by CCW | 24 May 2026 10:00
Pentecost offers a glittering array of contrasting images that gather us into unity with God and with the whole of our humanity. There is wind and fire, and the many and different tongues where one thing proclaimed and understood, namely “the wonderful works of God.” There are the red hangings and vestments of Pentecost in the tradition of the Church on a day commonly called Whitsunday, ‘white Sunday’, symbolic of Baptism and new life. And what is that new life? It is the coming down or descent of the Holy Spirit to give birth to the Apostolic Church and Faith in which we have our beginning and end; in short, our life in the abiding love of God.
One of the classical Anglican divines, Lancelot Andrewes, identifies the theological meaning and significance of Pentecost. He astutely observes that “the Holy Ghost is the Alpha and Omega of all our solemnities. In His coming down all the feasts begin; at His annunciation, when He descended on the Blessed Virgin, whereby the Son of God did take our nature, the nature of man. And in the Holy Ghost’s coming they end, even in His descending this day upon the sons of men, whereby they actually become “partakers,” θειας ψυσεως, “of His nature, the nature of God” (Andrewes, Whitsunday, 1610).
Pentecost is festum charitatis, the feast of love. “And He Whose feast [this] is, the Holy Ghost, is love itself, the essential love and love-knot of the two Persons of the Godhead, Father and Son. The same, the love-knot between God and man, yet more specially between Christ and His Church.” Word and Spirit. Faith properly refers to Christ the Word, whereas love is properly associated with the Spirit, who is also named the Comforter who brings faith to birth and strengthens and increases that faith in us. Comfort belongs to love. “If you love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus tells us in the Gospel, that in the giving of the Comforter “he may abide in you forever.” A beginning and an ending.
And all this is made visible before us today in the twin sacraments of the Apostolic Faith and Church, Baptism and Communion. Wilfred Somerset Cooper’s baptism is a visual reminder of our own baptisms whether as infants or adults. Baptism is the ordained means and beginning of our spiritual life and Communion is the ordained means of our continuing and growing in the understanding of the same.
Pentecost marks the fiftieth day after Easter, the seventh week after Easter. In a kind of wonderful Providence, Wilfred was born seven weeks before Easter and now is baptized seven weeks after Easter! Pentecost marks the gathering of all things into unity in God, a gathering of all of the motions of God’s love towards us in the witness of the Scriptures to Christ and his Church. “This day seals up all by giving us seisin [a hold on] of all that He has done for us, by His Spirit sent down upon earth.” In other words, the Holy Spirit brings all things to our remembrance of what Christ has said to us. The Holy Spirit gathers us into the living Word of God in Christ.
In some ways, the point is rather simple. “If you love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus says, but we can only love him because he first loved us and loved us greatly in his sacrifice for us by which his life lives in us. This is the whole meaning of new birth and new life in the giving to us of what we do not and cannot have on our own, the granting to Wilfred “that which by nature he cannot have.” This is not the negation or the denigration of the natural but its being regenerated, restored, and perfected by grace to be who we are called to be in God. Pentecost signals the wonderful harmony of all things restored to God and alive in God and with God. It is really all about unity and order, for such is creation and redemption and the meaning of new life in Christ.
This building evokes this theological understanding in the movement from the baptismal font at the entrance of the Church through the Nave and under the Rood screen or Cross to the Altar. Augustine called Baptism and Communion gemina sacramenta, the twin sacraments that belong to our incorporation into the very life of God revealed by Word and Spirit. That movement is at once justification, the saving work of Christ’s sacrifice imputed to us, Christ for us, and sanctification, our growing up into that grace, Christ in us. A beginning and an ending; our continuing in what God has begun by grace in us and for us.
Nature is placed on a new foundation of grace perfecting nature. That idea recognises our fallenness through the effects of sin, original and actual that separate us from God and from one another. The coming down of the Holy Spirit gives birth and new life that belongs to our life together with God, our being gathered back to God. Our challenge, as always, is to act upon what we are given. What is given is the radical meaning of grace. What is given by God restores and perfects creation and our humanity.
The Pentecostal event is itself testament to this idea. The coming down of the Holy Spirit in wind and fire is a recapitulation of the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel. That story is not a just-so story about the different languages of the world for that would make differences of language and culture a consequence of the Fall. In the preceding chapter in Genesis, different languages and cultures are explicitly tied to the generations of the sons of Noah “in their lands, each with his own language, by their families, in their nations” (Gen.10.5). The story of Babel is the imposition of one language upon the whole of our humanity in the vain attempt of reaching heaven itself by virtue of ourselves. Such is order without freedom and a denial of the dignity of difference that belongs to the languages of the world each of which is capable of participating in the created and redemptive Word and Spirit of God. Pentecost highlights the descent of the Holy Spirit as bringing order and unity out of the different tongues of the world, a restoring and redeeming of what belongs to the truth of creation and our humanity.
This signals the theme of the unity and the universality of our humanity in and through the proper distinctions that belong to creation and redemption. The Pentecostal event picks up and extends the Jewish understanding of Pentecost as a harvest festival, the feast of weeks, seven weeks after the Passover. “You shall give as the Lord your God blesses you; and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God, you and your son and your daughter, your manservant and your maidservant, the Levite who is within your towns, the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow who are among you, at the place which the Lord your God will choose, to make his name dwell there.[For] you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt; and you shall be careful to observe these statutes.” (Deut. 16.10-11). In this sense, Deuteronomy and Acts present complementary universalities, not competing ones. Through the descent of the Holy Spirit everything is gathered back to God in its fulness and truth, in its dignity and meaning.
Let me conclude with two images that I hope will help us to understand better the relation of nature and grace; the first is a remarkable passage from a sermon of Lancelot Andrewes about the wind of Pentecost, the second is a late 12th century baptismal font in Pistoia, Italy, carved by Giovanni Pisano.
Drawing on a passage from Ecclesiastes about the wind going forth and returning on its circuits, Andrewes says that it “describe[s] the nature of the wind; that it goeth forth, and that it ‘compasseth round about, and then last that it returneth per circuitus suos. So doth this,” meaning the wind of Pentecost, “it cometh from Heaven, and it bloweth into the Church, and through and through it, to fill it with the breath of Heaven; and as it came from Heaven to the Church, so it shall return from the Church into Heaven again, per circuitus suos; and whose sails (a nautical image) it hath filled with that wind, it shall carry with it along per circuitus suos; even to ‘see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living,’ there to live with Him and His Holy Spirit for ever.” (Andrewes, Whitsunday, 1606). This is recapitulation through the image of circling around and into the mystery of God that gathers and embraces all things in the unity of God.
The beautifully carved font by Giovanni Pisano depicts the the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity on the stand or pillar upon which the basin of the font rests while the font itself bears the images of the natural or classical virtues of temperance, fortitude, justice, and prudence. Father Crouse nicely sums up its significance:
It’s a very humanistic statement, in that the new life at baptism is seen as a renewal of the natural virtues, but at the same time, it’s a powerful affirmation that the restoration of authentic humanity depends upon and is sustained by the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
This is what Wilfred is born into and made “a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven” through the sacrament of Baptism. We pray for him and for us “that we who celebrate before thee [God] the Feast of Pentecost may continue thine forever and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit.”
Fr. David Curry
Pentecost 2026
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