘We will do all the Lord has said.’ Moses went back to the Lord with this promise from the people, and the Lord said to him, ‘The time has come now when I mean to visit thee, wrapped in a dark cloud, so that all the people may hear Me talking with thee, and obey thee without question henceforward.’ And when Moses had told Him of the people’s promise, He said, ‘Go back to the people, and spend to-day and to-morrow ridding them of defilement. Let them wash their clothes, and hold themselves in readiness for the third day; two days from now, the Lord will come down on to mount Sinai in the presence of all the people. Keep them within bounds along the whole circle of it, and bid them beware of going up on to the mountain, or touching even the fringes of it; if anyone touches the mountain, his life must pay for it. No hand must be laid on him, he must be stoned, or shot down with javelins; beast or man that touches the mountain is to die. All this, until they hear a blast on the ram’s horn; then let them go up on to the mountain.’ So Moses went down again to the people, and rid them of defilement. First they must wash their clothes; then he bade them hold themselves in readiness for the third day, and have no commerce with their wives. And now the third day had come. Morning broke, and all at once thunder was heard, lightning shone out, and the mountain was covered with thick mist; loud rang the trumpet-blast, and the people in the camp were dismayed. But Moses brought them out from the camp itself to meet the Lord, and they stood there close by the spurs of the mountain. The whole of mount Sinai was by now wreathed in smoke, where the Lord had come down with fire about Him, so that smoke went up as if from a furnace; it was a mountain full of terrors. Louder yet grew the noise of the trumpet, longer its blast; and then Moses spoke to the Lord, and the Lord’s voice was heard in answer. It was on the very top of mount Sinai that the Lord had come down, and now He called Moses up to the summit…”
Book of Exodus, 19: 3-20 [link]
The original Hebrew feast of pentecost, or shavuot/weeks, celebrated the giving of the Law through Moses, on mount Horeb (aka. Mount Sinai). This is the second of the Pentecost vigil readings, above. The Hebrews were not always very good at keeping those commandments, and the calamitous destruction of their land and nation in the sixth century BC was seen by their prophets as the just reward for their moral dissolution, principally their idolatries. But those same prophets foretold a restoration – a resurrection – and the third reading of the Pentecost vigil is the prophet Ezekiel’s famous valley of bones vision.
“The Lord’s power laid hold of me, and by the spirit of the Lord I was carried away and set down in the midst of the plain, which was covered with bones. Round the whole extent of them he took me, where they lay thick on the plain, all of them parched quite dry. ‘Son of man,’ he said, ‘can life return to these bones?’ ‘Lord God,’ said I, ‘thou knowest.’ Then he bade me utter a prophecy over the bones: ‘Listen, dry bones, to the word of the Lord. A message to these bones from the Lord: I mean to send my spirit into you, and restore you to life. Sinews shall be given you, flesh shall grow on you, and skin cover you; and I will give you breath to bring you to life again; will you doubt, then, the Lord’s power?’ So I prophesied as he had bidden me, and as I prophesied a sound came, and I felt a stirring, and the bones came together, each at its proper joint; under my eyes the sinews and the flesh clothed them, and the skin covered them, but there was no breath in them even now. ‘Son of man,’ he said, ‘prophesy now to the breath of life; give the breath of life itself this message from the Lord God: Come, breath of life, from the four winds, and breathe on these slain men to make them live.’ So I prophesied as he had bidden me, and the breath of life came into them, so that they lived again; and all rose to their feet, host upon host of them. Then he told me, ‘Son of man, in these bones here thou seest the whole race of Israel. They are complaining that their very bones have withered away, that all hope is lost, they are dead men. It is for thee to prophesy, giving them this message from the Lord God: I mean to open your graves and revive you, my people; I mean to bring you home to the land of Israel. Will you doubt, then, the Lord’s power, when I open your graves and revive you? When I breathe my spirit into you, to give you life again, and bid you dwell at peace in your own land? What the Lord promises, the Lord performs; you will know that, He tells you, at last.'”
Prophecy of Ezechiel, 37: 1-14 [link]
The dead bones clearly represent the devastated Hebrew commonwealth, and before the prophet’s eyes the bodies return to life. The final reading of the Pentecost vigil is from the prophecy of Joel, which spoke of the Holy Ghost being poured out upon the people.
“I will make Myself known among you, I, the Lord your God, Who alone am God; Israel cheated of their hopes never again! And afterwards? Afterwards I will pour out My spirit upon all mankind, and your sons and daughters will be prophets. Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men see visions; everywhere servants of Mine, handmaids of Mine, inspired to prophesy! I will shew wonders in heaven, and on earth blood, and fire, and whirling smoke. The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the day of the Lord comes, the great, the terrible day. And never a soul shall call on the Lord’s name but shall find deliverance; here on mount Sion, here in Jerusalem there shall be refuge; for a remnant, a remnant of the Lord’s own summoning, there shall be deliverance at last.”
Prophecy of Joel, 2: 27-32 [link]
This prophecy was famously used by S. Peter (as given in the Acts of the Apostles) when the extraordinary ability of the Apostles to speak in every language appeared on that day at the end of the Pentecost celebration in Jerusalem, and he used it to defend the Twelve from accusations of drunkenness. No, Peter said, we are not drunk with wine (for it is too early in the day), we are as Joel the prophet said drunk with the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of the Holy One, by which men and women will be drawn to the Holy Mountain and receive once more the Law of God, in blood and fire, and columns of smoke, as in the days of Moses.
