Some Whitsunthoughts

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. - Collect for Whitsunday, Book of Common Prayer

Today is the major Christian feast day that is traditionally known in English as Whitsunday or sometimes just Whitsun. It is more generally known as Pentecost but I prefer the traditional English name for two reasons. The first is aesthetic - it is far more charming and pleasant to the ear. The second reason has to do with precision. Pentecost, from the Greek word meaning fifty, denotes two distinct, although related, festivals in two distinct religions. It can refer to the Jewish Feast of Weeks, on the fiftieth day after the Jewish Passover, or it can refer to the Christian feast which falls on the fiftieth day after the Christian Passover, Pascha or Easter. The name Pentecost, therefore, requires an explanation of whether reference is being made to the Jewish or the Christian Feast. Whitsunday can refer only to the Christian Pentecost, just as Shabuot or Shavuoth can refer only to the Jewish Pentecost. (1)

The distinction between the two having been made it is important to observe their close relationship and to note similarities and differences. As St. Paul makes clear in the book of Hebrews, the Old Covenant, its sacrifices, and Tabernacle/Temple were shadows, types, and images of the New Covenant, the atoning sacrifice of Christ, and the heavenly Tabernacle not made with human hands. The relationship is not unlike that of the shadows depicting the visual world and the shadow casters depicting the Forms in Plato's famous allegory of the Cave. Not much is said in the New Testament about Christian feasts and festivals for the obvious reason that most - some would argue all - of the New Testament was completed prior to AD 70 when Rome sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. Up to that point Jewish Christians continued, to the extent that the Jewish authorities allowed this, to participate in the worship of Second Temple Judaism, whereas the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem had determined that Gentile converts to Christianity did not have to become Jews - be circumcised, eat kosher, follow the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, etc. - in order to be Christians. St. Paul's epistles, all except for Hebrews being written either to predominantly Gentile Churches or individuals such as Philemon and Bishops Timothy and Titus, stress the doctrine of Christian liberty. Little was written in this period about distinctly Christian patterns of worship common to Jewish and Gentile Christians alike, apart from the Gospel Sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, although it is evident from the Book of Acts that Christians had already begun holding meetings on the first day of the Week in remembrance of the Resurrection.

After AD 70, the worship of Second Temple Judaism ceased to be an option for Jewish Christians, because the Temple and everything that took place there was now gone, and they were persona non grata in the synagogues taught by rabbis who were increasingly hostile to Christianity. It now became important for the Church to develop its own distinctly Christian liturgical calendar for the use of all Christians. The earliest and most important of Christian feast days were Christmas and Easter. Both were established prior to the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, which was the first Ecumenical Council. The evidence suggests that the Church had begun celebrating December 25th as Christmas, calculating the date of Christ's birth through a logic that is internally consistent even if it rests on a somewhat questionable premise, long before Aurelian declared the Festival of Sol Invictus on the same date and that the latter was done to compete with the Church and not the other way around. While the major reason for the Council of Nicaea was to address the Arian heresy an important minor reason was to settle the controversy over the date of Easter.

In some cases the feasts appointed by the Church have a corresponding Old Testament feast and in some cases they do not. This itself illustrates the Apostolic and especially Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty - the Church under the New Covenant was not bound to either follow the Old Testament calendar or depart from it entirely. The feasts that do correspond to Old Testament feasts point back to events which their Old Testament counterparts pointed forward to, thus extending the principle of what St. Paul said in the epistle to the Hebrews. Christmas, although it occurs at approximately the same time as a major Jewish festival - Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, commemorating the rededication of the Temple after it was defiled by Antiochus Epiphanes in the events leading up to the Maccabean revolt - and one which was certainly kept by Jews in the time of Christ (John 10:22), must be counted as a Christian feast with no corresponding Old Testament feast. There is no record of Hanukkah being ordained by God in the Old Testament, even in the Septuagintal books which recount the events to which it points back, and there is no obvious thematic connection between the two feasts.

Easter, on the other hand, very much corresponds to the Old Testament Passover and, indeed, in most countries that do not speak a Germanic tongue is called by a name derived from the Greek word for Passover, Pascha. Here we see most clearly how the principles laid down by St. Paul in Hebrews can be extended in application to Old Testament feasts in relationship to Christian ones. Easter or Pascha is the Christian Passover. Every year in the period leading up to Easter, the Church's lexicons assign Old Testament readings from Genesis and Exodus that relate the events leading up to and including those the Jewish Passover commemorated, whereas the Gospel readings led up to and include the events which the old Passover pointed forward to and which the Christian Passover looks back to - the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which brought to the world deliverance from the spiritual bondage to sin, Satan, death, and hell which ancient Israel's literal bondage in Egypt signified.

