When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.Acts 2:1-4
As you may or may not know, today is Pentecost, where Christians across the world mark the day the first believers received the Holy Spirit. It may come as a surprise to most Christians however, that Pentecost was not actually "invented" by us, but had actually been around long before the Christian faith even existed. Today Jews celebrate Shavuot, or the Feast of Weeks, which in Greek is Pentecost, because it occurs fifty days after the feast of Firstfruits.
We often picture the granting of the Holy Spirit as occurring in a small upper room, as well as the commotion to cause a large and diverse crowd to gather in the streets, (at least that's how i always pictured it, until my lovely Sunday School fantasy was destroyed). The old city of Jerusalem's streets were far too narrow for that and it's hard to imagine 3,000 people ever fitting in those streets.
Shavuot is one of three holidays where attendance in the temple is required and more likely the "house" referred to in this scripture was the House of God, where Jesus' disciples would have been able to meet and pray. At nine in the morning, every practicing Jew in the diaspora would have been at the temple, which would account for the variety of languages present.
On the first Christian Pentecost, Acts tells us there were three thousand new believers who were baptized. No house in Jerusalem would have had the capacity to do that, but right outside the temple are more than a hundred ceremonial washing pools used to cleanse worshipers before they entered, as well as immersing new converts to Judaism, the precursor to Christian baptism.
Even more interesting, Shavuot marks the giving of the law, since the Israelites reached Mount Sinai fifty days after leaving Egypt. An event which is marked by fire. On Sinai God gave the Israelites a covenant, on Pentecost he was reestablishing a new covenant, one not written on stone but in the hearts of his followers.
But that's not all. On the morning of Shavuot, the priest would read a remarkable passage from the first 2 chapters of Ezekiel. One where through a windstorm and fire, ezekial is commissioned by God to take His divine word to His people, a coincidental indecent or a picture of God's plan?
