Pentecost: The Most Underrated Day in the Church Calendar?

This Sunday, Christians will ”celebrate” Pentecost Sunday. I put “celebrate” in quotes because, if you attend an evangelical church in the United States, there’s a high probability that Pentecost will not mentioned at all.

Pentecost, of course, is the birthday of the Church. It is the day on which Jesus’ disciples were collectively filled with the Holy Spirit and empowered to begin preaching the gospel, as described in Acts chapter 2.  Before that day, the church was already functioning as a human organization. According to Acts chapter 1, the disciples of Jesus were already staying together, conducting meetings, taking care of business, praying, worshiping and making decisions. So in that sense, the church already existed. But on the day of Pentecost, this body of believers became much more than a human organization. It was now infused with a divine presence. The Spirit came and made his dwelling among them and they became the Church with a capital “C”, the literal Body of Christ on earth.

Have you ever noticed how much attention we give to Christmas, to mark the day (probably not December 25) that God the Son was born into the world, but we downplay or even ignore the actual day when the third member of the Trinity arrived?  In its historical relevance, the day of Pentecost is no less important than Christmas or Easter.  This neglect of Pentecost may be symptomatic of our poor understanding and knowledge of the Holy Spirit.  Pentecost was the defining moment for Jesus’ disciples and our day of commissioning as the Church.  It ushered in a new era of history, a period when God’s redemptive work on earth would be carried out not through one man (Jesus) but through many human beings who are indwelt by the Spirit of Christ (the Holy Spirit). The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is the central fact that defines the spiritual age in which we now live.

I do not believe that Christians have been commanded to celebrate annual feasts or holidays. Paul explicitly says that we are not (Col 2:16). Nevertheless, Christians have done so for a very long time. In particular, the Christian celebration of Holy Week culminating in Easter, followed by Ascension Day (40th day after Easter) and Pentecost (50th day) is a natural revision of the Old Testament cycle of feasts instituted in Leviticus chapter 23. Most of us understand that the Passover was a foreshadowing, of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. The Last Supper and the crucifixion of Jesus are the fulfillment of the Passover. But perhaps you didn’t know this:

• The first day of the week (i.e., the first Sunday) after Passover was a special feast that anticipated the spring harvest. It was called the Day of Firstfruits (Lev 23:9-14) and it foreshadowed Easter, the day on which Christ rose from the dead as “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1Co 15:20).
• The fiftieth day after the Day of Firstfruits was another celebration called the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost. It was basically a harvest festival. It looked forward to the Christian Pentecost, the day on which God would begin to harvest souls through the preaching of the gospel.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the Holy Spirit. Much of what I have been taught over the years about the Holy Spirit (and it wasn’t much at all) was a reaction against the perceived excesses of the Pentecostal movement of the early 20th century. That movement, as I was told,  placed too much emphasis on speaking in tongues, prophesying, etc. and too little emphasis on level-headed study of the Scripture. My point here is not to critique the Pentecostal movement, because I am absolutely unqualified to do so. My point is that, for too long, this debate between Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal wings of the Church has so dominated our discussion  that many of us have little or no practical understanding of what it actually means to be filled with the Spirit, led by the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit in the truly biblical sense. The Christianity that I embraced as a college student was heavily focused on studying the Bible and understanding scriptural principles in rational ways. Nothing wrong with that. But somewhere along the line, I truly lost sight of the Holy Spirit and his role in the Christian life. That’s something that I want to correct.