There’s a conventional, and quite beautiful hermeneutic of the Pentecost narrative in Acts 2 that goes something like this:
In Genesis 11, there is a primal myth about humanity which explains the presence of many different languages. In this early primordial time before written history (so the story goes) humans settled at a place called Shinar and built a city. They learned to make bricks, and they used those bricks to build a city and a tower. They wanted the tower to reach to the sky. So God (who, of course, lived in the sky) came down to have a look and became worried. If they could build this city and tower, what might they do next? So God confused their language and scattered them around the world, and they stopped building the city. And the ruin was referred to as Babel, from the Hebrew balal meaning to jumble or confuse.
But then, thousands of years later, God came to earth again in the person of Jesus. After his death, resurrection and ascension, God’s presence was presence was felt in Jerusalem on the Jewish festival of Shavuot. On this occasion, people were gathered from all over the known world. But, even though people all spoke different languages, they could understand one another completely. Acts 2 is thus the reversal of the Babel story.
The hermeneutic of these two stories usually goes on to talk about how the Holy Spirit breaks down barriers between people, and unites us as one humanity under God. It’s a great interpretation and I have delivered that material dozens of times.
But not today.
Today, I want to invite you into the shadow side of the story. In particular, I want to invite you to reflect on whether the abolition of language barriers is as good we make out, and whether the story of ‘one humanity’ that I and many others trumpet merits some criticism.
The abolition of language has always been the tool of occupiers and colonisers. In the 1830s, national schools were established in Ireland in which the tuition was in English and Irish was expressly banned. After independence in 1922, Irish language was encouraged by the state, but by then English proficiency was absolutely vital to get ahead, so even today the Irish language is not the primary language of Ireland. The damage had been done.
Here in the land we now call Australia, the majority of indigenous languages have been lost. Even as recently as fifty years ago, assimilationist policies aimed to foster fluency in English only, and Aboriginal children in ‘mission’ schools were punished for speaking in the language of their family. Children in Arnhem Land today are typically fluent in more than three languages, but those who don’t speak English are widely perceived by other Australians (who speak only one language) as crude and uncivilised.
The Pentecost narrative in Acts 2 in set in around the year 30. The narrative was written down around forty years later. During this time, the indigenous Aramaic of the Jews in Palestine, while still used in daily speech, was superseded by the Greek required for commerce and the Latin required to advance in the Roman empire. Hebrew was preserved as a scholarly language, in order read the Hebrew scriptures. But Hebrew was not routinely spoken as people’s first language until the foundation of the modern nation of Israel in 1948. Part of the development of Israel as an independent nation carved out of the British-occupied Palestine was to recreate Modern Hebrew as a living language – which has involved creating new Hebrew words for ‘helicoptor’ and ‘psychology’. Many older Jewish Israelis never learned Hebrew, preferring to converse in European languages or Yiddish. So, for more than two thousand years, the native language of Jews was stifled.
So what happens when we approach the text of Acts 2 with some of that knowledge as our prism? Language equals culture and identity. Suppression of language is a form of assimilation which gives power over another. Control of language solidifies authority.
So is this a story about how the Kingdom of God means one language, and the presence of the Holy Spirit unites everyone as one people? Or might there be something darker and more seditious going on?
Have a look at this map. It’s a map of all the homelands mentioned in the Acts 2 story. The people gathered in Jerusalem are from all over the Roman Empire, Roman client kingdoms, and the Parthian Empire. Every single place that is mentioned is a place that is under the sway of an occupier or coloniser. Even the visitors from Rome are not Romans per se – they are diaspora Jews and people seeking to convert to Judaism. Everyone gathered in Jerusalem lives under the heel of the Empire. And when we read the text carefully, we discover that they did not all start to speak the same language. No! They began to hear Jesus’ disciples speaking in their own native language. The Libyan heard the disciples speaking in their berber dialect. The Nabatean heard the disciples speaking in their Western Aramaic dialect. The Cretan heard the disciples in the Cretan dialect of Greek, not just the koine Greek that everyone knew.
So, if we read the text and map carefully, we discover that after Jesus’ followers have an ecstatic experience of wind and fire indoors, a gathering of oppressed peoples in a Roman-occupied city suddenly hear followers of an executed peasant speaking to them about God’s deeds of power in their own native language.
If we put ourselves inside the story for a moment, we might imagine what it feels like to hear a stranger speaking your own language. A language that has been marginalised. Not the language of commerce and politics, but your local tongue, the words that you share with your family and community. The language of your ancestors and your land.
And then we might begin to understand the seditious nature of this story. It is not merely a story of the reversal of Babel, as endearing as that interpretation might be. It is a story which exposes the priorities of the Holy Spirit, who comes with wind and fire, and speaks of God’s power to powerless pilgrims. The Holy Spirit’s power is not the power of empire and dominance, it is not the power of commercial control or military authority, it is the power of the ordinary and the local.
And it begs the question for us. When the Holy Spirit communicates with us today, whose language is she speaking?
The Lord Be With You