Day: June 5, 2022

“He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance,
whatsoever I have said unto you”

We get it wrong, I am afraid. Pentecost is not some emotive experiential happening, some happy-clapping affirmation of ourselves in our self-assertions. Just as the Resurrection is not a flight from the world and nature, so too, Pentecost is not the celebration of self-identities.

Pentecost is not the celebration of the diversity of our humanity but its unity-in-diversity as grounded in the life of God. Credally or doctrinally speaking, it marks the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples to become the Apostolic Church. In the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the Holy Ghost” is followed directly by “The Holy Catholic Church” and “The Communion of Saints;” these are strong statements about our life together as shaped and formed by the Spirit of God. This is explicated more fully in the Nicene Creed. The Holy Ghost is “the Lord, The giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, Who spake by the Prophets”; after which comes “I believe One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

These strong statements locate the unity of the human community in the unity of God because the human community has no unity in itself. The Pentecost story is the redemptive retelling of the story of the Tower of Babel. That story, so often misunderstood, is not a just-so story to explain the diversity of tongues and cultures as something evil which assumes that there should be only one language, only one culture, just as in reverse, in our contemporary world, the claim is that an endless and indeterminate diversity of identities is the good. The binary is false. It may be, however, that the levelling nature of our global technocratic world ultimately excites a desire for diversity and difference as a yearning for some sense of what it means to be an individual, a person, but that only raises the questions about the categories of difference and identity and what they mean in terms of our common humanity. Which categories and upon what basis?

The story of the Tower of Babel is really about human presumption and arrogance which results in confusion. Babel means confusion. The confusion arises out of the agendas of dominance and the abuse of power. “Come let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” Such is presumption and arrogance, an attempt to rival God. The divine response is to “confuse their language” which means to return things to a respect for the diversity of tongues which are already God-given out of which we may learn a unity of understanding. Babel confuses the things of God with the vanity of ourselves and our human projects. The confusion is us in our competing assertions for dominance and control of one another.

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