On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” (John 20.19-23)
Today we conclude the Season of Easter as found on the liturgical calendar with the celebration of the Feast of Pentecost, a special day that draws our attention to the gift of the Holy Spirit that was bestowed upon the apostles fifty days after Easter. The word Pentecost is derived from the Greek word meaning “fiftieth day.”
Before we delve into the significance of the special day, we may want to remember that only the evangelist Luke tells the story of Pentecost, the event described in his second volume that we know as Acts of the Apostles. The other evangelists make no mention of the gift of the Spirit fifty days after Easter, raising all kinds of questions in our minds.
Adding to the complexity, it would appear that the evangelist John has the bestowal of the Spirit take place on the evening of Easter. We have that event given to us today in our gospel text, the only gospel that specifically cites Jesus gifting the apostles with the Holy Spirit. We hear the Risen Jesus say, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” As we may recall, Thomas is absent at the time, and when Jesus appears a second time a week later, he does not repeat the words, raising the question of how Thomas received the same Spirit.
Matthew, for his part, includes the Holy Spirit only in his Great Commission atop the mount in Galilee when the Resurrected Lord tells the disciples to “Go, baptize the nations in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” requiring us to think that they will have the Spirit if they are to baptize in its name, but there is no scene of the Spirit descending upon them as we find in Acts of the Apostles.
The simplest conclusion raised by this complexity is that the Lucan Pentecost in Acts cannot easily be solved, given its absence in the gospels, including his own. The best answer, I would suggest, is that Luke has extended the time line to meet another purpose. And what is that purpose? The word Pentecost was originally used by Greek speaking Jews to refer to the Feast of Weeks, an agricultural feast that took place each year fifty days after Passover.
So, perhaps Luke is wanting to repurpose this feast, borrowing the word to describe a different feast, this one having to do with the gift of the Holy Spirit that the Risen Lord promised to his followers after his death and resurrection, and that he gave to them on the evening of Easter when he made his first appearance to them, as we find in the selection from John’s gospel.
Given that “devout Jews from every nation under heaven were staying in Jerusalem” for the Jewish feast of Pentecost, it served Luke’s purposes to have the Spirit descend upon the disciples at this point, so that they could leave the place where they were gathered together, walk into the streets of Jerusalem, and begin the proclamation of the message of the Risen Lord that was now to be taken to all the nations, beginning in Jerusalem.
Of course, these are the brain teasers of Biblical scholars for the most part. In the end, when the Spirit was gifted to the disciples is less important than the fact that the Risen Lord fulfilled the promise he made to his disciples before his death when he spoke these words to them in the Gospel of John, “I will not leave you orphans. . . The Advocate, the Holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name–he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.”
Importantly, we find in those words the reason for the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is so that the followers of Jesus can become to the world what Jesus has been to the world, bringing his presence with them into the future ages, his Spirit allowing the disciples to offer to all others the same peace and the same joy that the Risen Lord gave to them on that Easter evening when he stood before them and showed them his hands and his feet and said to them, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
The absence of the physical Jesus in the world will be compensated by the presence of the Spirit, reminding believers of the words and the works of the Lord Jesus when he walked upon the earth, reassuring them that he still lives among them, not in a physical form, but in the Spirit that dwells within believers who have been sent out to do the same as Jesus did when he walked the roads of this world.
It is important, I believe, to see that the Risen Lord bestows this gift of the Spirit upon the disciples in the Johannine text by breathing on them and saying to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” John, whose gospel hearkens to the Book of Genesis in its first line when he writes, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God,” now returns to the Book of Genesis at the end, recalling the creation story in Genesis when we are told that, “The Lord God formed the man out of the dust of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
Doubtlessly, it is intentional on John’s part to connote the gift of the Spirit in this way, the breathing onto the disciples symbolizing a new life entering into them as well as a new creation of the world that will come through their words and their works as they continue the will of the Father in the world as Jesus had done the will of the Father while he was in the world.