“The whole of nature, as we know, groans in a common travail all the while. And not only do we see that, but we ourselves do the same; we ourselves, although we have already begun to reap our spiritual harvest, groan in our hearts, waiting for that adoption which is the ransoming of our bodies from their slavery. It must be so, since our salvation is founded upon the hope of something. Hope would not be hope at all if its object were in view; how could a man still hope for something which he sees? And if we are hoping for something still unseen, then we need endurance to wait for it. Only, as before, the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness; when we do not know what prayer to offer, to pray as we ought, the Spirit himself intercedes for us, with groans beyond all utterance: and God, who can read our hearts, knows well what the Spirit’s intent is; for indeed it is according to the mind of God that He makes intercession for the saints.”
Letter of S. Paul to the Romans, 8: 22-27 [link]
The Spirit of God arrives to bring renewal and restoration, to draw us back to obedience to God as in the beginning, in the Garden, before the whisper of the serpent presented an alternative to us. When we fell, as S. Paul states in the second reading (above), the Creation fell with us and stands about us groaning as in the act of giving birth, tied with the chains of our rebellion against God, aching for the freedom to return to him. And we reach upwards and the Spirit of God extends our reach, drawing us every upwards. We thirst for a time when we were not constantly pushing against God, we thirst for union with Him. And Christ in our gospel reading (below, from the vigil readings of Pentecost) says, Come to me, all ye who thirst, come to Me, believe and drink.
“On the last and greatest day of the feast Jesus stood there and cried aloud, ‘If any man is thirsty, let him come to Me, and drink; yes, if a man believes in Me, as the scripture says, Fountains of living water shall flow from his bosom. He was speaking here of the Spirit, which was to be received by those who learned to believe in Him; the Spirit which had not yet been given to men, because Jesus had not yet been raised to glory.”
Gospel of S. John 7: 37-39 [link]
So there, we have something of a saga in that line of readings. We tend to focus on extraordinary things, like the Apostles being able to speak in many languages and everybody’s surprise about this. But the Holy Ghost doesn’t come to give us extraordinary powers for the sake of giving us extraordinary powers. The gift of tongues didn’t survive the first century of our history, no matter what so-called charismatic Christians say today. But the missionary network built by the Apostles using this gift persisted. The gifts or charismata of the Holy Ghost are tailored to every age of the Church, and try as we might we cannot pretend to have restored a first-century ability without divine support. And we cannot cry for special abilities, when God distributes his gifts as He wills and towards a definite end…
“That is why I am telling you of this. Just as no one can be speaking through God’s Spirit if he calls Jesus accursed, so it is only through the Holy Spirit that anyone can say, Jesus is the Lord, and yet there are different kinds of gifts, though it is the same Spirit Who gives them, just as there are different kinds of service, though it is the same Lord we serve, and different manifestations of power, though it is the same God Who manifests His power everywhere in all of us. The revelation of the Spirit is imparted to each, to make the best advantage of it. One learns to speak with wisdom, by the power of the Spirit, another to speak with knowledge, with the same Spirit for his rule; one, through the same Spirit, is given faith; another, through the same Spirit, powers of healing; one can perform miracles, one can prophesy, another can test the spirit of the prophets; one can speak in different tongues, another can interpret the tongues; but all this is the work of one and the same Spirit, Who distributes His gifts as He will to each severally. A man’s body is all one, though it has a number of different organs; and all this multitude of organs goes to make up one body; so it is with Christ. We too, all of us, have been baptized into a single body by the power of a single Spirit, Jews and Greeks, slaves and free men alike; we have all been given drink at a single source, the one Spirit.”
First letter of S. Paul to the Corinthians, 12: 3-13 [link]
The faith that says ‘Jesus is Lord’ and enabling that faith is more important than these gifts that serve it. Within our families, our society, the world. This is mission – building faith. In our gospel reading this morning, we have the disciples on the evening of Easter Sunday, and even though they know that Christ is risen, they are still locked away and hiding for fear of the Jews. For fear of the dominant and hostile society around them. So do we often hide in our own time from a dominant and hostile society around us, afraid to make Christian witness. The hostility to the ancient religion has often entered within our own families, and we don’t know how to to deal with that. But He stands among us as he did among the Apostles and disciples in the gospel reading below, saying, As I was sent, so I send you. Go, therefore. Make disciples, bring souls to Me so they can be Mine.
“And now it was evening on the same day, the first day of the week; for fear of the Jews, the disciples had locked the doors of the room in which they had assembled; and Jesus came, and stood there in their midst; ‘Peace be upon you,’ He said. And with that, He shewed them His hands and His side. Thus the disciples saw the Lord, and were glad. Once more Jesus said to them, ‘Peace be upon you; I came upon an errand from My Father, and now I am sending you out in My turn.’ With that, He breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit; when you forgive men’s sins, they are forgiven, when you hold them bound, they are held bound.'”
Gospel of S. John, 20: 19-23 [link]
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 