Pentecost and God’s Wide Embrace

The Holy Spirit reaffirms God’s original blessing of diversity — and opens understanding across difference.

Pentecost is the day we commemorate the fulfillment of Jesus’s promise to send his followers the Holy Spirit as a helper and guide in living lives of faith, incubating what would be become the church we know today.

Far from upholding the status quo, the narrative we find in the Book of Acts tells us something revolutionary about God’s vision for this first Christian community — and for us today.

A strange yet familiar experience

The radical story begins in an ordinary house. Gathered for prayer and still elated after the miracle of that first Easter morning, the disciples are pondering the world-changing implications of what they have just witnessed: their teacher, Jesus, risen from the grave. 

Pressed together in one place, something cosmic occurs. A great wind — a manifestation of the very breath and Spirit of God — floods the room. Suddenly, the disciples see fiery tongues hovering above their heads. Like the burning bush before Moses, these flames are real but not consuming; Jesus’s followers are unharmed. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, the disciples begin speaking in languages previously unknown to them.

Almost immediately, passersby press in to investigate the cacophony. Luke, the author of the Book of Acts, tells us that “devout Jews from every people under heaven” were in the city. He goes on to catalog the nations represented: “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, those from Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt … Libya, visitors from Rome … and Cretans and Arabs.” Even though the crowd is widely diverse, each one hears the disciples’ speech in their own language.

Upon hearing their mother tongues spoken by Jesus’s followers, an unlikely crew from Galilee, the crowd responds with incredulousness. What they are hearing is both strange and familiar. Some even surmise that the disciples must be drunk. What does this mean? they ask one another. Their question is a good one. What does this mean? 

The gospel expands, never excludes

Luke’s wide yet non-exhaustive list of foreigners points to a wider, more expansive, truth: The good news of Christ’s resurrection, and his identity as the son of God, was not for a select few but always meant to spread to every corner of the world. The nascent church, Luke intimates, will be built on the generous sharing of this gospel, passed to all peoples from all ethnicities and backgrounds.

The community we find in Christ does not require assimilation; the prismatically beautiful diversity of the church is the very image of God.”

In other words, individual languages and cultures are not eliminated in this budding community, nor does God provide a single new language all souls will speak going forward. Instead, God accelerates and redefines fluency. Through the gift and power of the Holy Spirit, the people organically and instantaneously understand each other and, most importantly, the message that is being proclaimed: that Jesus is the Messiah they have been waiting for — the one sent to save all God’s people.

Far from being a reversal of the Babel story of Genesis, in which God implicitly does not desire for the peoples of the world to speak only one language, Pentecost reaffirms God’s blessing on all peoples while creating a supernatural way for the message of Jesus to be heard. 

Difference is essential to real community

Pentecost is both the beginning of the Christian church and the inauguration of a new kind of communion. The story of Jesus as the one “God raised up,” as the disciple Peter preaches to the crowd, can now be passed within and across any barriers of communication. 

The sharing and experiencing of the gospel is an act of unification for the burgeoning church, which contains within that unity the plethora of linguistic worlds. In other words, the community we find in Christ does not require assimilation; the prismatically beautiful diversity of the church is the very image of God.

Pentecost thus becomes the celebration of God’s intended kingdom “on earth as it is heaven,” where peoples from all nations might be opened to the revealing of God’s self in Christ — and in each of us. 

In Jesus, divine love is therefore made communicable to humanity, both through his person and proclamation — and the Holy Spirit’s descent illuminates this reality by opening the mouths and ears of all those present and passing by. In such a way, all might find themselves in relationship with the One who, quite literally, speaks our language. 

Summerlee Staten is the executive director, Faith Formation and Education, at Trinity Church.