Pentecost A

In John 20 Jesus breathes the gift of abundant life into his disciples as God imparted life into Adam—in Greek this is a pun, since “breath” and “spirit” are the same word. Jesus is giving them the gift of his own life, which they will live as they are sent even as the Father has sent Jesus.

But all this happens on the eve of Easter itself, as if, for John, Easter resurrection and Pentecost commissioning were the same thing. Luke puts the gift of the spirit on the Jewish Holiday of Pentecost (Shavu’ot, the Feast of Weeks, 50 days after Passover). Why? Perhaps it was to legitimate within the Jewish community what the Book of Acts shows to be essentially a Gentile phenomenon. In any case, the gift of the Spirit in Luke/Acts, with glossolalia and so on, is very different from the gift of the "Paraclete" in John, the continuing presence of Christ in the life of faithful discipleship--very different from the kind of charismatic experience we get in Luke.

Acts is largely a hagiographic account of the growth of the church through the Gentile community, a story in which the experience of charismatic phenomena plays a major role. Looking back through Luke’s gospel with a concordance in hand, readers can see that Luke inserts “spirit” wherever he can, to give the sense that the Jesus movement was spirit-driven from the start.

It has always seemed to me that the dominance of charismatic experience in Acts hints that such experience was already a feature of the Gentile community before Christianity arrived. My grandfather’s cousin Arthur Hays taught church history at McCormick Theological Seminary. I heard he used to open every semester’s lectures with the observation that “Christianity never entered an empty world.” There has always been a pre-existing culture in which the faith would exfoliate in new and unexpected ways. The history of Christianity’s rich diversity is keyed to such cultural transformation. If anyone has ever written anything about charismatic experience present in the pre-Christian-Gentile community I haven’t seen it. It was there in the temple oracles and surely present in some of the new religious movements sweeping through the Near East in those days.

Paul, who himself became a champion of Gentile Christianity, seems to have had personal experience of charismatic phenomena early in his career, certainly on the road to Damascus. Nevertheless, the Corinthian letters show him struggling to channel the early church’s enthusiasm in a constructive direction. The dominance of spiritual phenomena in the life of the community threatened to turn a young Christianity into a cult of personal ecstatic experience. Paul mad it clear that the spirit brings us together in community, as the body of Christ.

I have always thought Luke places the birth of charismatic experience at the Jewish Pentecost festival because he wants to align the Gentile experience with Jewish sources. One of these sources would be the Pentecost holiday itself, which celebrated the gift of Torah to Moses on Mt Sinai with much the same “Pentecostal” enthusiasm we get in later Christianity. We haven’t yet understood “Torah” if we merely translate it as “Law”. Torah came as the gift of a way of life that was new and liberating and overwhelmingly an experience of grace. Just look at the enthusiastic abandon of contemporary Lubavitcher communities celebrating Savu’ot. The importance of making the connection between “spirit” and “law” that generates and shapes community is seen in the way the Pentecost story evolves here in the second chapter of Acts. The people draw together as a new community, sharing life in common, living as the body of Christ, as it were, and as a community of Torah. There’s more of this in Acts 4. However the Gentiles appropriated Christianity in their own cultural expectations of ecstatic experience, Jewish roots determined that the result would be community-building, so that Paul could speak of “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit”.

The second important source in Jewish tradition for charismatic experience is in the prophetic tradition, and in particular in prophetic tradition connected to the “last days”. Luke couples his Pentecost story with the prophet Joel, whose young men shall have visions and whose old men will dream. What these dreams and visions constituted was the constant prophetic dream of the day of the Lord, an idealistic and utopian projection of a world of justice coming soon. Such overwhelming visions have throughout history often been accompanied by charismatic phenomena. Indeed, the recent grip the Christian right has held on White House policy has gone hand-in-hand with apocalyptic visions of the last days, accompanied by White House prayer services that look like Pentecostal camp meetings. Joel, the prophet who encourages us to beat our plough shares back into spears and our pruning hooks into swords, would feel very much at home here. Luke doesn’t pick up the militant side of Joel, but the last-days-ism certainly plays strongly in early Christianity, and continues to today in churches for which charismatic experience remains important.

In my tradition, in the tradition of the Reformed churches, the spirit has a stronger emphasis on binding together than in experiencing ecstasy. All authority is corporate, for instance, and seeking out the common will of God together among the elders or at a church meeting can be (or should be) a profound spiritual experience. Our experience of the spirit is embedding on our connectedness and concern for others in our community and in the world, not only as the pattern of our governance but also in the motivation of our prayers and our concern for social justice. Scripture reading in the Reformed tradition, moreover, is a profoundly spiritual experience. Calvin’s introduction to his commentary on the Psalms is a classic instance of understanding how the Spirit is at work as we read, opening our hearts to the experience until it is as if we are being read by the Scriptures and our lives are being transformed by the experience. Lest this becomes a mere emotional exercise, the Reformed tradition emphasizes rigorous, almost academic discipline to the study of the Bible in order to give proper weight to the text over our own feelings and imaginings. Because the result can look a bit dry, we in the Reformed tradition often forget that we have our own spirituality. But we do, and it is central to almost every practice.