Pentecost: The Men Who Caught Fire and Set the World Ablaze

There is one thing about the Day of Pentecost that strikes me as infinitely more startling than all the rushing winds and tongues of fire that the commentators are always chattering about. It is this: that the moment the Holy Spirit descended to unite all men, He immediately caused them to speak in different languages. Now this is the sort of thing that would have made even the maddest of the ancient philosophers scratch their bewildered heads in the market-place. For here we have the supreme divine act of bringing together, and its first effect is to scatter speech into a dozen directions like a handful of grain thrown to the winds.

But this divine paradox is precisely what we should expect if we understood anything about the difference between the unity that God makes and the uniformity that man makes. The uniformity of man says: "Let us all speak the same language, that we may understand each other." The unity of God says: "Let each man speak his own language, and I will make all men understand." The first is the method of the committee; the second is the method of love. For love does not destroy the thing loved; love sanctifies it and sends it out crowned.

If we wish to understand what really happened in that upper room in Jerusalem, we must put aside for a moment the picture-book images of flames dancing on apostolic heads like so many birthday candles. We must ask ourselves a more revolutionary question: What sort of men were these before the Holy Spirit fell upon them? And the answer is as clear as daylight and twice as blinding: they were the most ordinary men who ever lived. Peter was not a philosopher but a fisherman, and apparently not even a very good fisherman, since we find him frequently returning from his labors with empty nets and apparently no better prospect of breakfast. Thomas was not a great doubter in the grand intellectual sense, but merely a man with that slow, stubborn, practical suspicion that belongs to all sensible men when their friends start telling them impossible stories before they have had their morning meal.

Yet it was precisely these gloriously commonplace men who turned the world upside down, or perhaps I should say, turned it right side up again. And they did it not by ceasing to be ordinary, but by becoming extraordinarily ordinary; not by rising above their humanity, but by becoming so completely human that humanity itself became divine.

Now I know that modern religion, with its monstrous appetite for making everything misty and metaphorical, will insist that all of this is merely symbolical. The fire was not fire but enthusiasm; the wind was not wind but spiritual energy; the tongues were not tongues but religious emotion. But this is precisely the sort of thin-blooded theology that would explain away the Incarnation by saying that Christ was not really a man but merely a divine ideal, and would dismiss the Resurrection by explaining that the disciples felt His spiritual presence very strongly. Against all such ethereal nonsense, I insist that the fire was fire, the wind was wind, and the tongues were tongues. For the Christian religion has never been afraid of things; it has only been afraid of things being merely things.

The truth is that the Holy Spirit, being the Spirit of the God who made thumbs and thunderstorms, has always shown a marked preference for working through the most concrete and physical things available. He does not disdain matter; He transforms it. He does not avoid the particular; He sanctifies it. When He wanted to make men holy, He did not give them a philosophy but a Person. When He wanted to feed them spiritually, He did not give them an idea but bread and wine. And when He wanted to set them on fire with divine love, He gave them actual fire, lest they should think that divine love was something less substantial than a coal from the grate.

But let us return to our fishermen and tax-collectors and the impossible thing that happened to them. For the real miracle was not that they spoke in strange tongues, but that they spoke at all. These were the men who had fled like rabbits when their Master was arrested; the men who had hidden behind locked doors while He hung upon the Cross; the men who had received the most stupendous news in human history – that death was defeated – and had responded by going back to their fishing nets as if nothing had happened. Yet fifty days later, these same men were standing in the public squares of Jerusalem, telling the assembled representatives of the civilized world that they had been wrong about everything that mattered, and that they had better start again from the beginning.

Now the modern mind, with its touching faith in education and environment, would naturally assume that some tremendous intellectual development had taken place in the interval. Surely these Galilean peasants had been taking an online course in rhetoric; or perhaps attending evening classes in comparative religion; or at the very least reading some of those excellent handbooks on "How to Win Friends and Influence People" that are always being written by persons who have manifestly failed to do either. But the truth is much more shocking than that. The truth is that they had learned nothing new at all. They were telling the world exactly the same story they had been told three years before by a carpenter's son in their own district. The only difference was that now they believed it.

And here we come to the real explosion of Pentecost, the thing that really turned the world upside down. It was not that ignorant men suddenly became learned, but that cowards suddenly became brave. It was not that they acquired new information, but that they acquired something infinitely more dangerous: they acquired conviction. And conviction, as every tyrant who has ever lived can testify, is more explosive than dynamite and more devastating than any army that ever marched.

For consider what it means for a man to be absolutely certain that he has seen God walking about in his own neighborhood, talking to fishermen, healing beggars, and finally defeating death itself as casually as one might defeat a small boy at marbles. Such a man becomes a public menace in the most literal sense. He cannot be bribed, because he has seen the source of all wealth. He cannot be threatened, because he has been introduced to the master of death. He cannot be reasoned with, because he has met Reason Himself walking on the Galilean hills. He can only be killed; and even then, as the subsequent history of Christianity abundantly proves, he has an annoying tendency to go on talking.

This is why the first Christian sermon, preached by the same Peter who had denied his Master three times rather than face the questions of a servant girl, could shake the foundations of an empire. For he was no longer a man making a speech; he was a man bearing witness. He was not trying to convince anyone of anything; he was simply stating what he had seen. And the difference between these two activities is the difference between a lawyer's argument and a child's cry of "Fire!"

The tongues of fire, therefore, were not merely a miraculous sign; they were a miraculous necessity. For how else could the story be told except by men whose hearts were burning? How else could the incredible news be spread except by those who had themselves caught fire from the original flame? The Holy Spirit did not descend upon them to make them eloquent; eloquence would have been uselessly inadequate to their task. He descended to make them transparent, so that through their very ordinariness the extraordinary light might shine.

And this, surely, is the most encouraging thing about the whole affair. For if the Holy Spirit could make apostles out of such unpromising material as a handful of Judaean peasants, what might He not do with any of us? The feast of Pentecost is not really about the past at all; it is about the present moment in which any man might discover that he has been called to turn the world upside down. The tongues of fire are still falling; the wind is still blowing; the Spirit is still descending upon anyone humble enough to admit that he knows nothing and brave enough to speak what he has seen.

The great joke of Christianity – and it is a joke worthy of the God who invented laughter – is that it is always entrusting the most important messages to the most unlikely messengers. But then, as anyone who has ever been in love knows perfectly well, the most important things can never be said by important people. They can only be stammered out by ordinary people who have stumbled upon something so extraordinary that they cannot keep quiet about it, even if keeping quiet would be safer, saner, and infinitely more sensible.

Therefore, let us not make the mistake of thinking that Pentecost was something that happened once upon a time to a group of first-century Jews. Pentecost is something that is always happening, wherever ordinary people discover that they have been invaded by an extraordinary God. The question is not whether the Holy Spirit is still moving in the world; the question is whether we are still mad enough to let Him move through us. For in the end, it is not the Spirit that needs us, but we who desperately need the Spirit – not to make us extraordinary, but to make us brave enough to be ordinary in an extraordinary way.

And that, after all, is what the world is still waiting for: not more clever people, but more people on fire.

-The Seeker's Quill