The
first question you may ask when reading Acts 2 is, “What is Pentecost?” After you have read the passage a few times
over the years, the question might evolve to, “Why Pentecost?” I have spent most of my life knowing what God
did on Pentecost, just a few short weeks after Jesus’ resurrection, but only
recently have I asked the question why God chose to act at that particular time? Of course I lack the divine perspective to
answer that question with any real authority, but I think that when we consider
what Pentecost meant to the Jews of Jesus’ time we can begin to see more
clearly a pattern of how God has acted, continues to act, and will act in the
future.
So
what did Pentecost mean to the Jew of Jesus’ day? To begin with, Pentecost was the fiftieth day
after the first Sunday after Passover, and was also known as the Feast of Weeks. Its origins go all the way back to the Torah,
where the celebration was enshrined in the Mosaic Law:
“You shall count
seven weeks. Begin to count the seven weeks from the time the sickle is first
put to the standing grain. Then
you shall keep the Feast of Weeks to the Lord your God with the tribute of a freewill offering
from your hand, which you shall give as
the Lord your God blesses you… You shall
remember that you were a slave in Egypt; and you shall be careful to observe
these statutes.” - Deuteronomy 16:9-10, 12
One
way of describing it would be as a celebration that took place when the first
sheaf of wheat was brought in thanksgiving, with hopes that many more would
follow. For Jews, this festival was one
that reminded them of their blessings, and God’s deliverance. In Jesus’ day, it had also become a
celebration of when Moses received the Law, a date traditionally believed to
have been fifty days after Passover. So,
we have bound up in the festival the themes of blessing, deliverance, and a
divinely ordained way of life. The
intent, however, was not for this to simply be a celebration of God’s past
actions on behalf of Israel. Its purpose
was to use the remembrance of God’s past faithfulness as a compass by which
Israel might guide its present actions.
To that point, we see that if we only look back on the day of Pentecost,
we lose something vital in the formation of our faith. While Pentecost called the faithful Jew to
look back on the past, it was also an invitation for them to set their eyes
forward in anticipation of what God might do in the future.
I
would suggest that Pentecost was God’s way of taking ‘salvation history’- the story
of how God has brought about salvation in the past- and throwing it forward
into the future, so that the church no longer fixes its gaze solely toward the
past, but also looks to the future in expectation of how God will continue to
act on behalf of humanity. Take for
instance the idea of Pentecost as the Feast of Weeks, complete with the
freewill offering of the first fruits of the grain harvest. Those first fruits were offered with the
hope, the desire that God would grant even more. We often look back on Pentecost and see the
church’s high-water mark, though we loathe admitting it. 3,000 people put their faith in Christ
through baptism that day! What chance do
we have of replicating that type of response to an invitation or altar call? What if, instead of the pinnacle of God’s
redemptive work, Pentecost was simply just the beginning? After all, the roots of Pentecost were not in
offering the entire harvest, simply the first fruits. We are on the right track when we consider
the words of Peter in this famous sermon that “the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to
himself.” (Acts 2:39) Peter recognizes that God will act not only
in the present, but in the future; and that God will act not just here, but
also in every place. It’s the beginning of
the fulfillment of something promised long before, in the words of the prophet
Isaiah:
“I have seen his ways, but I will heal him; I will lead him and restore comfort to him and his
mourners, creating the fruit of
the lips. Peace, peace, to the
far and to the near,” says the Lord, “and I will
heal him.” (Isaiah 57:19)
That
is certainly how Paul saw it when he wrote his epistle to the Ephesians. For Paul, “those who are far off” speaks not to
geography, but to the chasm that stands between us and God because of our sin. Jesus addresses not our geographical
placement, but our unrighteous standing before God:
“But now in Christ
Jesus you who once were far off
have been brought near by the
blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has
broken down in his flesh the
dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in
himself one new man in place of
the two, so making peace, and
might reconcile us both to God in
one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.” (Ephesians 2:13-17)
The
beauty of Pentecost is not in the success of Peter’s sermon that day, but in
the promise that the transformed hearts of those several thousand new believers
in Christ was only the beginning of the harvest that God would gather to
himself.
