Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Acts 2: Why Pentecost? (Part I)

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.