What happened at Pentecost is more important than we know.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Jesus Christ did everything He did -- His Nativity, His Gospel ministry, His Passion in Holy Week and the Cross, His Resurrection -- just so Pentecost would happen.

One can go even so far as to say that the entire Creation and the Providence of the Universe were done so for the sake of Pentecost.

Of course, there is no taking away from the significance of the Incarnation, which was the descent of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, into humanity and Creation.

It is clear that the Son of God, for eternity before His descent, had been active in Creation as the Word and Image of the Father, the Artist of the Cosmos and the Ground of all Thought. This is emphasized in the first chapter of the Gospel of St John.

But in the Incarnation, Christ did something unprecedented: He assumed all humanity -- which is, as St Maximos the Confessor makes clear the beating heart of the universe -- into His Body, redeemed it at the Cross, and ascended into Heaven. He regained His eternal and heavenly glory, but now still and forever human as well as God. And in the mysterious ten days after the Ascension, He asked the Father to send the Holy Spirit.

The Father, in response to this request, sent the Holy Spirit, Who then descended into humanity. This is precisely what happened at Pentecost.

So what happened on Pentecost, fifty days after Pascha, that was totally new? And unprecedented?

What was NOT new

First of all, there are a few things that were not new. “Prophesying” was not new -- this phenomenon, and probably also speaking in tongues (“glossolalia”) was already known in Israel, and even in other cultures. King David’s predecessor, Saul, was known to have “prophesied with the prophets” (1 Kingdoms/1 Samuel 10.10): the Septuagint adds that “the Spirit of God came upon him.” So it is not correct to say that “speaking in tongues” was a new sign of Pentecost.

The Holy Spirit was very much active throughout all of the Old Testament, long before Pentecost. It was by the operation of the Spirit that any of the Prophets prophesied. The Prophets foretold things that would happen in the future -- especially the coming of the Messiah.

They also were moved by the Holy Spirit to call the people of Israel to repentance, to go back to loving God with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their strength (Deuteronomy 6.5).

The Holy Spirit spoke through the Prophets, too, to lead society in spiritual growth and theological maturity even beyond the first generations of Israel. The Prophets revealed to Israel that God was more than a vengeful, wrathful God — this “theology” of omnipotence and divine anger was common in the pagan world, as it is today. But the Prophets proclaimed that He is God the Father Who is Love. St Irenaeus of Lyons described this as an ongoing revelation of God the Father introducing, generation by generation, His real nature to Israel. That is why the Prophets called for even deeper repentance, deeper change. The Prophet Jonah was led, unwillingly, to announce repentance far beyond the boundaries of Israel, even to the worst of alien Gentiles -- the Assyrians in Nineveh.

This was all leading up to a climax. The Holy Spirit, through the Prophet Jeremiah, promised that there will come a day when the Law will move from the outside to the inside, from external “tables of stone” to internal spirituality: “I will surely put My laws into their mind and write them on their hearts. I will be as God to them, and they shall be as My people” (Jeremiah 38.33 LXX).

The Holy Spirit gave gifts all throughout the Old Testament to help humanity make it to this point. The Spirit gave gifts of prophecy, of “tongues,” of craftsmanship (like Bezalel and Oholiab with the Tabernacle in Exodus 31), of poetry and music (like King David), of miracles (like Elias and Eliseus especially). The Holy Spirit was always leading humanity to a “New Song” (Psalm 97.1 LXX; Isaiah 42.10; Apocalypse/Revelation 5.9), in a higher key than the songs before.

Spiritual gifts, then, were not the new, unprecedented thing in Pentecost.

What IS new

What is new in Pentecost is exactly the Descent of the Holy Spirit. As never before, the Holy Spirit descended as Person, as Hypostasis, into humanity and Creation, just as Jesus Christ had descended in the Incarnation.

Just as Jesus poured Himself out in “kenosis” in the Incarnation (Philippians 2.7), so now the Holy Spirit does the same. The Spirit surrenders His own glory (just as Jesus had done so until the Ascension) in two ways. First, the Spirit never brings attention to Himself, but glorifies only the Son. Second, the Spirit accepts and “suffers” the limitations of humanity. The Descent of the Holy Spirit is a descent upon all of humanity -- and yet, humanity will open up to the Holy Spirit in only (and tragically) partial ways. Sadly, it is (and always will be) possible to deny the Holy Spirit’s mission, and thus to blaspheme Him.

It is only by the personal descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost that Jesus Christ remains with the Church: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28.20). This remains true despite His ascending into Heaven. It is the Holy Spirit Who personally glorifies Christ and makes Him present. “When the Spirit of truth comes,” Jesus told His disciples on the night before His betrayal, “He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on his own authority, but whatever He hears he will speak, and He will declare to you the things that are to come” (John 16.13).

Jesus promised His disciples, on the eve of His Passion, that “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14.18). How was this to happen, given that He will indeed leave them during those terrible Three Days between Good Friday and Pascha … and then again, forty days later? “I will ask the Father,” Jesus said, referring to those ten days between Ascension and Pentecost, “And He will give you another Comforter, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth” (John 14.16-17).

