Celebrating hungrily

The celebration of Pentecost is a bit different from all the other gospel feasts that make up the church year. Like all those feasts - Christmas, Easter, Ascension - Pentecost looks back to something that happened, a foundational event in the ministry of Christ for his church. In this case, we recall the way in which the ascended Lord Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit on his followers in Jerusalem, thus constituting them his new earthly body, his witnesses. We remember, and we celebrate with gratitude because without that event the good news of Jesus would never have reached us, the community of the church would never have come to be.

But the difference lies in this: Pentecost is celebrated with an edge of hunger and desire to it. That first giving of the Spirit is an unrepeatable, unique event, in one sense, but in another sense as we read the narrative and remember the event we are caused to long that it might happen again. Of course it can never happen again for the first time, in the foundational way in which it happened there and then; but because the outpouring of the Spirit is an ongoing ministry of Christ, there is a definite sense in which it could happen today, here and now. In some way it definitely is happening - otherwise the church would long since have died out of the world - but don't we want to see it happen in power, as it did? Wouldn't we love to see the Spirit at work bringing thousands at once to new life through the gospel? Don't we want the dramatic transformation which came over the Lord's fearful disciples? 

So we celebrate the then-and-there with a distinct eye on the here-and-now, and pray: come, Creator Spirit.