Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church
1948 The Alameda
San Jose, CA 95126
San Jose, CA 95126
Each year the church celebrates the feast of Pentecost, re-narrating the "birth" of the church in the power of the Holy Spirit. We have largely forgotten, however, that the roots of Pentecost are agricultural - and thus unavoidably social and economic. Pentecost was the name Greek-speaking Jews in antiquity gave to the biblical festival of Shavuot ("Feast of Weeks"), because it came 50 days after Passover. According to Exodus 23:16, Shavuot was a harvest commemoration:
You shall observe the festival of harvest, of the first fruits of your labor, of what you sow in the field. You shall observe the festival of ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in from the field the fruit of your labor.
In ancient Israel the grain harvest lasted seven weeks (Deut.l6:9), beginning with harvesting barley during Passover and ending with harvesting wheat. Shavuot was the concluding festival of the grain harvest, just as Sulekoth (Feast of Tabernacles) was the concluding festival of the fruit harvest. After the Exile, however, Shavuot became more of a commemoration of the giving of Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai; this is how it still is celebrated in synagogue today.
In Leviticus, the liturgical calculations for Shavuot are explicitly connected with the Jubilee:
This suggests that Shavuot meant to remind Israel that the ethos of Sabbath Economics wealth redistribution applied at each harvest, not just every 50 years! Jeremiah understood the connection: he condemned the wealthy classes of his time because they neglected the Shavuot festival of grace and oppressed the poor (Jer 5:24-28). Luke's Acts narrative of Pentecost, too, re-habilitates the Jubilee implications of Shavuot-when the Spirit descends, wealth is redistributed and the "economics of enough" realized (Acts 2:44-47). May our churches and synagogues recover this Shavuot / Pentecost tradition, that the "harvest of justice may be sown in peace" (Jas 3:18)!