Pentecost

Even if Pentecost is much the neglected festival on the Church’s calendar, scarcely observed when compares to Christmas and Easter, it nonetheless ought to take its place among the most important days of the Christian Year. Pentecost, or Whitsun, is the day when we celebrate God's gift of the Holy Spirit to his people and in a sense the day when we celebrate the birth of the Church. If Easter gives us our reason to be the Church of Christ in the world, Pentecost gives us the power and the inspiration to be the Church of Christ in the world.

The book of Acts provides the better known account of the coming of the Holy Spirit:

This is a stirring account! The Holy Spirit comes among the disciples for the first time, a sweeping, driving force that virtually knocks them off their feet. His coming turns their world upside down; it causes them to do things that they may never have dreamed of doing. And we know the sequel to the story. The apparently outrageous behaviour of the disciples draws a crowd, Peter preaches, and a great number of those who listen come to believe in Jesus as a result of his preaching. At Pentecost, the Spirit is given and the Church is begun. The Spirit brings life to the Church, filling her with power and vitality, giving her a sense of direction, and leading her out from her beginnings in Palestine into every part of the known world.

John 20.19-23 provides a rather different account of the coming of the Spirit. There we read that on the day of resurrection Jesus suddenly appeared among his disciples, and having greeted them in the traditional manner, breathed on them, saying ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’ According to this account, the Holy Spirit is transmitted to the disciples in the moment the risen Lord breathes upon them. The Fourth Evangelist tells a very different story to the author of Luke-Acts, when he tells of Jesus breathing on the disciples and giving them the Holy Spirit. But in many respects his intention is the same. Both stories speak of a gift, given by the risen Lord to those who had followed him throughout his ministry and who would now become the founding members of his Church. In both stories the gift of the Holy Spirit provides for an element of continuity: initially Jesus himself is with his disciples, but when he goes from them his place is taken by the Holy Spirit. As the author of the Fourth Gospel has it, in words spoken by Jesus to his disciples following the Last Supper, 'I will not leave you bereft; I am coming back to you'. And he does come back to them, in the form of the Holy Spirit he breathes into them.

The scene in the upper room depends much on the Old Testament story of creation. In the beginning, when God had formed man out of the dust of the ground, we are told that: 'God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Thus the man became a living creature.' In the same way, when Jesus breathes on his disciples, man becomes a new creation. He gives them his Spirit, and out of that group of timid disciples 'hidden away for fear of the Jews' the risen Christ creates the new reality of the Church. The spirit he gives brings them life, and power, and a sense of direction.

There is something else that the two stories have in common. The gift of which these stories speak, and which provides for continuity from the ministry of Jesus into the ministry of the Church, is also a gift that empowers. Without the Holy Spirit to transform its individual members into the living reality that is the presence of Christ in the world, the Church would be a dead thing. If Christ were not alive and in her midst, for all its admirable precepts and principles, the Church would be just one more human institution. But it is not that; we who are Christians believe that the Church is the means through which the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has chosen to work in the world. We are heirs and trustees to a tradition of faith, and we are engaged in a dialogue with that tradition of faith on the one hand and the world on the other.

These stories, from the Fourth Gospel and the Book of Acts, affirm most strongly that the Holy Spirit was given to the first disciples, to become the power of Christ living in them. They in their turn were commissioned to bring the presence of the risen Christ to the whole world. And now, although we live in a much later time, Christ still makes his Spirit available to his people so that we who are his people might still speak and act and live as his presence in the world.