Whitsunday is very much like Easter in this respect. The events it commemorates, which are related in the second chapter of Acts, took place on the Jewish Pentecost. The first time this feast is mentioned in the Bible is in the twenty-third chapter of Exodus. Here it is mentioned as the second of the three feasts each year when all Israelite males were commanded to appear before the Lord, which, when Israel was established, and the Temple built, translated into the requirement of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The other two were the Passover itself, and Sukkot or Succoth, the Feast of Tabernacles. Neither Shavuoth nor Succoth are referred to by these names yet, in this passage, but are called "the feast of harvest, the first-fruits of thy labours" and "the feast of ingathering, which is in the end of the year" respectively (v. 16). The pilgrimage requirement explains why Jerusalem was filled with people from all over the Mediterranean world speaking a myriad of languages in the second chapter of Acts. Later in the book of Exodus when the thrice annual assembly of the Israelites is mentioned again, it is called the "feast of weeks, of the first-fruits of wheat harvest" (34:22) but the name is not yet explained.

More detailed instructions with regards to this feast are found in the twenty third chapter of Leviticus and the sixteenth chapter of Deuteronomy. On the day following the first Sabbath of Passover, the day on which they were to first "put the sickle to the corn" (Deut. 16:9), the Israelites were to offer a sheaf of the first-fruits of the grain harvest as a wave offering, along with a number of accompanying offerings (Lev. 23:10-14). Note that the grain harvest in Palestine occurs at about the same time grain is planted in this part of the world. The grain harvest was the early harvest, the spring harvest, as opposed to the late or fall harvest of the fruit. Passover occurs in the month of Abib or Aviv, (2) later called Nisan, which roughly corresponds to late March and early April. The sheaf waved in the first-fruits offering during the week of Unleavened Bread was of barley, the first grain harvested. From this offering of the first-fruits, they were to count seven weeks. At this point in time the wheat was being harvested. Seven weeks are forty-nine days, and the day after the final Sabbath of the seven, would be the fiftieth day. On that morning, they were to offer a "new meat offering unto the LORD" ("meat" here means "wheat meal"), consisting of two leavened loaves of fine flour, along with a whole bunch of other offerings which are spelled out in Leviticus and the twenty eighth chapter of Numbers. These sacrifices made the gathering at the Tabernacle/Temple a practical requirement as well as a commandment in itself. The name of the feast in both Hebrew and Greek is derived from its calculation. The "weeks" are the seven weeks, the "fiftieth day" is the following day on which the Feast actually occurred.

Note that in the instructions in the Torah or Pentateuch itself, it is quite clear that the weeks begin on a Sunday, i.e., the day after the Jewish Sabbath which is Saturday, and that Pentecost would always fall on a Sunday too. This was still the case in the Book of Acts. Pentecost there fell on the Sunday that was the fiftieth day after the Resurrection, which occurred on the Sunday after the Passover, the day of the first-fruits wave offering. Rabbinic Judaism interprets the Torah differently. It now celebrates Shavuoth each year on the same calendar date, the sixth of Sivan which does not fall on Sunday each year and which is the fiftieth day, not counted from the day after the first Sabbath in Passover but from the Ides of Nisan, which is Passover day itself. The Talmudic rabbis justified this by interpreting the sabbath in Leviticus 23 as referring not to the weekly sabbath but to the Passover Day itself as a special day of rest. This interpretation seems forced, and the more obvious understanding of a period of seven weeks beginning on a "day after the sabbath" and ending on a "sabbath" is that the regular sabbath is in view. It is worth noting that the same rabbinic tradition that interprets the Feast of Weeks as falling on the sixth of Sivan also says that this was the day on which the Ten Commandments were handed down. This is not possible without torturing the meaning of the first verse of the nineteenth chapter of Exodus. While that verse does state that the Israelites arrived at Mt. Sinai on Sivan - the third month after leaving Egypt counted by the same method as that by which the Sunday of the Resurrection is counted the third day after the Friday of the Crucifixion, i.e., with Nisan/Friday being the first in the count - but the expression "self-same day" would indicate that it was the Ides of the month or possibly the day after, but at any rate well after the sixth. Furthermore, the Commandments were not given until Moses was summoned up the mountain after the glory of God descended upon it three days after their arrival - the seventeenth of the month at the earliest. Even a Pentecost calculated by the interpretation of Leviticus I have argued for, would at the latest place the feast on the eleventh of Sivan, (3) which is still earlier than Exodus allows the arrival at Mt. Sinai to be. The original association between Shavuot and the Ten Commandments was clearly due to the events occurring in the same month, and only later was it tortured into the idea that they occurred on the same day.

