Pentecost: What is the Gift of Tongues for Us?

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This coming Sunday, June 8, we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, when the apostles were enlightened by the Holy Spirit to go forth and preach the Good News and to make converts to the same missionary endeavor. It occurs 50 days after Easter a designated time during an annual religious festival following Passover. The apostles are still hovering over the events of the past few weeks: appearances of Jesus to them in the upper room at least twice, breakfast on the shore of Lake Galilee, Eucharistic meal with the two disciples at Emmaus, and the gathering at the Ascension where he leaves them to the mission and ascends into heaven. Jesus does not appear at Pentecost. The Holy Spirit does. The Spirit is God in inspiration, encouragement, guidance. The Spirit is the essence of courage; it lives in our hearts and deepest recesses of our souls. The Spirit waits for us to employ a medium, let’s say, crudely, to awaken us to an action that God wants us to consider. I’m going to go out on a limb here but let me say the wakening of the Spirit within oneself is the action of becoming ‘woke!’ 

On this most powerful first event of a new faith, the Spirit reportedly came in tongues of fire—in other words—in overwhelming zeal to enflame each apostle and disciple in the room where their timidity and fear had hidden them for 50 days! I like to think of fifty days of prayer and planning knocking them to their feet and making them shout, “Let’s Go! Let’s do it!” Outside, the crowds had gathered for the religious feast, but they came from all over the known Middle East speaking different languages. They wonder aloud how it is that they can understand these apostles who appear drunk. The fact is, they are drunk, drunk with the zeal, flame, wokeness of the new message and so they shout it and teach it, and the Church is born. 

Their speech is born of “Christ’s truth,” writes Garry Wills, “so they speak without restraint. This open speech is parrhesia, which literally means, ‘speaking all,’ not holding back.” Wills continues, “In the Christian texts, it means the speech of one totally transparent to the message being conveyed, the truth of God’s word. No filter of falsehood stands between the Spirit and the proclamation from the speaker’s mouth.” (p. 308) Was that what the listeners heard? Did they actually hear the words of their language when they asked others in the crowd: “What are they saying?” The early fathers of the Church held that parrhesia was a mark of the free communication with God, a type of candor which Adam lost when he tried to hide from God after his sin. Falseness crept in and he covered his mind’s parrhesia with falsehood. Pentecost, however, had restored the parrhesia with free access to a God who loves us all, especially the poor. Parrhesia is speech you cannot NOT speak. You must speak out; you must speak for the message and justice. You then make the Spirit present, the very Spirit in your soul! “We know one way to test the Spirit’s presence,” says Wills: “Where she is, there is parrhesia.” (p.309)

Reflection

I am convinced that the need for Christians to speak up with conviction against the swirling evils that are destroying nations and even the rights of our own people has never been greater. It is time for our parrhesia, our gift of tongues to press for truth so that others may simply live, really live! I cannot watch the starvation of Palestinians, the cruel atrocities against Ukrainians and know that my country has a part in this. I’m finding ways to use my training in writing and advocacy, but it feels so weak because the evil of domination is so great. And I am just one little believer in the teaching of Jesus Christ.

But if I believe in the gift of parrhesia, speaking unfettered, facing opposition as a believer in Pentecost, then my faith is real and my love for the suffering is pure. I need to work on this. Will you join me?

Perhaps this week, we can ask the Spirit that each of us becomes a flame of zeal, one who makes an effort to confront or do something such as write to your congresspersons or ask your pastor if he can invite parishioners to gather and sign letters in your parish hall asking congresspersons to assert themselves more strongly for peace in Gaza and Ukraine. Do some research on groups you might join to advocate against the wildly uncontrolled destruction of our own constitutional rights of free speech. After many years of working in this field and teaching students to use it in their professional lives, I am terribly saddened by this corruption to deprive citizens of their rights. I have come to see that the parrhesia of Pentecost is demanding each us Christians to stand up and proclaim right now in the best way we can. We will then be speaking with the gift of tongues. 

This week read the story of Pentecost in The Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 2. What lines of Peter’s discourse touches you? Try not to shy away from declaring the truth when and how you are able. Remember the Spirit lives within you and “Where she is, there is parrhesia!” 

To all my readers and Anonymous Angels, I say thank you. Please live the message of Pentecost! And be open to the joy of this call from the Spirit. Plead on behalf of the helpless. You will be living your Pentecostal faith.

Quotes from Structures of Deceit: Papal Sin by Garry Wills. 

Jerome Biblical Commentary.