Acts 2:1-12 (NRSV Updated Edition)
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”
John 15:26-27 (NRSV Updated Edition)
“When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.”
John 16:13-15 (NRSV Updated Edition)
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
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"Here I would like to make a brief observation concerning the meaning of the gift of the Holy Spirit. If we read the famous chapters 14-16 of John’s Gospel, something will be noted which is very similar to the account which I am proposing to you. We see God himself, as a human being, giving his Creating Spirit to human beings as a consequence of his going to death so that we be led into all truth. That is to say, the role of the defense attorney, the Paraclete, and the role of opener up of all truth ... and the role of making us participants in bringing Creation into being on the same level as Jesus, are the same role.
[...]
"In the model which I am sketching out, and which I hope to be in harmony with the Johannine witness, we don’t get to receive the divine “eye” or “insight,” so as to speak, by an intellectual leap outside the human process of discovery. Rather it is from within the process of the forgiving overcoming of group violence that we are carried to discovering all truth. Which is to say, that through the gift of the Holy Spirit we get to participate actively as conscious and knowing beings within God’s own creative act."
- James Alison, On Being Liked, pg. 58
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"I want to stand back a little and think of the feast itself. We're inclined to think of the Holy Spirit as being something that is sent. You know, God the Father did something and then Jesus said something and they between them somehow sent the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit then gets to be, if you like, a third thing, something sent. And I want us to stand back just a moment from that and say: no, there is something about the sending of the Holy Spirit which makes the word "send" very inappropriate. Because we are talking not about a messenger, we're talking about God. We're talking about the protagonism that is God, the one who sends us, the sender if you like.
"When Jesus talks to the disciples in the upper room in John's Gospel, he says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And then he breathes the Holy Spirit upon them. The breathing of the Holy Spirit is the sending. There is all the dynamism and protagonism of God. God is the starter, the initiator, the beginner of all this. We are all secondary in the light of the Holy Spirit. When we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit this does not mean that we become the captors, as it were, of this particularly nice gift, the gilded cages in which this wonderful bird sings. No, it means that we start to be taken over by the creative Spirit of God. In other words, we become sent.
"I want to bring that out because it helps us understand something of the amazement and the excitement and the oddness of what's going on in the Pentecost reading from the Acts of the Apostles, which is that Jesus had told them that something was going to happen, he told them about power coming from on high, he told them about the promise of his Father. And yet, what came was a form of protagonism, a form of initiative that was vastly outside and more and beyond anything they could possibly have come up with. It was enormously more powerful. It was not only turning them into the beginnings of the New Temple which meant the sign of the coming in of the New Creation, because the whole point of the temple was that it would be a sign of the Creator, completing creation.
"The whole point of the Rite of the Atonement was that it helped inaugurate the new creation. All of this: the sign of the coming in of the Creator, the complete undoing from within of everything that had screwed up human togetherness, by the undoing of Babel, the unconfusing of tongues. Babel just means confusion; here in the Gospel text and the text from Acts where it says they came together and were bewildered. Actually, it says they came together and were confused. This is Luke's pun, this is the undoing of the confusion of faith. And they're discovering the non-unitary, the wonderful diversity, orchestrated together of language in which each of us from within our mother tongue can learn how to speak the truth. And how God can in fact speak the truth through us and speak us into being, from every nation, culture, tribe, without any over against. This is a huge initiative by God, the undoing of a falsely entrapped creation and it's being opened up into the fullness of creation.
"So that's something that we usually forget. We usually talk about the Holy Spirit as though it was something somewhat less than God. A kind of a tame version of God. And what I want to say is: no, it's us being introduced onto the inside of the life of God as humans. In other words, God having agreed to be Godself at a human level for us, that that's what Jesus had achieved. That's why Jesus is so keen that we understand that the only access to the Father is in him. Everything that is in the Father he is bringing to us, and everything that he is bringing to us is now available to us in the Spirit, on our level - sideways, horizontally. That God, the dwelling place of God, is with humans.
[...]
"[In John 15:15, Jesus] said something which is not in today's Gospel, which we had a few days ago: “I do not call you servants any longer because the servant does not know what the master is doing. But I have called you friends because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” Everything I have made known. In other words, I've opened up knowledge to you. I've opened up the knowledge of what really is for you, everything that I've heard from my Father.
"And then today, just a little later on, [in John 16:13]: “he will not speak on his own,” - the Spirit who's coming upon you, it's going to be the same initiative as mine, which is the same initiative as the Father's - “but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you.” So, “I have spoken to you what I have heard, I made it known to you, I've made known to you what I've heard” [15:15; and] “He will speak whatever he hears and he will declare to you.” [16:13].
"So, what we're getting is, if you like, the continuation of Jesus making things known to us through the Spirit. Which is bearing the whole of Jesus's life and death, keeping that whole dynamic alive for us to share in and living. And that this is what is being made available to us as something friendly, just as a master doesn't tell friends what it's about, but friends share what they've heard and share what is true about what they've heard so as to open up for other friends. That's what this talk of hearing means: that this gift of the Spirit, all the power and glory of God coming at the level of us, is a friendly opening up, [of] the reality of creation, of everything that is, as something profoundly friendly to us."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Pentecost Sunday, Year B" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bDtRSUUQEM)
[Source of James Alison quote from "On Being Liked" and for discussion of all this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-b/pentecostb/]
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