Pentecost Video

The Archbishop gives his thoughts on Pentecost. This, the seventh Sunday after Easter, is 'the moment when the friends of Jesus discover that they can communicate to all sorts of people they never thought that they would be speaking to'.

Transcript

People sometimes talk about Pentecost as the birthday of the Church. I've never been completely sure about this and I think that the birthday of the Church is the birthday of Jesus Christ. Or perhaps, if they want to put it slightly differently, it is Easter - the beginning of the community gathered around the risen Christ.

In fact you can't really give a simple date of when the Church began. It is what happens when Jesus is around and gathers people to him in the name of his father, to reconcile them and build them into a new community. But Pentecost does celebrate something very essential and very new about the reality of the infant Church as the story is told to us in the Acts of the Apostles; it is the moment when the friends of Jesus discover that they can communicate to all sorts of people they never thought that they would be speaking to. They have the gift of tongues. They can go out and make sense of all this great crowd of pilgrims assembling from every nation in Jerusalem. They can actually build bridges with strangers and so while there is already a community gathered around the risen Christ, the Church has begun. It is at this moment it seems that the earliest Christians really begin to understand that what they say about Jesus is something that can be communicated in principle to absolutely anyone, to every human being to the ends of the Earth.

So Pentecost is the moment when the promise and the command given at the end of St Matthew's Gospel becomes a reality. 'Go and make disciples to the ends of the Earth', says Jesus, 'make disciples of all nations'. And so at Pentecost the Holy Spirit comes down on the Church to build bridges with strangers. It is a reminder that when we think about the Holy Spirit in the Christian Church we are always thinking about the way God makes connections. It is the Holy Spirit that connects us with Jesus and through Jesus to God the Father. It is the Holy Spirit that brings communion relationship between Christian believers. It is the Holy Spirit that gives us the words we speak to God in prayer, so St Paul tells us. And it is the Holy Spirit, so the Acts of the Apostles seems to say, that helps us communicate effectively, 'Christianly' with one another. The Holy Spirit that gives us the words to share good news with one another and even to take that good news into environments that are strange and unfamiliar to us.