While the observations in the previous paragraph may tend to put the damper on those who like to preach sermons connecting the Old and New Testament Pentecosts through the parallelism of the coming of Law and Grace they do not affect the actual connection that is evident in the Scriptures themselves.

The idea of a grain harvest is the thematic connection between the two Pentecosts. Obviously, this theme was very literal with regards to the original Pentecost. In the second chapter of Acts we see the first-fruits offered to God from a different type of harvest. It was the Lord Jesus Christ Himself who drew the analogy. The ninth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel ends with Him going through the cities and villages, teaching and preaching, and healing people of their sickness and disease and, seeing the multitude coming to Him for these ministrations, saying to His disciples:

The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest. (vv. 37-38)

This leads directly to the commission of the twelve Apostles in the next chapter. Similarly, in the fourth chapter of St. John's Gospel, in speaking to His disciples after His encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well He says:

Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together . And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured and ye are entered into their labours. (vv. 35-38)

The harvest in both of these passages is a spiritual harvest, in which the fruit of the seed of the Word sown among the people who hear it is reaped in their coming to faith in Jesus as the Son of God and the Christ. In the second chapter of Acts we see the Apostles' reaping precisely this harvest when, after the Holy Ghost descends upon them in fulfilment of the promises of John 14:16-18; 15:26-27; 16:7-13 and Acts 1:8, they speak and are heard by each of their auditors in the multitude in their own tongue, and St. Peter delivers his first sermon calling upon them to turn in repentance and believe in the Christ Who was crucified and had risen, about three thousand so believed, and were baptized into the Church on that very day.

It is because of what happened on the first Christian Pentecost that they day has traditionally been one for baptisms and confirmations. Baptism is, of course, the first of the Gospel Sacraments, the ceremony in which one is initiated into the Christian faith, ritually cleansed, and made a member of the Church. Confirmation, which in the Eastern tradition occurs at the same time as baptism, is the extrascriptural name given to the very Scriptural practice, evident throughout the book of Acts, in which the Apostles, and later those succeeded them in the governance of the Church, lay their hands on the heads of the baptized and pray that the Holy Ghost would come upon them - which is where the association with Pentecost comes in. It is from the practice of holding baptisms on this day, and specifically the white robes traditionally worn by those about to be baptized as well as those doing the baptizing - that the day came to be called "White Sunday" or Whitsunday.

This year there will be few to no baptisms or confirmations on Whitsunday. Even if the Communist health apparatchiks loosened their unjust, totalitarian, evil and Satanic restrictions on the size of gatherings enough for us to obey God's commands and assemble together in Churches again, they would undoubtedly tell us that rituals involving tactile contact like baptism and confirmation could not take place. The only baptisms and confirmations that will take place today, therefore, will be where a bishop has made the courageous decision - one which would undoubtedly be condemned as "selfish" by professedly "Christian" writers such as Rod Dreher - to not render unto Caesar that which belongs to God.

Wherever such courage may be found, there will be seen the work of Him Who descended upon the disciples on the first Whitsunday, empowered them, and united them into the body of Christ which is the Church.

(1) That is, when it is used as the name of a single day. Since the word for "week" in Hebrew is identical to the number of days in a week, the word meaning "weeks" also means "sevens". This is the plural of the name of the Jewish Day of Rest, which simply bears the name of the number of the day of the week upon which it falls, "seven".
(2) The different spellings given for the Hebrew names of months and days reflect the difference between older and more recent rules for transliterating Hebrew into English, not two alternative Hebrew spellings. Obviously, however, whether spelled Abib or Aviv in English, it and Nisan - which can also be spelled with a double s - are alternative names for the same month. Aviv means "spring" in Hebrew and Nisan is a loan-word from Akkadian, dating to the Babylonian Captivity, meaning "first-fruit."
(3) If the 14th of Nisan falls on a Sunday, the first Sabbath in Passover Week would be the twentieth, making the day after the twenty-first. This being counted as the first day, there would be ten towards the fifty in Nisan, twenty-nine in the intervening month of Zif/Ziv or Iyar, leaving eleven for Sivan.