As the tongues of fire descend and the Holy Spirit comes to rest on the disciples, the full panoply of residents of and visitors to Jerusalem gather together in baffled bewilderment at the rushing wind and the strange scene unfolding. In the chaos and turmoil and confusion, whatever else may be going on, they can all understand each other. The disciples speak, and everyone understands. Each in their own language, nomads and noblemen, common people of the city, the poor and the outcast, even strangers who are lost: all can understand.
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Christians, and particularly Christian evangelists, have long taken up a charge in the image of Pentecost to go out and to learn every language, to translate the Bible, and to share the Good News with everyone they could. Historically, alongside establishing the basic speech required for trade, the New Testament was often the first text translated into a language as Europeans made contact with cultures and peoples who were new to them.
This is how the Hawaiian language, ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, ends up with a word for raven: kolaka. The Hawaiian crow, now extinct in the wild directly because of the introduction of European settlement and trade, is called ʻalalā. The Hawaiian word kolaka, on the other hand, comes from the Greek korax, and so it is that languages around the world have names for creatures they have never known and lives they have never lived, because some missionary worked to bring Scripture into their own language, so that they could hear the story of Salvation, each in their own tongue.
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Among the many great tragedies bound up in the history of Christian missionaries and evangelism is that while all of them were interested in speaking and being understood, many struggled to listen and to understand. All too commonly, the needs, values, and customs of those who caught the interest of European Christianity were quickly displaced or actively destroyed by the influx of these new texts and prayers and practices. The particular personal hangups and anxieties of the people spreading the Good News gave rise to prohibitions on cultural practices and ways of life.
Indeed, at times it became too frustrating for those who saw conversion as their goal to let the Holy Spirit reach people where they were, and so Christianity was imposed by force. At times, the demands of the panoply of languages became too much, and so the rich matrix of speech that long sustained life in places like Papua or around the shores of the Salish Sea became displaced with a common lingua franca, and always the language that those who wished to make new converts already spoke, themselves.
Christianity became possessed with the intoxicating spirit of Empire, and came to these shores with a compromised capacity to understand and be understood, and a desire instead to force its way to a simulacrum of the replacement goal, in which everyone just accepted English and Christianity, and the colonists and missionaries could use force as a way to speed up the process of saving souls.
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Language is not the stumbling-block it once was. Between classical tools of machine translation and new applications of Large Language Models, humanity can easily and effortlessly communicate across any barrier of language.
These days you can probably see the Pentecost scene quite frequently in Jerusalem, as crowds of tourists and pilgrims huddle together with their phones held in front of their faces, with WeChat or Google Translate or ChatGPT open and translating everything around them into their own language in real-time. This is the scene all around the world, now, from an ICBC kiosk in Victoria to remote villages in Central Asia, that finding ways to communicate with at least rudimentary linguistic comprehension is not so hard.
In our time, we would need a rather different miracle from the Holy Spirit to make for an impressive sign and to transform the way we live.
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We live in a world where language has become a trivial barrier, being only a little lower than the Tower of Babel at its greatest heights, and yet we still don’t really understand each other. In fact, to speak of understanding almost becomes a distraction from the real task. We treat the greatest failures and evils of our world as matters of misinterpretation, or perhaps a lack of information, but education does not heal all wounds.
Right now, there are scholars of Persian culture being enlisted to figure out how to most effectively bomb or at least strong-arm Iran. At the height of the Early 21st Century’s Global War on Terror, psychologists from the Pacific Northwest were enlisted to use their knowledge of trauma and the human mind to make it possible to torture people more effectively. Knowledge is power, or at least those in power will always figure out how to make knowledge into a tool to exert their will.
What we need is some sort of in-breaking not of words or information, but powerful and transformative human experiences which will help us to recover a real, felt sense that other people’s lives are real. Our worldviews are unimaginably incommunicable, and even on our lovely little speck of an island, there are people living lives who would not recognize someone else’s daily existence as really being living.
Some of us cannot imagine huddling around an impromptu fire to share a makeshift meal of expired meat cooked with exuberance and haste as a feast of abundance and joy. Some of us cannot imagine what it would be like to arrive at a palatial estate to have our every need catered to, and to be fed seated around a grand table with an orderly menu and servers to do everything but chew out food. These realities exist alongside one another.
I am uneasy about the Christian project of conversion by any means necessary, but the human project of really encountering and loving everyone seems like something worth living for. The Holy Spirit did not descend upon the disciples so that they could share correct theological ideas that must be uncritically accepted at any cost, but so that the wounds of separation within the human family could be healed. Too often we have used the tools of healing to inflict worse and more enduring injury.
We need the Holy Spirit now so that we can let our hearts be broken open, and have eyes and ears to see and hear as deeply as we possibly can the reality of the lives of others. More than that, we need to be open to reality itself, as our own lives are too often a mysterious swirl of compulsions and habits and reflexive consumer consumption, and we are strangers to ourselves, and go through life amused and fed, but never really living.
We need the Holy Spirit to break it all open, to shatter the rigid foundations of a hurting world that keep us imprisoned in the way things seem to be, so that we can be amazed and transformed by how things really are. In fact, we are surrounded by people to love. In fact, we are not so different from one another as we hope or fear. In fact, we are all God’s own, and the full diversity of the human family is not a threat, a danger, but a gift.
May you hear the Good News of the Kingdom of God in a way that can reach you in your inmost darkness. May you be set free from those things which have alienated you from your neighbour, your enemy, your family, your lover, and yourself. May the prisons of your heart be ruptured, and the dams in your mind flow free. May you know more deeply than words that you are loved, that we are loved, that everything is loved, forever. May the Holy Spirit find you wherever you are lost, and may you be changed by whatever brilliantly old and unspeakably new God is doing right now in your life.