The Wind Blows and Fire Appears: Acts 2:1-39

 

Today it’s Pentecost, the day Jesus sent us the gift of his Spirit. We first hear about the Feast of Pentecost in Leviticus 23, where it’s also called the Feast of Weeks. Pentecost is a harvest festival held 50 days after the Feast of First Fruits when the first of the crops are presented to God, which is why it’s called Pentecost, which means 50. Pentecost is the big harvest festival after the wheat has been brought in, something like our Thanksgiving Day. In our passage this morning, the disciples have traveled down from Galilee back to Jerusalem as Jesus had told them to do 10 days earlier when he was taken back up to heaven, and now they’re waiting for the gift of the Spirit that Jesus had promised them. I wonder if they really knew what was coming?

The day of Pentecost arrives. I’m sure the disciples are getting ready to celebrate the feast, there’s excitement in the air since Pentecost was a fun and joy-filled feast. This was also one of the feasts where many of the Jews would travel to Jerusalem to celebrate it at the temple, meaning that there are Jews and believers in the Jewish God Yahweh filling the streets of the city. Now the disciples are all together in one place; since many of them were originally from Galilee in the north and there were so many others in town, there likely wasn’t a whole lot of room available. I love how Luke describes what happens next, “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.”

In Hebrew, the word for wind, Spirit, and breath are the same, so the people first hearing this account from Luke would immediately have connected the sound of a violent wind with the Spirit of God or the breath of God. This is a God moment, God on the move, echoing back to the ripping of the curtain on the temple curtain from the Holy of Holies at Jesus’ death and a number of people rising of the death as God’s Spirit of life flowed into the world. It also reminds us that Jesus had breathed on the disciples just after he had appeared to them after rising from the dead, John 20:21–23, “Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” The Spirit is now connected to the strength and ability to forgive sins; a gift just as the Spirit is a gift. The Spirit is given to the disciples, and us today, because Jesus is sending them out into the world to continue his work of calling people to repent and believe because the kingdom of heaven is near. This is at the heart of what Pentecost is all about, it about equipping us for the harvest of people for the kingdom of heaven, it’s no coincident that the Spirit is given at the biggest harvest festival!

Tongues of fire also appear on each of their heads, fire that doesn’t burn, just as the bush that was burning when Moses came across it in the wilderness didn’t burn. Fire points to God’s presence, fire purifies and cleanses, the Spirit and fire show the disciples the kind of message they’re bringing, that the good news found in Jesus is a message of forgiveness and renewal, a message, that if you accept it and Jesus, brings a burning away of your sin and brings you new life.  

John Birch writes in his web page, “Note the mighty wind and what seemed like fire which entered that small room and the lives of those ordinary people. Did it leave them unaffected? I think not! The people are amazed at the transformation that takes place. Those men are empowered. Not only do they go out and preach the Good News, they do it in a way that all can understand, whatever their language. Peter recalls some verses of the Prophet Joel which seem so relevant to that situation, and hints that this power that the people are so amazed at is something that was promised many years previously.” As Birch mentions, the disciples are impacted and transformed by the coming of the Spirit. It drives them from the room into the streets to share with everyone, in their own language, the good news of Jesus! Now there are always doubters in every crowd and these folks mock the disciples, accusing them of being drunk because they’re talking about Jesus who was crucified, died, and rose from the dead, and now is in heaven, having gone to prepare our places for us. For unbelievers, it’s like crazy talk, but others stay to learn more.

In what’s happening, there’s an overturning of what happened at the tower of Babel in early Genesis when humanity was scattered throughout the earth and their language was changed into multiple languages so they could no longer understand each other. St Augustine writes, “That wind cleansed the disciples’ hearts, blowing away fleshly thoughts like so much chaff. The fire burnt up their unregenerate desires as if they were straw. The tongues in which they spoke as the Holy Spirit filled them were a foreshadowing of the Church’s preaching of the Gospel in the tongues of all nations. After the flood, in pride and defiance of the Lord, an impious generation erected a high tower and so brought about the division of the human race into many language groups, each with its own peculiar speech which was unintelligible to the rest of the world. At Pentecost, by contrast, the humble piety of believers brought all these diverse languages into the unity of the Church. What discord had scattered; love was to gather together. Like the limbs of a single body, the separated members of the human race would be restored to unity by being joined to Christ, their common head, and welded into the oneness of a holy body by the fire of love.”

The entire spring religious season of Israel, from Passover to Pentecost points to God’s plan to harvest a holy people for himself, to gather his people from the nations, and in Pentecost we see that God’s way of gathering his people in is through giving us the Holy Spirit to empower us to share the Gospel news of Jesus Christ; his birth, life, sacrifice on the cross for our sin so might experience the depth of God’s grace, forgiveness, and love. Pentecost is not just a day on the church calendar, it’s the way of life that Jesus’ Spirit has given us and equipped us to do.

Faith is more than just being saved from our sins, it’s also about our response to Jesus and this is where Pentecost comes in. Jesus gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit, but it’s not to make us more special than others, it gives us what we need to tell these others about who Jesus is and invite them to follow Jesus with us; to accept Jesus as their Lord and Saviour who has taken their sin and brokenness on himself so they can experience forgiveness, grace, and new life. The gift of the Holy Spirit gives us the tools to do the ministry of reconciliation that Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 5:18–19, “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.”

7 weeks after Jesus’ resurrection, comes the greater harvest. It’s during the feast of Pentecost that Jesus sends the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit brings many people to put their faith in Jesus. The Holy Spirit comes and those who hear the disciples talk about Jesus receive the good news of salvation through Jesus. There is a harvest of about 3,000 people for Jesus that Pentecost harvest festival. They take this gospel news home to their families and communities and the number of Jesus followers grows and grows including both Jew and Gentiles, insiders and outsiders. Just as the Holy Spirit comes as a wind into the room that Pentecost in Jerusalem, like the wind it begins to blow the Gospel news through Jerusalem, then into Judea, Samaria, and then into the rest of the world.

Pentecost needs to become a way of life for us, not simply a day to think about the Holy Spirit on those years we even bother to remember Pentecost. Today we’re called to embrace the Spirit once again and allow it to lead us to our neighbours, our friends, our co-workers, fellow students, and all the others God places in our lives to share with them the good news story of Jesus and invite them into a relationship with Jesus. What an exciting day, what an exciting call!