Twelve Months of Sundays by Tom Wright

Author:Tom Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Day of Pentecost

Acts 2.1–21

Romans 8.22–27

John 15.26–27; 16.4b–15

It is one of the striking features of the New Testament that Luke, Paul and John, so very different as writers and theologians, sing in rich harmony when it comes to the Spirit.

At the heart of the music is the sense of uncontainable newness. The sneering reaction on the day of Pentecost wasn’t too silly: in a sense the disciples were filled with new wine, and the old wineskins were showing signs of splitting. Or, in Pauline language, the groaning of all creation was now located within the believers themselves, so that the tension between the old world and the new had become an inner tension within the Christian, longing for the resurrection body which would give appropriate physical expression to the astonishing new energy welling up within.

Or, in Johannine language, the Spirit demonstrates, in a quasi-judicial fashion (it isn’t only Paul who uses legal metaphors), that the world is in the wrong. It’s in the wrong in its modes of morality (the cardinal sin is not believing in Jesus); in its notion of justice (the world’s justice sent Jesus to the cross, but God’s justice uses that as the means of Jesus’ glorification); and in its eager judgement (it condemned Jesus, but actually his death was the condemnation of ‘the ruler of this world’). The Spirit makes God’s people sing out of tune with the rebellious and decaying world. Pentecost is, after all, the festival of the giving of the Law on Sinai, 50 days after the Exodus, marking out Israel as God’s peculiar people.

But just when we might think that the Spirit was taking us out of the world altogether, making us a cult of flaky fanatics, the same writers make it clear that the Spirit is the agent of creation’s renewal and redemption. This is the same Spirit that brooded over creation, that spoke through the prophets. John has Jesus breathe the Spirit into the disciples precisely at the resurrection, the moment when the old world is brought to new life after death. Paul envisages the whole created order as a woman going into the pains of labour, longing for the child to be born in which her destiny as a mother will be fulfilled. Luke, through Peter’s fresh reading of Joel, indicates that this new experience will bring about the reconciliation of young and old, slave and free, male and female, heaven and earth.

Too idealistic? Don’t settle for less than the ideal vision. But expect, in embracing it, to be called to groan in prayer. It isn’t only the individual Christian, but the whole community, that needs the Spirit’s help in our weakness. Precisely when we are confronted again, in our communities as well as in our selves, with the pains and problems of our continued unredeemed existence – that is the time when the Christ-shaped dialogue of Spirit and Father, which is what Christian prayer is all about, can flourish. The harmony of Pentecost depends on precisely this paradox.

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