Abstract
In the flame and din of the Pentecost moment, half the Roman Empire had witnesses present. From the lands we now think of as Muslim Asia to the City of Rome itself, eyes and ears were present from every land, minds trying to grasp the meaning of the storm exploding in front of them. The roll-call of lands represented in the Pentecost crowd is a sampling of the eastern half of the Empire, witnessing something to take back to the deserts of the Middle East, the islands of the Aegean, the farmlands of Turkey, like a flame to carry around the known world, then and still now.
But trace those nations on a map in the order they’re listed in the story, and there’s an unmistakeable pattern on the page. The list begins with the most easterly residents of the Roman world – Parthians and Medes -, sweeps in a northerly arc through Turkish lands – Cappadocia and as far north as Pontus on the Black Sea coast -, reaches as far west as Rome itself, and finally swings back via Crete to the Arab lands to the south of Palestine. The whole list describes a neat, anti-clockwise, centripetal spiral of peoples drawn into a place and a moment and a revelation and a revolution. On the face of the globe, it’s like the sweep of someone’s right arm, bringing a world together to share the most dramatic divine moment. Somehow it seems to make a difference that it’s not a sucking force pulling people in a straight line into the middle of something, or a magnetic field that couldn’t be resisted by human will. It’s more like the gathering gesture of a welcoming host, the circling of an embrace big enough to reach around the world and make people each other’s most unexpected companions.
And for that moment, that spirit-giving moment, there they all were in one place…
And then didn’t the Gospel message from that moment begin to spiral outwards again, its centre in Jerusalem as the oldest disciples planted the church with authority where the story had its heart, and with marvellous sweeps of missionary journeys lighting up Antioch, Alexandria and one day Rome itself and all the lands between. It wasn’t tidy, for it was human. The route of St Paul’s journeys alone, where we think we can trace him at all, is as inefficient as the route of the children of Israel meandering around that desert until the promise was good and ready for them and they for it. The planning of the Gospel movement was full of coughs and splutters, arguments about tactics and people and principle, false starts and bloody ends sometimes. Yet continue the journey beyond the telling of the New Testament, on through the centuries to modern times, and the rough spiral continues its centrifugal way this time, to the ends of the earth.
Now we cannot always manage to think of the whole earth, which is too big for us to hold in our minds all at once. Sometimes it is enough to think only of our own lives, and there we may find the same patterns: a spiralling in, a spiralling out. The Gospel story spirals inwards through eyes and ears and experiences and finds its way to the middle of us. A gift so unsearchable can change the most unchanging depth of us. A calling so undeniable can focus in on the tiniest core of us. The message spirals in to the vanishing point beyond what anyone else sees of us.
And when it has caused us to be who we will be, over the whole course of a Christian life or with a suddenness mid-journey, the same message will spiral out of us and beyond us into the world we can change. We may have been set on our life’s direction in our earliest years, or on a new direction we didn’t really expect, but from then on it’s not just about us, but about what we can be and do and speak in our place in the world.
The warmth and kindness that has found the inside of our thoughts and feelings may reach out through us to our relations with others. It wouldn’t feel right to keep from others the compassion and mercy we feel redeeming us first. All our relationships taken together tell more about our personalities than all the talents we were born with or achievements we stack up in the course of our lives. Our touch of the world in the people we know is the beginning of that outward spiral of promise.
The personal passions that burn in those touched by the Pentecost flame – for forgiveness, for justice, for equity across the face of the world – these spiral out into the political. Wherever a rule of government or a pattern of social care serves or thwarts real mercy, inspired people conspire to see right prevail, whatever the cost in their time or reputation. Professional politicians worry lest they seem to be motivated from their spiritual core; while we who vote for them worry lest they are not. Our touch of the world in the structures of society is part of that growing spiralling of godly goodness.
The story of the Gospel spirals into us full of promise to us, the promise that makes us feel reassured about ropey pasts, the promise that makes us feel strong in a worrying present. But as the same story spirals out from us it takes its dues, in the form of our commitment and determination and loyalty to the same story and sense that we owe anything and everything to God. The more we do, the more bravely we do it, the more we seem to receive to motivate us further; so that the greatest saints always seem to be the ones who most feel they are still indebted to God.
And the question that was asked of us by Jesus Christ at the outset seemed then like a choice, and we could have ignored it as most people would do. But when we took the option for the adventure of the Christian faith, it soon stopped feeling like an option because it soon became a part of our identity we could no longer shake off in boredom or irritation. More and more our actions create us anew, so our apostleship sticks to us for the world to notice. Others seeing us see character shaped and coloured by text and tradition and spirit, and that just is.
Probably scattered round any church on any Sunday are people who are located on different points in those spirals. The Gospel story may yet be wriggling in through your head and heart and you feel you are still just a listener and a learner. Or the same story may have determined how you look at everything long since, and touches the world through you, through your loves and friendships, through your voting and your work in community, through your professional decisions and your career choices.
Surely each hearer and reader of the Pentecost account is no further away from the power of it even today, than those Parthians and Cappadocians and Cretans and Arabs were all those years ago.