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[1. Please Sign in before posting or writing any message. 2. Write your message in MS Word; copy and paste it into the message box before posting. 3. To register click here. Thank you.] Marist Laity Australia Forums for Discussion / Gospel Reflections / May 23 - Pentecost Sunday Author Message Kevinoshea Member # Posted: 21 May 2010 16:28 Reply  The 'feast behind the (Christian) feast' of Pentecost is the Jewish feast of Shavuot. The Hebrew word Shavuot literally means 'weeks'. It is a Jewish high holiday. It occurs on the sixth day of the Hebrew month of Sivan (late May or early June). It is one of the three biblical pilgrim feasts. At Shavuot, the pilgrim season ends. It is linked to Passover. It commemorates the anniversary of the day God gave Torah to Moses (and Israel) on Sinai. On Passover, they were freed from enslavement to Egypt. On Shavuot, they were given their own Torah and their own identity as a people, and became a distinct nation serving their own God. It is a national holiday. Torah mandated a seven week period after Passover, called the 'Counting of the Omer'. It began on the second day of Passover. It was a time of anticipation and desire for the full living of Torah. Shavuot is also a harvest feast – a feast of reaping, a feast of first fruits. It provides closure for all the festival activities during and after Passover. It occurs fifty days after Passover (Christians gave it the name Pentecost, the fiftieth day). In fact, the harvest season was spread out over the whole seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot. Barley was harvested from Passover on, and wheat was harvested at Shavuot. Shavuot was the climax of the grain harvest (Sukkoth, Tabernacles, was the concluding festival of the fruit harvest). While the temple stood, two loaves of bread made from the wheat harvest were offered there on Shavuot. Shavuot was also the first day on which individuals could bring the Bikkurim (first fruits) to the temple. They came from the seven species for which the Land was praised: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates (Dt 8,8). Jewish farmers would tie a reed around the first ripening fruits, from each of these species. At harvest, the fruits identified by the reed would be cut and placed in baskets woven of gold and silver. The baskets would be loaded on oxen whose horns were gilded and laced with garlands of flowers. They were led in a grand procession to Jerusalem, with music and parades in every town. At the temple, the fruits would be presented to a priest. The texts used at this ritual were: 'An Aramean tried to destroy my father', and 'My father was a wandering Aramean'. The first text refers to Laban's efforts to weaken Jacob and rob him of his progeny. The second refers to Jacob as a penniless wanderer in the land of Aram for 20 years. This is an allusion to Jewish history: they went into a foreign place and were oppressed, but God redeemed them and brought them to the Land of Israel. The mood is one of profound gratitude to God. Christians used the Greek word 'Pentecost', meaning 'the fiftieth', to translate Shavuot. Christians celebrated this feast as the feast of the Resurrection of Jesus on the fiftieth day after Easter. Jews at the time used two different calendars. In one, the actual fortieth day was known as the 'fiftieth' day (40 was the fullness of time in Hebrew counting). In the other calendar, the actual fiftieth day was, more naturally, accepted as the 'fiftieth'. So there were two 'fiftieth' days celebrated. Christians decided to have both of them, and put the Ascension of Jesus on the actual 40th, and the Christian Pentecost on the actual 50th. They fasted between the two, and then kept the Vigil of Pentecost like the Easter Vigil, and feasted during the whole octave of Pentecost – right up to what we now call Trinity Sunday. Acts highlights the coming of the Spirit at the Jerusalem Pentecost. That's the feast most of us think about today at Pentecost Sunday. Jews from everywhere in the Diaspora had come to Jerusalem for Shavuot. (Their common language was Greek). Acts says that the symbols linked with Sinai occurred – the fire, the quake, the giving of the Law. The effect was not 'speaking in tongues' (glossolalia) but a kind of fearless speech and uninhibited hearing that produced multi-cultural understanding (xenoglossia). This is what the coming of the Spirit means – and produces. In Acts, something like this keeps on happening. In Acts 8, in Samaria, believers are baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, the apostles impose hands, and the Spirit comes once again. In Acts 10, Cornelius (a Gentile) is filled with the same Spirit even before baptism, and so is declared fit for baptism, with a resounding justification for the Gentile Mission. In Church practice now, the whole season from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost Sunday is regarded as a unit. There are 40 days prior to the Triduum, and 40 days between Easter Sunday and Ascension. We begin with Ashes, we end with Fire.... 