With the Feast of Pentecost we come to the end of our Easter season. As we noted last week, Luke is the only gospel writer who organizes his material to give us accounts of the Ascension and Pentecost in that discrete form. These are wonderful and powerful ways of describing how the disciples felt during the period immediately after Jesus’ death. But they do create the risk that we may see Pentecost as a separate event from Easter, with the Easter season laid out with the Resurrection at the beginning and Pentecost at the end.
If we look at all the gospels together, it is more helpful to recognize that there is one, single Easter experience. It does not take place all at once, and it has many aspects, from confusion and fear through to joy and mission. It’s also crucial to realize that the Easter experience, as described by all the evangelists, in whatever form, is not something that happened to Jesus, it was something that happened to the disciples. And so, it is something that happens, or can happen, to us.
For me the most dramatic and powerful part of Luke’s Pentecost story (Acts 2:1-11) is the speaking in tongues, or more accurately the hearing side of that. “Each of them heard the word of God in his own language”. This central feature of Pentecost, and thus of the Easter experience, tells us clearly that there is no single way that God speaks to each of us. The experience of conversion, the experience of entering into this relationship is different for everyone. It is based on where we are coming from. And it comes to us, we don’t have to go to it.
We are so used to the idea that life is a process whereby we make decisions, we make efforts to achieve something, we succeed or fail in those efforts, and move on to the next challenge. And probably someone judges us or keeps score of how well we are doing, whether parent, or teacher, or the god of mammon handing out wealth and success.
Life with God isn’t like that. For sure there may be times when God asks something, as when he asked the disciples to follow him. But he doesn’t then watch over us, judging our success or failure. If he’d done that with the disciples they would clearly have got Ds at best and Peter probably an F. God doesn’t work by demanding things of us and judging how we measure up – he offers us things. Even the invitation to follow is not a demand, it is the offer of an opportunity.
That offer is made to everyone, wherever they are from – in their own language. Most often we don’t hear and understand all at once, it takes time for us to understand. Our Easter experience doesn’t happen in a moment, a moment of resurrection or a moment of touching by the fire of the Holy Spirit. It is a process, unique to each of us – because we are each unique to our Father, and he wants to make us our own, unique offer of a relationship with him. Each Easter season we get to explore again, we get to listen again, we get to understand again what happened to Jesus and what that means of us, each individual, each one unique in God’s eyes, in God’s embrace. We get to re experience our own Easter.