We all know about how the age-old Jewish festival of Passover celebrates the liberation of the ancient people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. God perfected that liberation in Jesus, when at the time of the Passover, Jesus started his journey of the passion which lead him to die on the cross. And on the third day God raised him as our saviour pulling us out of the grave with him. The liberation of the Passover has become for us the liberation of Easter, the liberation from fear and selfishness.
On the festival of Pentecost – fifty days after the Passover – the people of Jesus’ day commemorated the giving of the commandments in the desert, the ‘new deal’ that God was striking for his people – the covenant of love sealed on tablets of stone (“Thou shalt love your God…”). Our Jewish brothers and sisters still celebrate this as Shavu’ot, the ‘Festival of Weeks’.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that the earliest followers of Christ experienced Pentecost as the day when God struck a new deal with them. But this time not in a desert but in the middle of the city. This time not on tablets of stone but in tongues of fierce fire resting on their heads and as a gentle breeze of wind blowing where it wills. As the old prophets had foretold, ‘I will remove your hearts of stone and replace them with hearts of flesh’. Not letters scratched into stone but living words of love whispered in all languages into the ears of all that wanted to hear. God has invested us with his Holy Spirit, today at Pentecost let us pray for his spirit to be set free in us and the love story can begin.
Bernhard Schunemann