We should pay close attention to two revolutionary words: “another Comforter.” This word “another” indicates that Jesus Christ Himself is a “Comforter” already, and that the Holy Spirit is actually the Second Comforter. It means that both the Son of God and the Spirit of God reveal to humanity and Creation that God is Father, that God is Love.

Both Jesus and the Holy Spirit comfort us with the Personal Love of God. They both comfort us with the revelation of God as beauty, God as goodness, God as truth, God as the goal of our life desire, God as the One Who draws us all to full communion with Him.

“Communion” really is the Pentecostal Mission of the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit Who makes us One with the Father, One with Christ, and One with each other. It is the Spirit Who is working now to draw all humanity, and all Creation, into Oneness with God -- a perfect and full and unlimited Communion on the Last Day, when “God will be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15.28).

The new possibility of prayer

In these troubled days, it has become fashionable to ridicule the cliche “thoughts and prayer” — the kind of empty expression often sent as a response to the news of some tragic event.

This is terribly unfortunate, as that ridicule, and the empty use of the expression, completely misses the reality of prayer.

Prayer is the best thing you can do in any and every situation. It is not only the last resort, when no solution is in sight: it is also the first resort and every resort. “All action begins in the soul,” the Hesychastic Fathers repeatedly remind us.

And all love, the deepest and perfection of action in human nature, begins in prayer.

There is no other way for love to bloom.

The Incarnation and Pentecost — both Descents, the first of the Son and the second of the Spirit — make prayer universally possible for the first time.

This is what communion with the Father is all about. “Prayer” remains the best word — in fact, the only word — that we can use to describe the relationship of the Son and Spirit with the Father. Without denying at all their co-divinity and consubstantiality with the Father, the undeniable and earth-shaking truth remains that the Son and Spirit both call the Father “God.” Their relationship within divinity is exactly called “prayer.”

The word “prayer,” over centuries of time and overuse, has been stripped of its radical meaning. “Prayer” is precisely — just because it is the word for the Son and the Spirit’s communion with the Father — the word for our communion with God.

Origen once suggested that the sort of prayer of “asking,” or “supplication,” is inferior to the prayer of “adoration” and the seeking of mystical union. As much as I honor Origen, I think he is wrong here. In relation to God the Father, all of our prayer is “inferior,” and there really is no dividing of prayer into different types or forms.

The “communion of prayer” was described by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “Which of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7.9-11).

And it is exciting and enlightening to pair these verses with what the Lord said about prayer in His Upper Room Discourse, hours before He was betrayed: “In that day you will ask nothing of me. Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask anything of the Father, he will give it to you in my name. Hitherto you have asked nothing in my name; ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full … In that day you will ask in my name; and I do not say to you that I shall pray the Father for you; for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from the Father. I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father” (John 16.23-28).

When Jesus said “that day,” He was referring to Pentecost, the Personal Descent of the Holy Spirit upon humanity. Prior to that day, there was a “distance,” and a difficulty in prayer. There needed to be an intermediary, or a chain of intermediaries between humanity and God.

This was exemplified in the book of Daniel (chapter 10). There, we read of a mysterious, demonic resistance to prayer — which for Daniel’s supplication, took twenty-one days.

That resistance is driven away by the Personal Presence of the Holy Spirit. Now, we can approach the Father directly in prayer (that is, in the Holy Spirit), all because we exist in the Name of Jesus — that is, in His Body.

The true Pentecostal

The Theotokos, the Virgin Mary, is really the truest “new sign” of Pentecost, not “speaking in tongues” or any “spiritual gift.” She is, out of all humanity, the greatest “Pentecostal,” who stands long before the American pentecostalism of the Azusa Street Revival (a three year long event that started in 1906) or any camp meeting or “brush arbor” meeting. The Virgin Mary is the one who is filled most with the Holy Ghost, and brought perfectly into communion with the Holy Trinity. She is the Sign of Pentecost, but also the Sign of the End.

After the first chapter of Acts, we hear no more of the Virgin Mary. And that is well. She, as the most perfect sign of the Holy Spirit, as the one most deified by the Spirit, recedes precisely to glorify the Name of Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit never brings attention to self, but always attends to the Son.

The Virgin Mary did -- and does -- the same. It is by her prayers that the world was turned upside down in the rest of Acts. It is by her prayer -- in maternal communion with the Father -- that history was changed, that Time is now propelled toward universal transfiguration.

We, too, can change history.

In these days, we must change history.

So at this Feast of Pentecost, when someone comes up to you and asks “Is the Orthodox Church Pentecostal?” you can answer, confidently, that indeed Orthodoxy is Pentecostal, but so is all of humanity, and so is all Creation. Whether or not an individual wants to be enfolded into that Uncreated Fire of the Holy Spirit is up completely to him or her. At least for now.

But who would want to miss any moment of that Comfort of Two Comforters, that beautiful goodness and truth, that unshakeable knowledge that God is Father to us all?

Welcome to Pentecost, which with Pascha, is the most important day of the year.