All of Them Were Filled with the Holy Spirit

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?” …All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”
(Acts 2:1-8,12, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

The apostles who participated in the Pentecost miracle belonged to a progressive spiritual movement that had, less than two months earlier, seen its leader seized by local authorities in Jerusalem, handed over to the Roman Empire, and publicly executed. Fearing for their own lives, they went into hiding to mourn Jesus’s death—but then he showed up at their safe house to reassure them that he had risen from the dead. Furthermore, he informed them, all this had occurred in fulfillment of the Scriptures. Soon, once they had been “clothed with power from on high,” they could proclaim “repentance and forgiveness of sins… to all nations.” (Luke 24:47,49)

Then, after spending forty days with the apostles, Jesus disappeared again! 

Despite all the reassurances Jesus had given them, the apostles immediately plunged back into fear and confusion. Then two mysterious strangers appeared and nudged them back on track with a simple message: “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” So they returned to Jerusalem to await further instructions.

Jesus had brought them to Jerusalem just before the start of Passover. After his resurrection, he kept them in the city until just before the festival of Shavuot, which commemorates God’s giving of the Torah to Moses and the Israelites. As they had for Passover, Jews came to Jerusalem from all over to celebrate Shavuot at the city’s temple:

“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…” (Acts 2:9-11)

In other words, the apostles had an ideal opportunity to share Jesus’s good news with the global Jewish community. So the Holy Spirit came down among the apostles, and filled them with inspiration to face the crowds and deliver the same message for which their leader had been killed—an event everyone in the crowd that gathered around them would have heard about. On top of that, Spirit made it possible for each person to understand that message clearly.

As the purpose of Shavuot has faded from Christian memory, our sense of the significance of Pentecost has perhaps diminished. Centuries ago, God had made a covenant with the Israelites after freeing them from slavery. Now, Peter stepped forward from the small group of apostles and addressed “the entire house of Israel,” inviting them to “know with certainty that God has made [Jesus] both Lord and Messiah.” (Acts 2:36)

Peter and the apostles offered the world a new covenant with God.

Christians don’t celebrate Pentecost just because a roomful of spiritual revolutionaries had a dramatic mystical experience. Pentecost matters because of what happened after the apostles began speaking in tongues. In one day, they recruited thousands of new followers, people who embraced baptism and “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:41-42)

But let’s backtrack: Imagine the apostles sitting together, waiting for a sign as to what they should do in Jesus’s absence. Suddenly, a compelling urge overtakes them—an urge to share the message of “God’s deeds of power” with whoever shows up to hear it. When I contemplate this scene, my mind turns to expectant worship in the manner of Friends. And that thought encourages me to consider how the experiences of the early Quakers, seeking to restore “primitive Christianity,” mirrored those of Jesus’s first followers.

In 1652, after a visionary experience at Pendle Hill in which “the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered,” George Fox walked about 45 miles northwest to Firbank Fell, where he preached to a crowd outside a nearby chapel. “It was judged there were above a thousand people,” Fox recalled, “to whom I declared God’s everlasting truth and Word of life freely and largely for about the space of three hours.”

“I declared unto them that the Lord God had sent me to preach the everlasting gospel and Word of life amongst them,” he continued, “and the Lord’s convincing power accompanied my ministry, and reached the hearts of the people, whereby many were convinced.” Like the apostles in Jerusalem, Fox felt himself overtaken by the Holy Spirit. That feeling propelled him to connect with a large group of people on a spiritual level. And on this day, many historians reckon, the Quaker movement began in earnest.