Pentecost: A Pilgrimage to the Roots

Every journey, both inward and outward, are inherently revelatory in essence. Each journey makes us meet our finitude and transience vis-à-vis. For Christians, who consider Christ their sojourner, every journey then ought to be a pilgrimage. Rumi, the Islamic mystic has remarked, “The sweetness and delights of the resting-place are in proportion to the pain endured on the journey. Only when you suffer the pangs and tribulations of exile will you truly enjoy your homecoming.” Journey is not obligatory but a Divine mandate – the cost of discipleship. Vagabond, recluse, migrant, refugee etc. are some of the common adjectives used to qualify Christ who was indubitably an ardent wanderer. Thus journeying becomes the Spiritual destiny of his disciples. Pentecost is an invitation for one such pilgrimage which we as a faith community need to make – a pilgrimage to our roots.

Pentecost is an event when the Church realized her source of existence, her breath, her being – the Spirit. John Zizioulas, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, explicates;

The Spirit is not something that ‘animates’ a Church which already somehow exists. The Spirit makes the Church ‘be’. Pneumatology does not refer to the well-being but to the very being of the Church. It is not about a dynamism which is added to the essence of the Church. It is the very essence of the Church.

Spirit is one of the complex theological propositions which have been quite often left to wiggle room. Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar, states;

The Hebrew term rendered ‘spirit’ is ruah which can also be rendered ‘breath’ or ‘wind’, all terms that seek to speak theologically about the release into the world of a specific force that is linked to Yahweh but which is invisible, inexplicable and irresistible. Ruah in a wholistic sense refers to an invasive power at work in the world, deeply linked to YHWH’s will and purpose, capable of disrupting and transforming earthly reality.   

To be precise, Spirit is the disruptive and transformative being of the Church which urges her to dismantle and breach the existing order which is contrary to the divine order. Pentecost then becomes a divinely inspired call for the Church to revive her spirit of disruption and transformation, whose embers are at the verge of being extinguished in the course of her journey so far. Pentecost is also a time when the Church needs to contemplate and address her evolutionary trail from the Kingdom of God to the Church in its present form. Bring in to our memories the proverbial words of the French scholar Alfred Loisy, “Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God - instead came the Church.” Give it a thought before dismissing it as a mere conjecture.

Acts of the Apostles chapter 2 is where we find the Pentecost event being narrated. This is a subversive pericope. Here we see the disciples and the crowd were gathered in a house (the Greek word used here is oikos which means ‘an inhabited house’). In contemporary times when the architecture of the edifices and their associated paraphernalia determine a Church, Pentecost teaches us that it is not the structure rather the purpose of the gathering that ascertains a Church. A church is never built rather it is born. Today when the Church is validated in terms of assets and jurisprudential constitutions we relegate the Church into a bare ecclesial institution devoid of the Spirit of disruption and transformation i.e. its very being, which the Church had realized at its inception. There occurs the demise of Ecclesiology. Orthodox theology further elucidates this;

In a Christological perspective alone we can speak of the Church as in-stituted (by Christ) but in a pneumatological perspective we have to speak of it as con-stituted (by the Spirit). Christ in-stitutes and the Spirit con-stitutes. The difference between these two prepositions: in- and con- can be enourmous ecclesiologically. The ‘in-stitution’ is something presented to us as a fact. As such it is a provocation to our freedom. The con-stitution is something that involves us in its very being, something we accept freely, because we take part in its very emergence. Authority in the first case is something imposed on us whereas in the latter it is something that springs from amongst us. (John Zizioulas)

Another radical lesson which we need to learn from Pentecost is to acknowledge the sanctity of the laity by appropriating the distinctiveness of clerics and the laity. Joe Holland eruditely opines;

The ‘sacrament of orders’ and the clerical state’ are historically distinct and institutionally separable. During its first three centuries, the Greek-speaking church developed and sustained the ‘sacrament of orders’ for episcopoi, presbyteroi, and diaconoi (bishops, presbyters, and deacons). But there was as yet no ‘clerical state.’ That came only in the fourth century, through the Constantinian fusion of the Catholic Church with the Roman Imperial State. In that fusion, the leadership of the Roman Empire transferred imperial ‘hierarchical’ privileges from the pagan priesthood to the ordained servant-leaders of the Catholic Church. The new imperial clergy’ were legally empowered to rule over the non-clerical ‘laity.’ Prior to this development, the entire church (meaning both ordained servant-leaders and the entire membership) had been understood as both sacredly lay (the holy laos) and as divinely chosen (the holy kleros). In short, the sacrament of orders is of apostolic origin, while the clerical state is a fourth-century legal construction by the Roman Empire.

During Pentecost, the early faith community participated in the breaking of bread, shared their possessions, flourished in fellowship and prayers, thus giving prominence to the fundamental virtue of the Spirit i.e. Communion (koinonia). According to St. Basil “the nature of God is communion. Communion is an ontological category.”  

The Pentecost liturgy of the Syrian Orthodox church illuminates us with the insight that Pentecost is an inversion of the Babel episode. In Babel, the languages were splintered while in Pentecost the languages were united. This gives a clarion call that the Spirit which is the very being of the Church is a Spirit which celebrates and embraces diversities and fosters communion. Relationality and communion have been the primordial concerns of God right from Creation. Thus in 1923 the brilliant Jewish philosopher and mystic Martin Buber wrote, “In the Beginning is Relation.” There is also a perichoretic (mutually-indwelling) relation between the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian communion between them is the communion of love and becomes the prototype of any communion. Characteristic distinctiveness should be a fecund ground of Communion and not of divisiveness and conflict.   

Humans exist in the web of relations and communion is our ontological prerogative. Whatever deters us from accomplishing this, needs to be denounced and opposed vehemently no matter however sacrosanct it is. This Pentecost, as we undertake a pilgrimage to our roots, may we as a faith community reclaim that abandoned Spirit of disruption and transformation which gives us the audacity to breach the currents flowing contrary to the Divine will. May the Trinitarian communion be the paradigm of our communion and fellowship. I conclude with a poem by a Chinese women probably from the Sung dynasty. In it she expresses her communion of love with her husband. This could be extrapolated in terms of our communion with our neighbours.

I take a lump of clay,

make a figurine of you

and a figurine of me.

Then I take the figurine of you

and the figurine of me,

crush them together,

make them into another lump of clay.

Again I make a figurine of you

and a figurine of me

out of this lump of clay.

There is now ‘You in Me’

And ‘I in You.’

Prayers

Dn. Basil Paul