Numbers 11:26 Two men had stayed back in the camp; one was called Eldad and the other Medad. The spirit came down on them; though they had not gone to the Tent, their names were enrolled among the rest.
Acts 2: 11 They have been drinking too much new wine
1 Corinthians 12:4 There is a variety of gifts but always the same Spirit.
John 7:39 He was speaking of the Spirit which those who believed in him were to receive.
The conviction that sometime quite close to the Resurrection, the Christian community received a special gift of the Spirit is a constant in the New Testament writings. I think it is appropriate to assume that this experience is only loosely connected to the doctrinal affirmations which describe the work of the Holy Spirit as the Third Person in the Trinity of Being as Christians have come to understand the dynamic powers of God. As I have tried to suggest with these texts relating to the experience of the Spirit, there is clearly a lot going on in both historical, cultural and psychological terms which resists any attempt to enclose them in a single, consistent definition.
The events described in the Book of the Numbers suggest that Spirit worked as it willed and resisted the attempts of Israel to limit its experience to specially selected persons who were brought into the tent of meeting. The effects of possession were called prophecy and must be separated from the work of the great and lesser prophets such as the Isaiahs, Amos or Jeremiah. I suspect that prophets in this more primitive sense were enthusiasts whose behavior was clearly distinguishable from the more regular religious posture. Their experience was vivid reminder of Jahweh’s power to charge a person with visions of life yet unrealized. It is probable that the speaking in tongues technically called glossolalia was one of the common manifestations of this possession. I think that it is generally agreed that the sounds which come forward are not language in the accepted meaning of the words - namely having an organized syntactical structure which enables others to understand and thus “speak”the same language. What is of particular importance in placing this experience is that it represents a genuine and probably universal manifestation of religious fervor. It is testimony to the complexity of our humanness -which makes for the possibility of life conceived as a multi-dimensional experience no matter its cultural or language setting. There are also at best, only limited conclusions which can be drawn from the event since it can be only described since these utterances are noises that defy rational language structure. On the other hand it seems that being moved by the spirit remained a part of the Israelite religious tradition though it became replaced most of the time by the prophetic word which was not altogether without spiritual visions as depicted by the first Isaiah or Jeremiah. But in these cases issued in very specific content that was expressed according to the rules of Hebrew grammar and syntax enriched by the potential of figures of speech such as metaphor which took the experience beyond the regular limits of language
It would not be surprising then that the followers of Jesus would have some basic awareness of the work of the Spirit. According to John, in one of his post resurrection appearances with his disciples (20: 18-23) Jesus quite specifically tied his ongoing presence with the gift of the Spirit and associated the Spirit with the power to forgive sins - though I would like to think that this particular “power”represents the later interests of the 2nd century church and as we shall see, there is more immediate evidence to suggests a less ecclesiastical understanding of the work of the Spirit. The other point to notice is that John does not associate the coming of the Spirit with the gathering on the Jewish feast of Pentecost but with the forty days before the Ascension.
This brings us to Luke and Acts where the great gathering of the community for Pentecost becomes the occasion for the coming of the Spirit in a quite spectacular manner. The text is quite unclear from the point of view of what actually happened. Here I resort to the classical interpretation by Kirsopp Lake:*
The facts would be adequately covered if it were supposed that the original source ran “...and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues, as the spirit gave them utterance, and when this voice arose, the populace came together, and they were all astonished and perplexed, one saying to another, ‘What does this mean?’ But other jeered and said, ‘They are full of sweet wine.’”
Under this rubric, what we have is a classical instance of glossolalia which made sense to those who knew in a non-linguistic way what was going on but could easily provoke the scepticism which Luke records. However, Luke clearly shies away from such an understanding and instead suggests that those gathered in this place were rewarded with an ability to communicate in the languages understood by the myriad of traditions represented in the crowd. The story then represents the effects of Pentecost as providing the sense of Power which directed those to make known to everyone the Good News of Jesus resurrection. In this sense, the Gospel represents a common understanding of human need and its fulfillment in what we would call today religious terms and every language known is capable of expressing this possibility. Thus in reading one of the lessons today in French we acknowledge that universal faith which all language has the possibility of sharing. Interestingly, while glossolalia continues to be make its appearance within the church, it is not regarded by Paul as of major significance in so far as discerning the presence of the Spirit within the Christian community.
In his letter to the church at Corinth, he outlines a list of signs of the Spirit which clearly become discernable and measurable with the normal tools of human language. There is a point he seems to be saying where we must insist upon a rational ground for our faith and action. He is, of course speaking about a sense of “proof” that is not a challenge to contemporary science but rather a claim that the multi-dimensionality of life requires an ability to give reasons for what we say and do. The content or gifts of the Spirit become the direction to life given in the ministry of one Jesus of Nazareth. Without this direction the spirit is indeed dumb, only meaningless babble, so that we must as Paul insists look for the gifts which become accessible as Jesus made God - through what he said and did..
There is also a curious irony present within the life invoked by the Spirit. It is incredibly materialistic in the sense that it is grounded in real acts and material. It leads us back into the world of poverty, disease and the injustices which failure to commit to their amelioration furthers. Life in the Spirit brings about a confrontation with evil which challenges anyone who would look the other way. For example, in many ways, this materialistic turn of Christianity is what separates it from Islam. The Muslim Jesus is hard to recognize because he is so unreal - he is depicted as a miracle worker resurrected and ascended but never dead. But the change that brings Jesus followers into eternal life happens in this world and so the way which he opens is one based on talk leading to understanding and reconciliation not war.
Finally, let me go out on a bit of a limb - you can judge whether it is just too much sweet wine. The community which the Spirit empowered is not necessarily synonymous with the ecclesiastical entity which we call the church if by this we mean that the power structure is to be preserved above all else (as distinguished from its power). Ironically, the Church invented the bureaucracy and procedures upon which the modern world even in its secular forms functions. The present result of this inheritance is that the economic orientation be it free market or central planning is not the source of our current nightmare but the separation which both power structures creates between citizen and decision maker..We could site Enron, Macdonald’s or the Quebec health ministry as ready examples. What does this have to do with the Spirit and the Church? Divorced as we are now from the stations of power It behooves catholic ( with a small “c” including orthodoxy Christianity) to find a new model of functional structure which reflects as did its original, the power generated by the coming of the Spirit. There is an historic model of what not to do, at least now. When the coming of the Spirit was translated into the coming of the Third Person of the Trinity as it were a monster was created whose survival depended upon an alliance between church and state and the administrative control required to insure that this elaborate legal and philosophic fiction could be maintained. What other form could this community now find? I thought that the presence of the Spirit was what this is all about.
*Beginnings of Christianity, London, 1920-1933, V, 119
The Rev. Roger A. Balk, Ph.d.