From all over the world, pilgrims were in Jerusalem for Pentecost, a religious festival, and they were amazed to hear about God’s love in their native tongues, from Galileans who had never learned those tongues.
God was reaching to them in the most intimate possible way.
Responding in their thousands by being baptised, they stepped into God’s plan to bridge language and cultural barriers with his grace. This amazing event stems from God’s deep desire for us to know him — on two conditions: that we draw breath; and that we want to know him.
God’s interim step was to choose Israel as “a light to guide other nations”: with a ten-point plan for effective living, and sending prophets to prepare them for Jesus’s coming.
Ordinary people flocked to Jesus’s ministry, as he released life-changing love, healing miracles and down-to-earth teaching about God’s availability for anyone who would listen.
Religious leaders sensed his threat to their piety pecking order and contrived his crucifixion. But Jesus never died a defeated martyr, he advanced on death instead, with a two-fold plan.
Firstly, his sacrificial death has released his love — to absorb the guilt and shame that corrodes our confidence; stifles our sense of value and direction in life; and confuses our connection with him and with each other.
Resurrection, the second part, solves his problem of being limited to one place at a time, for he now may release and multiply his Spirit through anyone who receives him. And as he does, he also helps us to reach towards our potential and to bring out the best in others who unite with him as fellow believers in his new body: the church.
The church is not — and never has been — perfect; for almost half of the New Testament offers fine-tuning for off-the-track churches.
Worship and prayer help us to mature in his character, his hope, his healing and his clarity. And God trusts us with gifts to continue Jesus’s ministry, despite our fallibility, so we may multiply his grace through the church and into our wider world.
Still today, God speaks as intimately as at that Pentecost festival — with or without any surprise foreign language — seeking to gently touch our deepest hopes and hurts, inviting us to trust him.
Now and for ever.
Noel Mitaxa
11°C