Pentecost: The Mission of the Spirit

Although there is a choice of Gospel readings for Pentecost in year A of the Revised Common Lectionary, from John 7 or John 20,1 the story of the day of Pentecost from Acts, which is an option both for the first and second readings,2 may get more attention. There will be some sort of Luke-John conversation, just as last week with the Ascension. Luke (Acts) gives us the expected and foundational story, and John’s creative take (or re-take) on the giving of the Spirit complements it.

The Spirit has often been the poor relation among the persons of the Trinity, often neglected or viewed via caricatures. For much of history she was viewed as institutionally bound, reduced to the rationale for forms of ecclesial power through holy orders, or invoked as technical explanation for sacramental efficacy. More recently however, ideas raised and left behind by the Charismatic movement of the late 20th century changed this. That movement reminded us that the Spirit is relevant to personal faith and witness, and many people found renewal through it. Yet the results now seem more to do with exaltation of personal religious experience, or just feeling and subjectivity in general, than with what any of these biblical texts would suggest about the Holy Spirit.

If the Spirit is identified with experience or personal opinion, on the basis that the believer has come to understand (not wholly incorrectly) that they “have” the Holy Spirit, we have a two-fold problem. For if the Spirit is mainly about personal experience as well as something we may “have,” we have absorbed the spirit of consumerism and acquisition rather than the Spirit of God.

In any case, the Luke-Acts and John stories of the Spirit do not actually center religious subjectivity, even though they refer to intense experiences. Perhaps this claim seems at odds with the Acts story of Pentecost in particular, where the apostles receive a spiritual gift of speaking, or being heard, in various languages. Yet the “tongues” story is not presented as a model for personal faith or even of Church life, but as a demonstration of the prophet Joel’s vision of divine judgement in the last days. Peter’s commentary on the events via an extended quote from Joel makes this clear, in the form of a message of both warning and hope.

The timing of this is highly significant. Pentecost or Shavuot was part of the agricultural cycle—it was the end of the wheat harvest, echoing the earlier end of the barley harvest, at Passover. Luke then is not just providing a sort of theological backstory to the presence of the Spirit in the Church, nor celebrating charismatic gifts—which Luke seems to depict as an admirable feature of an ideal past. Rather he is insisting that the Spirit is the preeminent sign of the coming Day of the Lord, a portent that warns of imminent judgement, and requires a missional response. And as noted already, even after all the remarkable goings-on with languages and comprehension, Peter’s speech is not about those gifts of the Spirit, but about what they say concerning the end of history as foretold by Joel, and the demands it brings.

John seems to move the gift of the Spirit somewhat in time, to the resurrection appearance told in John 20. Of course John’s narrative does not seem to extend to the events depicted in Acts anyway, although many find convincing J. L. Martyn’s idea that the Gospel of John is a “two-level drama,” that actually does tell the story of the Johannine community between the lines of the story of Jesus. So for instance when we find Jesus “speaking to camera” as so often in John, this seems to mean he is addressing the later reader who is a follower of Jesus, and not (just) the characters present in the narrative.

Although John’s Gospel often seems to change or relativize time, and insists that faith and even eternal life are present “now,” in this instance we find a stricter chronology. Comparing the two gospel options—not something one can do in the liturgy—makes the point clearer. The episode from John 7 also takes place during a Feast, that of Booths (Sukkoth). Water was an important symbol in Temple observances of the feast, both as the memory of how water was once provided for the Hebrews (Exod 17:6), and as thankfulness and hope for crops in later days. This seems to have had some orientation to the future and hope for salvation. As Gale Yee puts it, “The worshipers looked expectantly to a future time when life-giving waters will flow from the Temple and invigorate the land, just like water flowed for their ancestors from the rock in the wilderness.”

Jesus’ cry about living water—a theme of that feast— is annotated by the evangelist: “the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (v. 39b). Hence Jesus’ gift of the Spirit to the disciples must wait for John 20; it is not something that was always true, but could only take place after Jesus glorification, that is the Cross, where Jesus “gave up the Spirit” (19:30).

John thus wants to link the gift and reception of the Spirit clearly with Jesus’ own story. He had earlier connected the promise of the Spirit with Jesus’ departure (see 16:7), and now in chapter 20 the risen Jesus breathes it on the disciples. What was promised as rivers of living water in chapter 7 is now given in chapter 20 with a transformative purpose, the forgiveness of sins (20:22-3) There is no outpouring of ecstasy in John’s scene but a missional possibility about forgiveness and reconciliation.

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While the gift of the Spirit is thus emphasized in both the Acts and John stories, missional demand is always clearer than ecstatic experience. And in both cases the gift is not individual, but communal. There is no room here for one individual to lay claim to a gift that is sent to a community. And the Church created by the gift is not so much recipient of a commodity or object—it does not “have” the Spirit— but is “had,” is drawn into the life of God in a new way. The consequence is above all the urgent proclamation of the Gospel, not growth in personal spirituality per se, although this must be one part of a renewal that is not merely human but cosmic.

Back to our present and the prevailing pneumatology, then: it’s not wrong to connect the Spirit with joy, or to acknowledge God’s presence in experience. However experience does not interpret itself, and individuals are not the primary location of the Spirit, the Church is. This is so even when Paul, in the Epistle, acknowledges great individuation of the gifts of the Spirit. His point is the very same: that while gifts do indeed differ, the Spirit is always given to and for the one body of Christ.

The response of the Church to understanding its own baptism in the Spirit is the living practice of reconciliation implied by John, and the mission modeled in Peter’s speech in Acts. The Spirit empowers the Church for its work; or better still, the Church is drawn into the agency of the Spirit. This cannot happen without personal transformations, and it may include vivid religious experience, but those are not its real end.