The Pentecost Event
This interpretive key applies also to the event that took place at the Jewish Feast of Weeks in Jerusalem. Luke tells of it immediately after he has recounted the choice of Matthias:
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. (Acts 2:1-4)
This narrative and its continuation make up a text that already had a long history of tradition behind it, in the course of which it had been changed and brought up to date; it was then reworked again and expanded by Luke himself. Let us for the moment set aside the motifs of wind and fire. They are part of an older, pre-Lukan layer of tradition that told of miraculous speech and whose model lay in Jewish interpretations of the Sinai story. God gave his Law on Sinai in fire and loud thunder, and despite all their different languages all the peoples of the world could understand what God spoke on Sinai.16
The earliest level of the narrative, however, was not about a miracle of speech but about the phenomenon of “speaking in tongues,” or glossolalia. The final text says that they spoke “in other tongues,” that is, in foreign languages, but behind that is an original lalein glōssais, a “speaking in tongues,” namely, inarticulate, ecstatic speech.17 We can take it as certain that the oldest narrative core of Acts 2:1-36 told of the outbreak of ecstatic praise of God in inarticulate speech within the original Jerusalem community.
In that case, however, we can imagine the whole context as follows: Peter, the Twelve, and other disciples returned to Jerusalem, at the latest for the Feast of Weeks. They were still in the thrall of their visions of the Risen One and the impressions from what they had heard about the empty tomb. They arrived in a high-strung state of eschatological expectation, looking for the Parousia, the final, ultimate appearance of the Risen One, to take place publicly in the capital city itself.
They joined with the disciples, male and female, who had remained in the city. All of them gathered to exchange experiences and pray (cf. Acts 1:13-14), and then, on the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), in the midst of such a gathering, there was an eruption of ecstatic speech that seized them all and shook them to the core. This prayer experience left them with a deep faith conviction. It formed the group of Jesus followers definitively into a community and—this is crucial—it was interpreted by the community as an experience of the Spirit. This was the beginning of such experiences of the Spirit in the church. There have again and again been glossolalic phenomena since then. In the course of the later mission they extended to other communities (cf. Acts 10:46; 19:6). Even twenty years later we find them in Corinth. It was probably at the same time, and in connection with the speaking in tongues, that the charism of prophecy appeared in the earliest community (cf. Acts 11:27), and it would accompany the development of communities for a long time.
What is decisive in our context is the following: In the Old Testament and in Judaism there was a clear-cut tradition that described the coming of the Spirit of God as a phenomenon of the end time, indeed, as a sign preceding the end of the world. We need only recall Joel 3:1-5, a text quoted by Peter in his Pentecost discourse. The quotation begins as follows: “then afterward [lit.: in the last days] I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions” (Joel 2:28). This text clearly shows how, already in the Old Testament,18 the coming of the Spirit can introduce the end time. It was against that background that the sudden and elemental experience of the Spirit was comprehensible to the earliest community in Jerusalem. The ecstatic phenomena of the day of Pentecost and their interpretation in terms of the Spirit of God would have been unthinkable without the firm conviction of the participants at that time that the end-time events had already begun. The ecstatic shock of the Pentecost assembly was immediately understood to be the eschatological outpouring of the Spirit of which the Old Testament prophets had spoken. This again supports our interpretive approach, which says that without the network of coordinates that made up the tense expectation of the Parousia the history of the earliest community cannot be understood at all.
Further Indications
What we have seen thus far could easily be expanded. We would then have to speak especially of baptism, which was practiced from the beginning of the earliest community and appeared as suddenly and abruptly as the experience of the Spirit. It can only be understood phenomenologically as an eschatological sacrament, a saving seal in view of the nearness of the end.19
We should also speak of the earliest community’s self-perception, recorded in the terms it applied to itself. It would become clear that concepts such as “the saints” (Acts 9:13), “the elect” (Mark 13:19-27), or “the church of God” (Gal 1:13) reveal a fundamentally eschatological structure. They refer to the Israel of the end time, which God has created, chosen, and sanctified for God’s self.
Finally, we would have to speak of the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, which also points toward the eschat
World-Altering Expectation
But none of that can be pursued here. Even this brief description has probably shown already what approach we need to take if we are to understand the course of the Easter events. Here I will propose only one more question: What happened in the long term to that understanding of Easter, that tense and eager expectation of the Parousia in the first weeks after Jesus’ death? Did history invalidate it and lay it to rest? Was it an illusion? Was it all like a grass fire that blazes up suddenly and just as suddenly collapses?
It is helpful, in trying to answer this, if we recall a basic feature of all the appearance accounts. There is not a single Easter narrative in the New Testament that would point our attention to the “beyond,” to heaven, to eternal happiness or the disciples’ own resurrection. Nowhere in the Easter stories in the gospels do we find the basic idea of many of today’s Easter sermons, meditations, hymns, and petitions: because Christ is risen we can be certain that we will also rise.
Instead, all the Easter texts culminate in the Risen One’s sending of the disciples. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” says Matthew 28:19. “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation,” says Mark 16:15. In the name of the Messiah “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things,” reads Luke 24:47-48. Finally, “as the Father has sent me, so I send you,” according to John 20:21. Even Paul said nothing in response to the question of why the Lord had appeared to him except that God “was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles” (Gal 1:15-16). And to round off the whole, in Acts 1:11 the disciples who are staring after the vanishing Christ hear, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” That is, they should not fixate on heaven but be Jesus’ witnesses “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).