'Paschal' time goes from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost Sunday. We began it in ashes, we end it in fire – in the fire of God. It is a time of 'enthusiasm' in the literal sense: 'enthusiasm' literally means 'in-God-ism' and this is a time of being 'in God'. We are grasped by a power, a dynamism, a life, that we instinctively know is divine, even if we have no adequate words for it. We call it a 'spirit', the Spirit of God – mostly because a 'Spirit' is more elusive than a clear 'Word'. Somehow we feel that we touch the point from which all creation begins, it is in this Spirit. We sense it being led to a large fullness, an ever greater abundance. It is the celebration of a continuing process that is interiorized and amplified to more and much deeper dimensions. Pentecost is the point of it all. ---- DID YOU KNOW THERE HAS BEEN A PENTECOST IN YOUR LIFETIME? It is usually called the second Vatican council. It was one of the greatest Pentecosts ever. It was dynamite. Look at what it did. It gave us a document that said life in the secular world was blessed by God. It gave us a document that said that salvation was not divided into two different histories – secular history and church history. It gave us a document that said a mini Pentecost was happening when we read the Word of God in scripture and lived it in the liturgy. It put before us an alternative way of living the resurrection of Jesus from the way we used to. It gave us not just a new way of being in church, but a new cultural identity in our world. It told us we needn't get into the politics of state craft, we ought just show everyone – in the church and outside it – how free we have been made in the Spirit. We could all live in communion. There would be no fights about who is best or better, no contests with Jews, no fights between liberals and conservatives. It was not to be an update on the old model. It was to be a new model. It was not just a reform of a few things we used to do that perhaps needed reform. It wasn't a reform at all, it was a really new start. A Pentecost, really. Was it in continuity with the church's past? Well, yes and no. Was the first Pentecost in continuity with the apostles' past? Not unless you stretch the idea of continuity – but the church has often had Pentecosts in the past, and their novelty has kept it in touch with its past. Was it an outburst of divine energy? Surely, it was, and in our time. Yes it was dynamite, but unfortunately, almost a half century later, it hasn't yet gone off! In a real Pentecost, two things happen. First, people go past their fears, and secondly, they have an astonishing capacity for communication. In most cases, when people overcome their fear of something, they replace it with something else they are even more afraid of. If we had a real Pentecost, we would not be afraid of anyone or anything. We would lose fear itself. It is often said that at Pentecost we were given the New Law. I would rather not say it like that. Most of our fears come from a sense of some Law obliging us. Pentecost gives us, not so much a New Law, but a new freedom from the fear that all law inspires, no matter what kind it is. As well as fearlessness, there is communication. Pentecost is the revelation of God as relationship. Relationship means communication. The Absolute God is revealed as the Unsurpassable Love, communicated. That is why God is unconditional pardon, given. A real Pentecost gives this kind of communication to people so that they can communicate this way with others. It is a new logic (it looks foolish to usual logic, as Paul said). Power is made manifest in vulnerability, life is not afraid of death – it assumes it and goes beyond it, the future is open to what we used to call the impossible, because now 'nothing is impossible for God'. What appeared to be definitively lost is found again, renewed, recreated, resurrected. Luke uses two Greek words that show that someone is full of the Spirit: parrhesia and paraklesis. Parrhesia means saying all there is to be said, not covering up anything, telling it like it is. Paraklesis means enabling a hearer to grasp this, giving them the confidence to act on it, and trust it, and believe in it. Without fear, in good communication. At the Jerusalem Pentecost, the followers of Jesus spoke in their own language and were heard in the native language of many peoples gathered there. Pentecost is a process of communication in which the barrier of languages is taken down. [In the future European Parliament there will be 23 official languages!] Each understands the other in her mother tongue, no language is declared foreign to the benefit of some kind of globish. Each language brings its own cultural richness, difference does not mean exclusion, everyone understands everyone. There is a wholeness that retains and discovers diversity. We are not talking about something magical. We are talking about a process. It is indeed a process. If we want to discover the details of that process, we can read some clues in Acts. The process is one in which there are many steps, and each step is a step away from a fear that held people back. It is a step away from fear of something new, or someone new. Each way is a step away from fear of the other. Each way is a step towards unity in dialogue and not in reduction to uniformity. 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