Pentecost And The Gift Of The Holy Spirit

The Day of Pentecost ends the Great Season of Easter. In Acts 1, St Luke tells us that before the resurrected Jesus was taken into heaven, he told the disciples about the Father's promised gift of the Holy Spirit to wait in Jerusalem until the promise was fulfilled. A few days later, on the Day of Pentecost, the promise was fulfilled when the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples, empowering them to witness Jesus to the ends of the earth. This is the church's birth day; hence, the Day of Pentecost is the church's birthday.

The Feast of Pentecost is a thanks offering of first fruits in the tradition of the Israelites. It is also known as the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Harvest, celebrated on the fiftieth day after Passover. It is a joyous time to give thanks and present offerings for the new grain of the summer wheat harvest in Israel. The name "Feast of Weeks" was given because God commanded the Jews to count seven full weeks (or 49 days) beginning on the second day of Passover and then present offerings of new grain to the Lord as a lasting ordinance (Leviticus 23:15-16) The term Pentecost comes from the Greek word meaning "fifty."

Since the second century, the Day of Pentecost has been a time to baptise catechumens (those who had received instructions in the faith) who could not be baptised on Easter Day. In northern Europe and England, the feast was called White Sunday (Whitsunday) because of the special white garments worn by the newly baptized.

The Message

It would have been a wonderful experience for the twelve Apostles, the Mother of Jesus, Jesus’ brothers, and other women to experience the gift of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. As Luke reports, it had been a dramatic event. While they were together, the event started with a sudden sound from Heaven, like the rush of a mighty wind. It filled all the house where they were sitting, and there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit.

As Luke reports in Acts 1:15, there were about 120 people at the beginning. Then, many people were attracted to the place by the sound and heard the Apostles speaking their respective languages. Peter then gave the main address to the crowd. At the end of his sermon, about three thousand were baptised, and the church was born.

How did it all come to be? Jesus promised the Holy Spirit, and that was expected to happen. But how did the average disciple who only spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic, the common language of Judea in Jesus’ day, speak in foreign languages? The brief bios of the disciples in the Gospels tell us that they only had primary education. Apart from the Aramaic they knew, they may have been able to hold a basic conversation in Greek.

St Luke says that the foreigners to Jerusalem heard the disciples speaking in other languages because the Spirit made it possible. What does that mean?

Today, I want to draw our focus on the topic of disciples speaking in foreign languages.

Besides the main event of the Holy Spirit coming upon the disciples, the disciples speaking in many languages has been the most important feature of the Pentecost story for me. Why? The foreigners hearing the disciples speak eloquently in their native tongues brought them to the faith. By this, did I mean the Arabs and Egyptians heard the disciples speaking in Arabic and Egyptian? Not necessarily.

I thank God for an experience I had in Sharjah, a small emirate of the UAE. It was the 5th of April 2015. The day was a Sunday on which an Ethiopian congregation that I had assisted in establishing was celebrating their third anniversary. This three-hundred-strong congregation was founded and led by a godly husband-and-wife team, Pastors Sebhat and Konjit.

All the congregation members were migrant labourers: housemaids, cleaners, drivers, construction workers, and the like. The two pastors, too, were labourers (driver and housemaid). They worked for a wealthy Emirati who, for some reason, had given Sebhat and Konjit better terms of employment and good living conditions.

Over the six years of their life in Sharjah, the couple earned a Certificate of Theology (from the Gilgal Theological School in Sharjah). The congregation was formed through the dedicated ministry of Sebhat and Konjit among the migrant workers during their spare time. The ministry mainly involved praying with frequently mistreated, underpaid, and often physically or sexually abused female labourers.

Since I helped them to establish their congregation and provided a hall for worship at the Anglican Church premises in Sharjah, I was the chief guest at the third-anniversary celebration service.