Penticost, The Outpouring Of The Holy Spirit To Unite The World
Pentecost is this amazing mystery. it’s a mystery because it is the birth of the church, and the church is a sacrament of unity to the world. To understand that, we must understand that what God has done in this moment by the birthing of the Holy Spirit is to transformer Jewish feast from what it was, which was the 50 days after the Passover. It was the commemoration of the Covenant at Mount Sinai; it was the entrance into the the promised land. That’s what the Jews were celebrating. That’s why they had people from all over the known world in Jerusalem on that day, because they all came back as it was a feast of obligation that every good Jew had to find themselves in Jerusalem to be able to celebrate.
What they are celebrating – the Jewish community – and what those in the Upper Room are celebrating, is very different but, they’re layered one on top the other because what they celebrate as a Jewish community was a harvest festival; it was a spring festival, it was a time when they started to gather in the harvest, and recognize the gifts and the graces of God and in this harvest festival. They were very generous to the church, and in the generosity to the church, they would bring whole animals, and slaughter, and give, and the first of their fruits would be given, and all of the the the the dynamism around the harvest festival with the wheat, the barley, the grape and the wine, and all that was part of this Jewish life.
But it was also about the law and the Covenant, and it was also about entering into the Promised Land, and it is this latter one that the tradition takes up; because the people we know left Egypt, they walk through the Red Sea dryshud; they walk through the desert for forty years, and they entered into the Promised Land; and at the same time when the Jewish community is celebrating the entrance into the Promised Land, it’s the same moment when the Holy Spirit will come down upon the Apostles, and the disciples, and Mary, who are gathered in the Upper Room, where they will experience power from on high, and they to enter into the Promised Land on the same day. Because with the birth of the church, we have the first sign of the Kingdom manifest here on earth; with the birth of the church, we have the first sign of unity manifest here on earth, and that’s what the promise land is and that’s what the Kingdom of God is, and that’s what God is about bringing – unity where there is devision everywhere in the world.
