Pentecost

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Pentecost is the Christian feast kept on the fiftieth day after Easter, commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the first followers of Jesus. The name is Greek — pentēkostē, “fiftieth” — and it was first the Greek-speaking Jewish name for a festival already old when the church inherited it.

That older festival is the Feast of Weeks, Shavuot, one of the three pilgrimage feasts the Hebrew Bible commands. It is counted seven weeks from Passover, falls in late spring, and in its earliest layer marks the wheat harvest; the offering of the first loaves of new grain stands at its center. Later Jewish tradition came to associate the day with the giving of the Law at Sinai, though that linkage is not spelled out in the Torah itself. It was to keep this pilgrimage that, in the Acts of the Apostles, Jews “from every nation under heaven” had gathered in Jerusalem.

The Christian observance grows directly from that scene. Acts reports that as the apostles were assembled on the day of Pentecost a sound like a rushing wind filled the house, tongues as of fire rested on each of them, and they began to speak in other languages, so that the crowd of pilgrims each heard their own tongue. Christians read this as the birth of the church and the fulfilment of a promised Spirit — the harvest feast reread as a harvest of a different kind. The parallel is one the tradition itself draws: as the Law was held to be given at Sinai fifty days after the first Passover, so the Spirit is given fifty days after the death and rising of Christ.

In Western Christianity the day acquired a second name, Whitsunday — “White Sunday,” after the white garments of the newly baptized, baptism at Pentecost being an old custom. The feast closes the long Easter season, and in liturgical churches its colour is red, for the fire and the Spirit. Eastern Christianity keeps the day as a major feast and folds into it a commemoration of the Trinity. Among Pentecostal and charismatic movements of the last century the events of Acts 2 became a template for present experience — the gifts of the Spirit, above all speaking in tongues, understood as recurring rather than founding.

What runs through the festival in all its forms is a single image held across two religions and two harvests: a season of first-fruits, and a power descending from above to be poured out on those waiting below. The grain feast and the feast of fire keep the same place on the calendar, fifty days out, and the church has never stopped reading the one through the other.

→ Related: Acts Of The Apostles · Leviticus · Communion