Pentecost
One of the most bloodthirsty books in the whole Bible (which, as I am sure you are all aware, contains much that is unedifying) is the Book of Judges. It deals with the settlement of Palestine after Moses had led the Israelites out of Egypt, and Joshua had taken them over the Jordan into the land of promise. It describes a lawless time, a time ‘when there was no king in Israel, and so everyone did as he pleased’, and the reader is treated to the charming spectacle of Jael driving a tent-peg into the skull of Sisera; of Jephthah, the Gileadite sacrificing his daughter; of Samson killing a lion with his bare hands; and of an unnamed Levite hacking up the body of his concubine into twelve parts and distributing them around the various regions of Israel. Not exactly bedtime reading. One wonders why Hollywood has not cottoned on to it and produced an epic to rival any contemporary horror movie in its presentation of unrestrained horror and unstanchable gore. (Of course, Hollywood has given us part of the Book of Judges in the story of Samson and Delilah, starring Victor Mature, the film which contains, I think, the memorable line, ‘Gee ma, you make the best cream cakes in the whole of Judea’, but the rest of the book deserves the same kind of treatment.)
In addition to these dubious delights, the Book of Judges is characterised by xenophobia, fear of foreigners. The enemy of Israel, it seems to be saying, is anyone who is not a Jew. Gentiles, principally the Philistines, are idol-worshipping savages who have to be eliminated from the land in order to render it fit for the Jewish people to inhabit. Since the book preceding Judges, the Book of Joshua, is equally intolerant of anything or anyone who is not Jewish, it comes as something of a surprise to the reader, expecting more of the same, to find that the book which follows it, the Book of Ruth, actually praises a foreign woman! Ruth, whose name in Hebrew means ‘pity’, is from the land of Moab, one of Israel’s bitterest enemies, and yet here she is featuring as the heroine of this lovely little story of courtship and loyalty. It’s almost as if some editor, hundreds of years ago, slipped this in at this particular point just to demonstrate that not all his fellow religionists were of the opinion that the only good Gentile was a dead one.
I mention these things because it is the Book of Ruth which Jews always read at this time of year, Pentecost time. One reason may be that this is the time of the barley harvest in Palestine, and the barley harvest plays a key role in the story, but I like to think that there is more to it than this, and that this tale, which shows God’s tender concern for a Gentile woman, is really a testimony to an embryonic universalism within Judaism, which transcends national, ethnic, religious and gender barriers, and which sees the spirit of God working in all people.
This universalist theme is taken up in what we might call the Christian Pentecost story, in which the disciples of Jesus, dispirited and frightened after his death, are so energised and empowered by the spirit of God, which came down upon them in ‘tongues of flame’, that they go out into the street to proclaim the good news. The story continues:
Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. Utterly amazed, they asked: ‘Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism Cretans and Arabs) – we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!’ Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?” Some, however, made fun of them and said, ‘They have had too much wine.’
I used to see this as yet another boring list, as if the author of Acts (who, by the way, was the same person who wrote the Gospel of Luke, and so we can call him ‘Luke’) were simply picking names at random to show that there were a great many people present in Jerusalem on that day. But when I looked closely at the list I found that it was far from arbitrary. The passage has been carefully constructed in order to leave the reader in no doubt that the message of Christ is not just for a privileged racial minority, but for the whole world.
The author does this in two ways. First he compiles a list of countries using the geographical conventions of his day, which split the world up into regions ruled by each of the four elements – Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. We find a comprehensive catalogue of these in Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, written some time after Acts, but reflecting the same geographical assumptions. The first few names of Luke’s list all belong to the Earth element, the next few to Air, and so on, indicating that the author was attempting to construct a symbol of universality: all varieties of human being were represented in Jerusalem on that Pentecost day.
What is more, each of these people heard the message of the gospel in his own language, a miracle indeed if we take the story literally. But we don’t need to see it in this way. It is quite likely that the apostles would have preached in Greek to the assembly, and Greek was the common language of the ancient world, which anyone with any pretence to education, or any involvement in commerce, would have understood. But Luke’s concern is not with the miraculous. The passage is highly symbolic. What it portrays is the reversal of the story in Genesis of the Tower of Babel, when human languages were confused by God and strife between nations began. Now, says Luke, all that is finished. Now, all human beings are united once again. In the words of St. Paul, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’.
