Taken by storm

Pentecost versus the Machine

In the beginning, Genesis tells us, God's Spirit, His breath, His wind (the Hebrew ruach means all of those things) gusted across the waters, bringing form and order to chaos. But man tried to take God's power into his own hands, in the form of the forbidden fruit. We were meant to continue the work of the Spirit, bringing order and harmony to creation. But instead, we proved as much a curse to the land as a blessing.

When humanity consorted with demons, it was enough: God withdrew the Spirit that held back the waters, withdrew the breath that gave life to all creatures, and let the floodgate open. Noah and his household and menagerie became the nucleus of a new creation. But soon enough, men tried to outwit and overpower God again. They tried to build a tower, to get above any more floods, and worse, to summon God down to obey them. I'm talking, of course, about the Tower of Babel.

You will find the ancient legend in Genesis 11, but it is filled out further in another book called Jubilees. This is not part of our Bible, though it is regarded as canon by Ethiopian Jews and Christians. When the Dead Sea scrolls were unearthed in midway in the last century, more copies of this Jubilees were found than most actual biblical books, which suggests that it was in widespread use around the time of Christ: it was most likely written shortly before 100 BC.

According to its telling, it was Nimrod, himself conceived through demonic rituals, who ordered the building of the tower. He used a new technology: the brick. Now, to Jewish listeners, that was a reminder of later events in their people's life, when they were slaves in Egypt baking bricks for the pyramids. And like the pyramids, the towers of Babylon – and Babylon is what "Babel" refers to – called ziggurats, are artificial mountains. That is because mountains, to ancient people, were holy places: places where earth and heaven meet.

The Garden of Eden was on a mountain – it had to be, if you think about it, because four rivers are said to have flowed down from it. This Edenic mountain was God's blueprint for creation. At the peak is the holiest point, the Tree of Life at its centre, a Holy of Holies which mortals cannot touch. Lower down is the Garden, paradise, where all dwell in harmony. And at the base is the world outside the garden, ready for cultivation.

God's command to man was to go out of the garden and make the rest of the world like it: in short, to make earth heavenly. But instead, man turned from God's will to his own, and his presence became one which corrupted creation, rather than perfecting it, as God intended.

The mistake of Babel was the same as the mistake made in Eden. Bab-el means "gateway to God" in the Babylonian language. The accusation against the Babylonians is that they wanted to build a new Eden by themselves, a copy of the holy mountain made by human artifice, so that they could call God down, tame Him, essentially take heaven by force. Nimrod wanted to unify the world under one man-made empire, all speaking one language, with himself in God's place. He wanted everything to be built up, technologised, controlled, everything the same: unity, yes, but by suffocating compulsion.

Does this sound at all familiar? A pattern repeated in human history?

We know God's response from Genesis. He gathers his angels and destroys the tower. But Jubilees' take (10:26) is interesting:

"And the LORD sent a mighty wind against the tower and overthrew it on the earth."

That wind again. It's the power of the Holy Spirit. In Jubilees' account, it is the Holy Spirit that breaks the Tower and scatters the nations, divides them by language, so that they cannot conspire to seize God's power. The Spirit sows division at Babel, because unity on man's terms instead of God's is a crushing uniformity.

At Babel, the Spirit's wind scatters and divides because humanity was forcing a false unity. But watch what happens when God initiates the unity instead.

Move forward around 1200 years to the Upper Room in Jerusalem. The wind enters; the flames of fire appear, like bishops' mitres over the Apostles' heads (the shape is not coincidental). The Spirit is upon them in wind and flame. It is Pentecost, seven weeks after Passover, when Jews from all over the known world come to Jerusalem to celebrate Moses receiving the Torah and to present first-fruits of their harvest. There were Jews of all shades of skin, speaking all sorts of languages in town that day.

The Apostles, now inspired – literally "inbreathed" – with the new life of the Spirit, go out and speak to them. And despite the bystanders' different languages, everyone can understand. The key part of the miracle is not so much the Apostles speaking several languages, but that each listener hears what they say in their own language.

Here is the perfect reversal of Babel: where Nimrod forced one language to control people, God preserves every language to bless them. Where Babel built up to drag God down, at Pentecost God comes down to lift humanity up. And this is the unity that God had planned for the nations. Not that they should all be identical, all speaking the same language, as though we were all forced to speak some artificial language like Esperanto, but rather that in their difference, preserving that difference, they might be one: even as God is one in His threeness and difference, as Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

The difference could not be starker. Babel represents humanity's way: building up through technology and force to seize heaven. Pentecost represents God's way: descending through grace to give what cannot be taken.

The Collect from the Prayer Book pulls the themes of Pentecost together:

GOD, who as at this time didst teach the hearts of thy faithful people, by the sending to them the light of thy Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgement in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through the merits of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Holy Spirit taught the Apostles right judgement, the right reading of the Scriptures, to show that it is by God's gift alone that we can come to the unity with Him and one another which He wills. None of our own artificial mountains, our utopian political regimes, our attempts to penetrate the heavens with rockets, or to force our way into the spiritual realm with information superhighways and godlike artificial intelligences – none of these things can take us back to Eden. At best, they are weak simulacra; at worst, idols which enslave those who make and worship them.

No: God chooses the mountains He wants us to climb. In God's time, He chose His own mountains – Sinai for the Law, Sion for the Temple, Tabor for the Transfiguration, and finally Golgotha, where through the merits of Christ Jesus our Saviour, by His Sacrifice on the Cross, He undid the curse of Adam, and freed us from sin and death. He chose the mountain for His Ascension, lifting up our humanity to the Godhead. And now on Whitsunday, the divine Wind, blowing where it wills, sweeps through Sion again, no longer confined to the Temple but settling in the hearts of the disciples, so that they might fulfil the task we were made for: bringing heaven to earth. Not by our will or contrivance, but by God's.

And that, St Luke reports, is what they did:

They continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.

This is where we find true union - not in Nimrod's crushing uniformity, but in God's unifying harmony. Not by storming heaven with our artificial mountains, but by receiving heaven in simple bread and wine. The choice before every generation is the same: will we build another Babel, or will we gather in the Upper Room? Will we trust in our technological towers, or in God's grace, coming down freely on us like a dove?

Here, now, in the breaking of bread, God gives His answer. Through these humble gifts, the divine Wind still blows, the holy Fire still burns, and heaven still comes to earth, bringing us Communion with God through the movement of the spheres, the produce of the seasons, the work of human hands, the common feast together – not by our striving, but by the gift of the harmonious Word who orders all creation.