Pentecost

Pentecost is the great feast of the Holy Spirit and, in liturgical structure, the close of the paschal season. The Greek name pentekoste means "fiftieth" and is the direct translation of the Hebrew Shavuot ("weeks") — the Jewish feast that the rabbis later called the Festival of the Giving of Our Torah (Zeman Mattan Torateinu). The Jewish feast counted fifty days from Passover; the Christian feast counts fifty days from Pascha. Acts 2:1 frames the event explicitly: "when the day of Pentecost had come" — that is, when the existing Jewish feast had arrived. The apostles were not inventing a new feast in Acts 2; they were gathered for the old one when the Spirit fell.

The theological geometry of the day is exact. Shavuot in Jewish tradition commemorates the giving of the Torah at Sinai fifty days after the Exodus. The Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 86b–88a) develops the chronology in detail. On that day, fire descended on the mountain (Exodus 19:18), the voice of the Lord went out in seventy languages (so the midrash, see Exodus Rabbah 5:9), and the Torah was given to Israel. On the Christian Pentecost, fire descends — now on the heads of the apostles (Acts 2:3). The disciples speak in tongues, and "devout men from every nation under heaven" hear in their own languages (Acts 2:5–11). Peter cites Joel 2 to interpret it: "in the last days... I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh." The Sinai pattern is repeated with universal scope. Christian preaching from Irenaeus and Tertullian forward made the parallel explicit.

The feast was firmly established as the second great paschal day by the end of the second century. Tertullian writes around 200 that no day is more appropriate for baptism after Pascha than Pentecost (De Baptismo 19). Origen, Eusebius, the Apostolic Constitutions, and the great Eastern liturgies all describe Pentecost as the conclusion and crown of the fifty days of Easter joy. The entire fifty-day span (the Pentecost season in the Eastern tradition, in some sense the original "Pentecost") was a single great Sunday — no fasting permitted, no kneeling permitted. The fiftieth day itself was the festal climax of that season.

Liturgically, the feast in the Roman tradition is marked by the red vestments of fire and the Spirit, by the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus (a ninth-century composition, traditionally ascribed to Rabanus Maurus), and by the sequence Veni Sancte Spiritus (twelfth or thirteenth century, ascribed variously to Stephen Langton or Pope Innocent III). The Pentecost vigil parallels the Easter Vigil in structure. The Eastern liturgy is dominated by the kneeling prayers of Sunday evening — long sets of prayers said while the whole congregation kneels for the first time since Pascha. The transition is liturgically vivid: the church has been standing in resurrection joy for fifty days, and now it kneels in the presence of the Spirit it has received.

Theologically, Pentecost is the feast of the church. If Christmas celebrates the Word becoming flesh and Easter celebrates the conquest of death, Pentecost celebrates the birth of the community in which both of those mysteries are made present through time. The Spirit who descended at Pentecost is the Spirit who animates the church, who illumines the Scriptures, who consecrates the sacraments, and who indwells every baptized believer. Eastern theology speaks of the church as one of the two hands of God (Irenaeus's phrase) — the Son and the Spirit — together accomplishing the divine purpose. Pentecost is the day on which the second hand is laid on the body of the church. The fifty days are completed. Ordinary Time begins.