But, of course, it is a pretty limited unity. There are conditions. In order to be part of it one has to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, which does not augur too well for those who, through no fault of their own, have never even heard the name of Jesus. This has given great impetus to the Christian missionary movement throughout the ages, and to the arguments that Christendom has constantly generated about the status of those outside the Christian fold. Even in these ecumenical times, one can still read of theologians who declare that all who are saved are saved through Christ whether they are Christian or not.
So, the spirit of God, so active and so dynamic on that Christian Pentecost Day, when the church was born and the programme of world evangelisation began, is still tied to an organisation. It still operates on the minds of many Christians exclusively within the confines of Christianity, and, according to some, only within certain sections of Christianity, and the work of the spirit will only be complete when the whole world has been converted. Only last week I was handed a tract at the top of Dawson Street by a rather genial man with a very dispiriting message. God has given us the free gift of salvation, the tract tells us, but we have to accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour, otherwise we ‘go to hell for all eternity’.
The tenor of this message – like that of so much that comes from all sections of the religious world – is that there is only one way of coming to God, and anyone who doesn’t find that way is damned. Everywhere we hear the proclamation ‘God is on our side’, and we know without doubt that whenever we hear it human beings will suffer. It is the message of certain sections of Islam, and it is still the message of the Roman Church, despite the liberalising and humanising influences of the Second Vatican Council of nearly forty years ago. And the results of it have been catalogued for us in the Ryan Report. Because make no mistake, what happened here in Ireland was caused in no small part by an abuse of power springing from the belief that God had granted authority to certain chosen individuals, and that these individuals could ignore the laws of the land and the laws of common human decency. History shows us, again and again, that when religious organisations get political power everyone suffers. It is not, as we are being told, that a few wicked people have marred the reputation of a benevolent institution. Just the opposite is true: good people have been corrupted by an institution that believes it has divine approval, and all such institutions are potential agents of catastrophe. To give political power to religious leaders is to invite disaster. As Steven Weinberg says, ‘With or without religion you would have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.’
There’s a Jewish story that goes something like this. A man has been going to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem every day for fifty years, in order to pray for peace among the religion of the world. An interviewer asks him, ‘How do you feel about your activities over the past fifty years? How successful have your prayers been?’ The man replies, ‘I feel as if I’ve been beating my head against a brick wall!’
And, of course, he’ll go on beating his head against a brick wall while the religious world is dominated by competing power structures, each claiming a divine mandate to bring the human race into subjection. The Unitarian view –shared by many in all the religious systems – is completely different. We accept no unelected hierarchies, we believe that church and state should be kept entirely separate, we do not claim any direct line to God, and we believe that no book is beyond criticism, and no human being is infallible. For us, the church of God is not associated with any organisation. ‘We limit not the truth of God to our poor reach of mind,’ we sing. For us, the operation of the spirit is not restricted to one religious movement, no matter how exalted. We tend to go along with what Jesus said to Nicodemus in chapter 3 of John’s Gospel: the spirit of God blows where it wills, and we are in no position to put limits on it.
Pentecost is about ‘newness’. It’s still called ‘Whitsunday’, White Sunday, after the white clothes that the newly baptised would wear to symbolise their new life and their new attitudes. When I was a child, we used to get new clothes at Whitsuntide – probably the only time we did get new clothes.
Our religions need new clothes. We need a new Pentecost spirit which moves out from the embryonic universalism of both Judaism and Christianity, towards the realisation, and the proclamation of that realisation, that God is never without witnesses, and never has been without witnesses throughout the whole of human history, and throughout all the nations of the world. Paul tells us that the fruits of the spirit of God are ‘love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance’. We find these in people of all faiths, and in people with no religious faith at all. God speaks to the world in many different languages, only one of which is the language of Christianity. ‘God’s spirit,’ in the words of the prophet Joel, ‘is poured out on all flesh’. This is the universal, ecumenical, international message of the New Pentecost, whose torchbearers we Unitarians have been for many years. May we keep the flame alive and preach the message of a unity in the spirit which transcends all religious and racial barriers. May we try to kindle this flame in liberal hearts everywhere, because within this message lies the only kind of salvation that really matters for the human race.
Pentecost Sunday, 2009