Luke, as we know from Acts, will symbolize the gift of the Spirit by way of wind and fire, but there is something profoundly intimate in John’s text when he says Jesus breathed on them, recalling for us the start of every human life that comes with the first breath taken in. The disciples’ new life begins as they take in the breath that Jesus has breathed into them even as a newborn takes its first breath of life.
As we can see, there are many things that can draw our attention in this story of the gift of the Holy Spirit, all of them important. If we stay with the Johannine version, I think we find another key point at the start of the appearance story when we are told that “on the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst.”
What we see here is the state of the disciples before the gift of the Spirit has been breathed into them. They are fearful of what harm may come to them and they have barricaded themselves behind locked doors to protect themselves. This is their pre-paraclete posture–scared, subdued, and subject to their own fears. The door to the outside world is closed off and they refuse to step through it.
Their post-paraclete posture, as we know from Acts and from history, is the opposite. Gifted with the Spirit, their timidity is turned into intrepidity and their cowardice is changed into conviction. They no longer hide behind closed doors, but instead walk boldly and bravely into the streets, ready to share the words and works of the Risen Jesus. They behave as people sent on a mission, doing as Jesus had told them, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
Of course, it is the only way that the message of Jesus can be heard by all the nations, if those sent by the Risen Lord go to them, proclaiming and preaching the mighty deeds of God as shown in the works of Jesus of Nazareth. Staying behind closed doors results in the disciple refusing to be sent out, the door preventing the teachings of Jesus from being heard by the peoples of the world because of the trepidation of the would-be follower of the Risen Jesus.
The feast of Pentecost poses a challenge, then, to all subsequent generations, asking us if we truly have accepted the call to be sent out, or have we stayed in our safe room. The question, of course, is easily answered, more easily perhaps than we want. The answer is found in our boldness or in our bashfulness, in our activeness or in our passiveness, in our assuredness or in our diffidence.
The Spirit that has been gifted to the followers of the Risen Lord would not have us remain in a place of fear, but instead pushes us out the door, sending us into the streets, urging us to step onto new paths, and showing us a way ahead where none was before. In the same way that the breath of God created new life out of nothingness, the breath that the Risen Lord breathes onto his followers wants us to create new life wherever we walk.
Those who have the breath of the Spirit within them have no fear, not of the future, not of the fanciful, not of the foreigner. They are not held in chains to the ways of the past, past creeds, or past practices, but have the freedom of the sons and daughters of the Most High God who led the slaves out of Egypt into a new Promised Land.
Obviously, the opposite can be said of those who show no sign of the Spirit within them, people who never question the status quo, who never buck the system, who never ask why not. Confined to the small space with the door closed and windows shut, not a bit of fresh air floating around, such people fatten themselves on their fears, afraid of anything new or different, of anyone new or different, of anyplace new or different. They live prematurely in graves of their own making.
Even a cursory glance at the gospels shows us that the Galilean Teacher called Jesus, filled with the Spirit at his baptism, showed not the slightest fear, not of his enemies, not of the powers that ruled people’s lives, not of the blowback that came when he upset the apple cart of people’s tightly held beliefs and rigid mindsets. He could have locked himself away in his carpenter shop in Galilee, but he did not. He could have stayed away from the leper and the tax-collector, but he did not. He could have avoided Jerusalem like the plague, but he did not.
Instead, filled with the Spirit, he did what no one else would do, searching out the lost, loving the unlovable, and siding with those struggling on the sideroads of life. He did it because he had been sent by the Father to do it. And when his time on earth was done, he called his followers to do the same. “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” It was all that simple in his mind.
Today, as we recall the gift of the Spirit that he has given to all those who seek to walk in his footsteps in this world, we are reminded that the Spirit would have us sent into the world to do the works of Jesus. It would not have us stay behind locked doors. Should, out of fear, we find ourselves behind those locked doors, then it may be high time for us to unlock them, setting aside our fears, and to walk into the fresh outdoors, trusting in the Spirit, sent into the world to turn it into a new creation.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 