KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 12 June
He shall teach you all things
The school year runs out in the week of Pentecost. Pentecost marks at once the Jewish festival of Shavuot, a harvest festival and a celebration of the giving of the Law, and in the Christian understanding, a celebration of the descent of the Holy Spirit to give birth to the Church. Wind and fire and the speaking in tongues are the distinctive and outward signs of the Pentecostal event. And yet for all of the emphasis upon the ecstatic and the experiential, the whole point of Pentecost is on teaching. Jesus explains that the Holy Spirit “shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” There is a clear sense of the interplay of Word and Spirit.
Peace and order and unity are the defining themes of Pentecost but they are all about God’s peace, God’s order, and the unity of God in whom we alone find peace, order, and unity. The point is that we can find none of these things simply in and of ourselves. In that sense, Pentecost is about the redemption of our humanity.
It is neither reductive nor gnostic. It is not about the collapse of God into the material world (reductive) any more than it is about a flight from nature and matter as if they were somehow evil, as if spirit and matter were to be understood in some sort of fatal opposition (gnostic). Precisely through the wonderful yet elusive images of wind and fire we are opened out to the mystery of God at once with us and beyond us. Precisely through the differences of languages that so often divide and separate us we are recalled to the truth of God, to a unity of the understanding that grounds the diversities of human language and culture in what is universal; in short, in God. This is enormously suggestive and speaks, I think, to the diversities of culture and language at our School.
For in the story of Pentecost, one thing is heard in and through the diverse tongues of the peoples of the world. That one thing is the praise of God. “We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” Pentecost celebrates the unity of God in whom true diversity is found and is redeemed. Instead of separation and opposition, there is unity and truth found in and through the diversities of tongues and cultures. This is profoundly counter-culture because the emphasis is on what is understood as one in and through the differences of culture and language. We are reminded of our humanity as one, as universal not in spite of its diversity but through it. The insight of Pentecost is that the human community has no unity in itself but only in God.