The Economics of Pentecost (or, the Spirit Is Not a Capitalist)
No matter where we turn—politics, economy, war trauma, refugees from conflict and climate change, ecology—“Arrr-rrr-ggghhh!” expresses lots of what we feel. It’s not an uplifting spirit. Not at all. Okay, but on May 15, thousands of Christian congregations will be talking about the Holy Spirit as an empowering spirit. It’s the feast of Pentecost.So, my question to people of all faiths, “Can we put our trust in the Divine Spirit to transform or transcend such spirits as the spirit of capitalism, the spirit of nationalism, the spirit of darkness—the dis-spiriting spirits of the age?”
On Pentecost Sunday, thousands of Christians read Acts 2 in the New Testament. Mostly, the focus is on the outpouring of the Spirit apart from the economic significance. But the Spirit is an economist—one, incidentally, not promoting capitalism.
The Feast of Pentecost (now called Shavout in the Jewish calendar) was one of three pilgrimage festival in the first century, the other two being Passover and Sukkuth. A pilgrimage festival mandated that able-bodied Jews went to Jerusalem. It generated a huge social event in the city as people came from diverse sectors of the Roman Empire to observe the feast.
Its social value was increased by its economic significance in that it was a festival concluding the harvest of grains. Barley harvesting began at Passover; wheat harvesting concluded 50 days later with the Feast of Weeks (also Pentecost and Shavout). As a harvest festival in an agrarian society, its economic importance was on everyone’s mind, whether the seven weeks of the grain harvest had been good or not.
Luke maximizes this economic content in how he presents what follows. Remember, Luke has already given us the story of Jesus framed in the economics of Sabbath and Jubilee. In that story Luke first presented Jesus bringing himself to people publicly in his hometown synagogue. There, among the people who knew him as a boy, Jesus claimed the Jubilee vision of Isaiah (61:1-2 and 58) as his own. Like Isaiah, he felt “in the Spirit” to bring good news to the poor and release to the captives by living a year acceptable to the Lord. The political, social, and economic impact of what he said was not missed by his hearers who, first, were amazed. But, then, they recognized its radicality. To do jubilee was to initiate rebellion. They weren’t ready to go there. So they turned on Jesus, wanting to throw him over a cliff.
Now Luke, with a similarity that is not accidental, gives us the story of the Holy Spirit in his second volume. Again, he emphasizes economics and the necessity of the Spirit to empower living the jubilee economics. The Spirit that came upon Isaiah, and that came upon Jesus at his baptism, now came upon the gathered followers. The multilingual, multiethnic crowd gathered in Jerusalem became astonished and excited one morning when they found they could hear one another in their own language.
This prompted Peter to speak up and interpret what everyone was experiencing. He courageously connected that moment’s events with their Scriptures. “Had not their prophet Joel” Peter opined, “envisioned such moments as they were experiencing?” It was the Spirit of God empowering all of them to live in the jubilee way of Jesus. Peter testified that though Jesus had been killed for his radical jubilee life, he had been raised. And the same Spirit of Yahweh that had been on him was now on them all. Jesus was not the Messiah in so far as advancing the monarchy of David to politically counter Rome; but he was the Messiah in so far as he embodied the Divine Consciousness that the Spirit was empowering them to live. Their lives were to be shaped by a Spiritual Consciousness that exhibited a viable, powerful alternative to how their lives had been shaped by Rome and Temple. Rome was the political and military expression of “empire religion” and the Temple was the religious and legal expression of it.
What Peter said sounded like a more comprehensive and basic change than the people listening could fathom doing. It’s much like us. We wonder what we can do when we’re scrambling to make a living under the rule of governments, cartels, and corporations that operate outside of the law, yet they give too little attention to the ecological catastrophes that cause us asthma, water shortages, dwindling species, climate disasters, and more. So the people replied to Peter, “Give us some guidelines. What shall we do?”
Peter said, “Change your way of thinking; think in the paradigm of creation instead of the paradigm of empire!” Peter uses the word metanoia, which in Greek means to get beyond our current way of thinking. Peter also urged them to ritually enact their metanoia. The water ritual of baptism could wash away empire thinking and clean out space for creation’s alternatives. And by being baptized in the name of Jesus the Christ, the washing water was like an anointing of Divine Consciousness.
By washing away the thinking shaped by Rome and Temple, and by being anointed with Divine Consciousness, they would be released from the oppression they’d been living under and become part of a sharing, cooperating, jubilee community.
It worked! Many shifted their allegiance that very day. Inspiration of the Spirit had them daring to believe they did have the capacities of the new consciousness. Thinking differently, they didn’t put any energy into whether or not the Roman world would ever change. They just began to meet in one another’s homes every day and encouraged one another to make jubilee real. People of difference class and color shared meals. Money was no longer primarily about private use or accumulation; it became a community thing. Instead of the Roman economy which redistributed money upward from people with less to people with more, they began living small, local jubilee economies that reversed the direction of redistribution and reduced the emphasis on ownership. They were making the economics of the Holy Spirit happen, as we can today.
(Note: Pentecost is also about the re-reading of the Torah and renewing the covenant between Yahweh and the community. But that will have to wait for another day.)
