Acts 2:1-21 Commentary

Trouble in the Text

In the ancient Mediterranean world when Jesus was born, you could count on the fact that everyone spoke Greek as, if not a first, then a second or third language. It had something like the linguistic power of English in the world today. You could travel the world safely knowing you would be able to find someone with enough Greek to help you rent a camel, find a bathroom or buy a meal that approximated your own taste and preference. So if it was the case that, as NT Wright argues, “ever since the conquest of Alexander the Great, 400 years earlier, Greek had been to much of the world what English is for many people in the world today,” why didn’t the Holy Spirit just let Peter offer his sermon in Greek? Here’s the question for us this week: why was language the gifted power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost?

To be sure, this wasn’t the gift of power the disciples were looking for. Remember their last question before Jesus ascended: “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” In other words, “Lord, are we almost to the part where you strip all these oppressive regimes of their power? Is this the part where you make the heathens all submit to us?” The disciples still think that the promised power will be a conquering, reigning, triumphant, overthrowing, subjugating power. The kind of power that can make other people speak your language.

Theologian Willie Jennings opens up this insight in his commentary on the book of Acts. “It bears repeating: this is not what the disciples imagined or hoped would manifest the power of the Holy Spirit. To learn a language requires submission to a people…Anyone who has learned a language other than their native tongue knows how humbling learning can actually be.”

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Draw on the experience of living or visiting in a place where your native language is not spoken.  How did it feel to not speak the language of those around you? How did you feel not being able to order food at a restaurant or read street signs? How did it feel to not get the jokes or understand the cultural, geographical or historical references? What does it feel like, I wonder, to be a doctor in your home country but driving Uber here because people think you are stupid or ill-educated because your English is broken or your accent is strong?

Language is power. It is the power to exclude. And it is the power to include. It is the power to distance and marginalize or to welcome and embrace. To learn a language is to learn a people. To love a language is to love a people. There’s a humility to learning someone else’s language that counteracts colonialism’s demands that everyone abandon their language to speak the dominant language they brought with them. To require others to abandon their language (and culture and identity) to learn your language is not to love them very well at all.

To learn a language is to learn a people.

To love a language is to love a people.

Grace in the Text

Returning to the question posed at the top of this commentary: why was language the gifted power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost? Not a power that would subsume everyone else’s language and culture but a power that allows the disciples to enter into the language and culture of Medes and Parthians and Elamites. A power that allows the disciples to tell the story of Jesus from inside the culture, geography, and history of a people, a power that allows the disciples to hear the story of Jesus, with fresh nuance, as it is expressed by the languages of those from Asia to Egypt and all around the Mediterranean.

Why was language the gifted power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost? Because, by learning rather than imposing a language, you enter into a people and a culture. By language you learn to know and love a people and a culture. Language is the means by which God’s people on earth day embody the Incarnation of Christ, who learned our language, submitted himself to its structures and limitations, walked our earthly geography, learned the particular customs of a time, celebrated the uniqueness of a people. In Christ, Willie Jennings says, “God speaks people fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the disciples of his only begotten Son to speak people fluently too. This is the beginning of the revolution the Spirit performs.”

What does it mean for us to speak people fluently? Like parents who quickly discern the various cries of a newborn, entering into the language of their child in order to love him or her. The power of God given to us in Jesus Christ is the sort of love that enters into the language of others. Other holy texts are only holy in their original language.  We don’t say that in Christianity.  Our Scriptures are holy precisely because they belong equally to the Elamites and Cappadocians, to Arabs and Jews, to Africans and Europeans. The story of Jesus is no better suited to American life in 2026 than to any other country in any other era. And yet, somehow, the story of Jesus is also particularly suited to American life in 2026.

Pentecost is the church’s forever reminder that the Holy Spirit gifts us the kind of power that enters into another language, culture and community as a guest. To learn and language and, thereby, a people. To love a language and, thereby, to love a people with the kind of love that Jesus himself taught us, the love of entering in, of being a guest and of living and dying for the people we meet there.