Post 52--Pentecost

In post 50 I reproduced a meditation written by my hero Abraham Kuyper on the Ascension of Christ. I complained that this event has slipped into oblivion in the Church as well as in the life of believers. 

Ten days after the Ascension another momentous event took place that we refer to as Pentecost.  Another older name for the same celebration is “Whitsunday.”  “Pentecost” itself is from the Latin meaning “50^th day,” that is, the 50^th day after Christ’s resurrection. The term “pentecostal” refers to a family of churches that place the work of the Holy Spirit central in their Christian life. It is the fastest growing family of churches in the world at the moment. It is so dominant today that in some countries it has become the major tradition, dwarfing such giants as the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches.

Let me give you an example from a country in which I have lived 30 years,  Nigeria. It has a population of some 170 million, half of whom are Christian, representing all the Christian traditions you read about in North America, but the biggest of them all is the Pentecostal family—and still growing. It is a political tradition in the country—and, no, I am not changing the subject!—that a Christian president will always choose a Muslim vice president and vice versa. Recently, new elections were held and a Muslim president was elected. His vice is a Pentecostal pastor, a natural political choice in the context of a majority of Pentecostal Christians. Thus the event celebrated on Pentecost has boiled over into the world of politics; it is that real and that significant.

In the second paragraph I mentioned the Holy Spirit. That is what Pentecost is all about. Christmas is about the coming of Christ into the world, but that was a temporary place for him. 40 days after His resurrection, He ascended back into Heaven. On Penteost we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit into the world, His was to be a permanent presence in the world.  He is with us even today. 

I invited you to celebrate Ascension with the words of Kuyper. Today I invite you to celebrate Pentecost also with Kuyper, though this time in shorter compass. He wrote:

Among all the Christian celebrations there is none of which the average Christian understands so little, feels so little emotion and enjoys so little as Pentecost, the high feast of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  It is all so spiritual and offers so little to the imagination.

In contrast, at Christmas there is so much movement and so many things to talk about with your children: the manger, that Child, the shepherds and their lambs, the angel choir, the murder of the children by King Herod’s men, the temple visit, the flight to Egypt and so much more.

Similarly, on Easter you can imagine the weeping women on their way to the tomb, the lonely wandering Mary Magdalene, the descent of the angels, the rolling stone from the grave, the two men walking the road of Emmaus, that evening meeting and then Thomas with his finger in Jesus’ wounds.

All of the above is concrete and subject to everyone’s imagination. There’s stuff for conversation. These stories can be sketched or painted. There is movement and variety; there’s a wealth of human actors.  Because everything is concrete to the eye, it all lives in the congregation’s consciousness.

But how different it all is with Pentecost. There’s little more there than an upper room with people in and outside. Then there are miraculous sounds and mysterious bright lights. What is said confuses people outside and sounds foreign to those inside. It all ends up with a sermon to God’s glory.

Naturally, such a dull scene cannot possibly inflame your imagination. It does not conjure up any surprising images in your imagination; your children cannot enter this kind of world; it does not offer any stuff for a brilliant sermon.  Every picture, every drawing, every painting of Pentecost ever produced falls flat.

I must quickly add that they had to fall flat, not because Pentecost has less value than do Christmas or Easter, but because it appeals to a level of imagination and conception too high for the average person and is too spiritual. Pentecost is the noblest of the three feasts, but only for those who have tasted the noblest.  Only those who themselves have received the “first fruits of the Spirit” can truly celebrate this Feast of the Spirit!

End of Kuyper

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I end today with two items, the first one a question; the second, a correction of Kuyper. 

The question for you is whether you can or do celebrate "this Feast of the Spirit" in Kuyper's terms. In other words, whether you have "tasted  the noblest."

The correction:

I cannot restrain myself; I must correct one assertion in the above that is simply not true.  I refer to the allegation that every visual representation of Pentecost falls “flat.” I am a distributor of the Mafa series of African Gospel Art that includes a very lively and colourful reproduction of the Pentecost scene that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be interpreted as “flat.”  Go either to my website  < SocialTheology.com > the “African Gospel Art” page or  to <  www.jesusmafa.com  >, the publisher’s  website based in Versailles, France.  There you will find info about a very exciting artful series depicting all the Gospel stories, over 60 of them. Go there. You will thank me for it. You will enjoy, admire and celebrate them for their beauty and liveliness as I do every day, surrounded by them as I am in my house.