Pentecost and the New Temple

The following is an extract from N. T. Wright’s sermon at the Eucharist on the Feast of Pentecost, June 8 2003 entitled New Law, New Temple, New World based upon Acts 2.1-21; John 15.26-16.15. Regarding Acts 2 he states:

Luke is also telling this story so as to echo stories about the Temple.

When Solomon built the Temple and dedicated it, it was filled with the cloud which veiled God’s presence. The priests couldn’t stand there, because God’s glory filled the whole house. One of the most famous moments in subsequent Temple history came when the prophet Isaiah saw the Lord, YHWH himself, in the Temple; the foundations of the thresholds shook and the house was filled with smoke. Ezekiel’s vision of the restored Temple climaxes in the glory of the Lord returning to the house, sweeping in from the east with the sound of many waters, illuminating all the earth with its glory. Many, many first-century Jews, though continuing to worship in the Jerusalem Temple, lamented the fact that this still hadn’t happened. The Temple seemed a place of memory and imagination rather than the vivid reality spoken of by the prophets.
But now Luke, telling the story of the day of Pentecost, tells it in terms that would awaken these old stories of God filling the Temple with his glorious presence. The rushing of a violent wind filled the house where the apostles were sitting, and flaming tongues of fire came to rest on each of them. That phrase is so well known that we lose, perhaps, its immediate and vivid force. Imagine a dragon with a red, fiery tongue reaching out to lick you. Then imagine that the dragon is just outside the window and as its tongue reaches through it turns into a dozen tongues and everyone in the room is being licked with fire. That’s the picture. And Luke, writing the story, wants us to think: this is the glory of the Lord coming back to fill the Temple! This is the pillar of cloud and fire coming to lead the people through the wilderness! This is the restoration we’ve all been hoping for!

Watch what happens as a result. The Old Testament prophets spoke of the day when God would restore Israel’s fortunes, when he would cleanse and rebuild the Temple, when he would come back to Zion in glory. On that day, they said, the nations would flock to Zion to hear the word of the Lord. When the Temple was renewed, God’s power and grace would reach out and summon people from every nation under heaven. Yes, says Luke, and that’s precisely what’s happening: Parthians, Medes, Elamites and all the rest, all coming to Jerusalem to hear God’s word. All right, they’re all Jews living in those countries. The actual Gentiles come later in the story. But the symbolic point is clear. Pentecost wasn’t just the fulfilling and renewing of Torah. It was the fulfilling and renewing of the Temple. The apostles are constituted as the new, true Temple: not now a building of stone and timber, of bricks and mortar, but as a community of living, breathing, worshipping human beings. Just as in Judaism the Law and the Temple belong closely together, so now at Pentecost the renewed Law and the renewed Temple belong even more closely together. Both of them speak of men, women and children whose lives are being transformed by the living presence and power of the one true God.