Pentecost
Then, 50 days after Passover, they came to Mount Sinai, where Moses received the law. Pentecost, the fiftieth day, isn’t (in other words) just about the ‘first fruits’, the sheaf which says the harvest has begun. It’s about God giving to his redeemed people the way of life by which they must now carry out his purposes.
When the Israelites arrived at Mount Sinai, Moses went up the mountain, and then came down again with the law. Here, Jesus has gone up into heaven in the ascension, and—so Luke wants us to understand—he is now coming down again, not with a written law carved on tablets of stone, but with the dynamic energy of the law, designed to be written on human hearts.
The whole point is that, through the spirit, some of the creative power of God himself comes from heaven to earth and does its work there.
He intends to explain how it was that a small group of frightened, puzzled and largely uneducated men and women could so quickly become, as they undoubtedly did, a force to be reckoned with right across the known world.
Part of the challenge of this passage is the question: have our churches today got enough energy, enough spirit-driven new life, to make onlookers pass any comment at all? Has anything happened which might make people think we were drunk? If not, is it because the spirit is simply at work in other ways, or because we have so successfully quenched the spirit that there is actually nothing happening at all?
The early Christians believed, in other words, that they were living in a period of time between the moment when ‘the last days’ had been launched and the moment when even those ‘last days’ would come to an end on ‘the day of the Lord’, the moment when, with Jesus’ final reappearance (already promised in Acts 1:11), heaven and earth would be joined together in the great coming renewal of all things (see 3:21).
This itself is striking, when you think about it. If the prophecies of Joel are coming true, the spirit is available for all God’s people … so why is the spirit not being poured out on the chief priests, on the official religious leaders and teachers? The answer, as politically uncomfortable in the first century as anywhere else, is that the spirit seems to be indicating that the work of new creation is beginning here, in this upper room, where Jesus’ friends and family have gathered: not in the Temple, not in the rabbinic schools, not in the back rooms where the revolutionaries plot violence, but here, where those who had been with Jesus, and had seen him alive again after his resurrection, find themselves overwhelmed with the fresh wind of the spirit and unable to stop speaking about what they have seen and heard.