On Pentecost
For Evensong at Girton College, Cambridge.
A message on John 14:8-21 and Acts 2:1-21, delivered 8 June, 2025.
Have you ever had the experience of being somewhere where no one speaks your mother tongue? Perhaps you learned some of the local language in preparation for the trip, studied it for many years, or just long enough to order a coffee and ask for the toilet. There can be a kind of strain that comes from trying to keep up, to pick up this word or that phrase. It is the mental equivalent of using your non-dominant hand to write a letter; you can just about manage, but it is tiring. Sometimes you find yourself giving up on the effort of communication— resigned to a period of verbal invisibility. You are reconciled to the fact that no messages arrive or perhaps are even intended for you, because you cannot understand them.
But then, sometimes, someone speaks your language. You heard a word, a phrase. You feel a thrill of recognition, admitted once again to the world of communication. Suddenly, you are once again in the know, in on what’s up. You are a person for whom messages are intended, for whom meaning is meant.
This is what happens at Pentecost. The story we hear about today happens not long after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. The disciples and Jesus’ mother Mary are gathered together. They are sure of Jesus’ resurrection, of his saving message, but still not quite sure of what it all means for them, and what will be next. They were gathered praying during the Jewish holiday of the festival of weeks, which celebrates God’s giving of the ten commandments at Mount Sinai. This was a “pilgrimage festival,” when all Jews who were able were to traveled to Jerusalem to celebrate. We are told that “God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven” were in Jerusalem at the time (v. 5). Imagine their surprise (or bewilderment, as my bible tells me), when they heard their own language. Perplexed, they joke that maybe the Jesus followers have just had too much to drink, giving rise to one of my favorite responses in the Bible from Peter who replies “It’s only nine in the morning!” a response, I might note, that wouldn’t entirely convince me of someone’s sobriety after a May ball in Cambridge.
But then, having their attention, indicating to them that this message, this moment, is intended for their ears and their hearts, Peter speaks of signs and wonders. We must remember that the gospels describe an eclipse and an earthquake taking place during Jesus’ execution (Luke 23:44-45), which must have been still vivid in the memory of people in Jerusalem at the time. Peter then speaks of people of all ages and genders prophesying, seeing visions, dreaming dreams. All this, he says, points to Jesus Christ, the man who taught, who died, and who God vindicated in his rising again from the dead “so that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (v. 21). This is a moment when the message and saving work of Jesus pushes beyond the bounds of his close circle of friends and disciples, the beginning of “making disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). This is a message for everyone, a message spoken in the mother tongue of all “God-fearing” people. And this translation is the work of the Holy Spirit.
In today’s gospel passage, Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit will come, and Pentecost is the fulfilment of that promise. Jesus speaks of the Spirit being an “advocate” and helping the disciples really know who the Father is and how to be faithful to Jesus (v. 16). In chapter sixteen of John’s gospel, just a few pages later, Jesus says this about the Spirit: “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when the Spirit of truth, comes, The Spirit will guide you into all the truth” (v. 12). I love this. Not only does the Spirit help the disciples understand who Jesus is and what his love for the disciples means, but the Spirit does it in a way and on a timeline that the disciples can “bear.” The Spirit is sensitive not only to the language we speak, but the readiness of our hearts. The Spirit does not overload the disciples, but gently guides them, showing them the truth about Jesus a little bit at a time, so that it is not too much for them to bear.
The Spirit continues to share the good news of Jesus in our own languages today. This is true in the literal sense that Christianity, especially Protestant strands of Christianity, places an emphasis on the vernacular: the language of the people in the culture where Christianity finds itself. Unlike many other religious traditions, scripture does not need to be read in its original written language to be the “Word of God” in the Christian tradition. And part of this is that in Christianity the point of scripture, robustly understood, is not to parse the words and ideas, but to discover within it Jesus. Martin Luther is famously said to have described scripture (especially the Hebrew Bible) as the swaddling clothes of Christ— open them up and search within them and it is Christ you find, and it is the Holy Spirit, engaged in the work of translation, of guidance, of revelation that shows us Jesus.
But the Spirit speaks not only in the language of our mother tongue, but in the mother tongues of our hearts, calling to us, appealing to us, advocating for us in ways that we can bear and understand. The Spirit is eager to show you the love of God in Jesus, patiently finding ways to “guide you into that truth,” to reveal Jesus to you in ways you can bear. In my own life the Spirit has spoken in beauty, in music, in human love, in the natural world, and even sometimes in pain. But in all of this, I have imagined myself and all of us gathered here as the crowd, hearing, almost disbelieving and astonished, the story of God’s love in Christ in our own languages. And so we are! We are the inheritors of the ever-widening circle of God’s love. And yet all Christians are also the disciples on whom the Holy Spirit fell, able to translate God’s love into the mother tongue of those around us.
I recently spent a month in Asia, and while I was there I attended a service at St Stephen’s Anglican church, the first Chinese speaking congregation in Hong Kong. The liturgy that morning was sung in Cantonese to the 15th century Merbecke setting of the Book of Common Prayer, the same tune that my church used for many years. So while everyone else sings the Gloria, the Angus Dei, and the creed in Cantonese, I sung under my breath in English, aware of what is happening because of the shared liturgy. The sermon, I will confess, passed me by. But when I went to receive communion, something wonderful happened. As the priest worked his way through the congregation, offering them communion in Cantonese, when he reached me, without pausing he said in English “The Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He offered Jesus to me, in my own language. This is, I believe, what Pentecost is all about. The Holy Spirit speaks to us in our mother tongues, offering us the risen Christ. And doing so in ways we can receive. But then our hearts are set on fire, so that the Holy Spirit can do a work of translation in us, so that we can speak in ways others can bear and understand.
The former chaplain of this college put it well in his sonnet on Pentecost:
The right words come today in their right order
And every word spells freedom and release
Today the gospel crosses every border
All tongues are loosened by the Prince of Peace
Today the lost are found in His translation.
Whose mother tongue is Love in every nation.
Malcolm Guite, Sounding the Seasons (Canterbury Press, 2012).
