Pentecost is an explosive event. There is no other way to read the description of the descent of the Holy Spirit in chapter two of the Acts of the Apostles: the “strong driving wind” filling the house, the personal experience of God’s Spirit “filling” the disciples, the vision of “tongues of fire” that “rest upon them,” the miracle of having the power to speak in diverse languages to the crowd.

And there is no other way to interpret the objective events that then take place. A disheartened group of “120 persons” (Acts. 1:15), who had been huddling in hiding for fear of the Jewish authorities, suddenly begin audaciously preaching in public. Peter, the coward and the denier of the Lord, gives the Church’s first dogmatic teaching (“Let the whole house of Israel know that the Lord has made both Lord and Messiah this Jesus whom you crucified!” [Acts 2:36]), converting 3,000 people. The Church is born!

Any explosion necessarily involves fire. And fire, as we all know, burns as well as gives warmth; it consumes the dead wood (or fossil fuel) in the very process of making our life on this planet possible. The 20^th-century poet T. S. Eliot had the most incisive grasp of the meaning of Pentecost as the coming of the Spirit of fire of any contemporary Christian I know. Here is what he wrote in his famous work Four Quartets:

 

“The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

                Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –

                To be redeemed from fire by fire.

 

“Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

                We only live, only suspire,

                Consumed by either fire or fire.”

 

May the fires of Pentecost burn away “the old self of our former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires” (Eph. 4:22) and ignite in us the presence of “our God who is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29)!