Year: 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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“The end of all things is at hand”

The spectre of “endism” hangs over us – an ominous presence of foreboding and despair in our current age. It is an endemic feature of our fragmented world in the sense of the collapse of cultures and institutions that belong to human flourishing and dignity. This is the dominant form of fear that is with us. A deeper fear than the fear of Covid-19, it is the pandemic of fear itself, a fear of death and of the end of the world. “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper” as T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men puts it, though perhaps with both a bang and a whimper, we fear.

One hundred years ago, in 1922, T.S.Eliot wrote The Waste Land, his poem on the wilderness of modernity. Composed of five sections, the first one is entitled The Burial of the Dead, an explicit reference to the Prayer Book Burial Office. It presents a telling image of a world and church in ruins.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree give no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you,
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The images of death and decay are drawn from the poet-prophet of the Exile, Ezekiel, and from Ecclesiastes, the poet-philosopher of the Hebrew Scriptures. Son of man, ben adam, taken from Ezekiel, alludes to our common humanity and to Christ but also to our uncertainties about life and death. “You” – we – “cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images.” That, too, is from Ezekiel: “and your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken” (Ezekiel 6.4). His world, too, was a world of ruin and fragmentation, of loss and exile on Babylon’s strand.

It all seems so dark and ominous, so negative and dystopian. Yet the poem offers more than despair and darkness, more than fear and death, and again as drawn from Scripture and as belonging to the life of the Church in all times and all places. It is found in the idea of “com[ing] in under the shadow of this red rock,” an allusion to Isaiah 32.1-2: “a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment./And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” The images belong to God and his Providence.

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