PENTECOST 2014 It must have been quite an experience in Jerusalem that day; little wonder the crowd thought that all the disciples were drunk! Well, they were in a way – they were filled with the new wine of the Gospel. The old wine skins were burst, the new had come and it came with power. What happened? To begin with there was a dramatic fulfillment of John the Baptist’s prophecy: (Mark 1:8 NRSV) “
I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
It is with the gift of the Spirit there is a real sense in which we can say that the Church was born. Well, what do we make of the coming of the Holy Spirit? Over the past 40 years there has been a great deal of interest in things “spiritual”: but the focus has been on self – self fulfillment being the goal, rather than on what spirituality means in the context of what it means to be human. We have seen movements that have a strong “charismatic” content with its emphasis on speaking in tongues, the Toronto blessing phenomena and so on. We have seen a fascination with “new age” spirituality – all of these pretty much about a self absorbed quest for the transcendent. In the meanwhile the world has gone on in its chaotic and self destructive way. The Feast of Pentecost exposes the falsity of such pathways. The sphere of the Spirit is not in the inner recesses of the soul, its sphere is in the public arena of the world. The Psalmist speaks of the work of the Spirit as renewing the face of the whole earth. St Paul speaks of the whole creation groaning in pain as it awaits its renewal. He uses the rich imagery of child birth to describe it all. In John’s Gospel the Spirit shows the world how wrong it is: The world’s cardinal sin is in not believing in Jesus, The world’s notion of justice is wrong: it was the world’s justice that sent Jesus to the Cross. It was the world’s justice that condemned Jesus. The Spirit turns the world’s ways on their head. The coming of the Spirit shows Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of God. The coming of the Spirit shows God’s justice by glorifying Jesus through his death.