What better way to spend the Pentecost weekend than celebrating God, the Holy Spirit? Without presuming that everyone understands the doctrine of Trinity 三位一體 {san1-wei4-yi4-ti3}, please allow me, a layman, to briefly repeat what we believe about Holy Spirit, in case anyone needs to interpret messages about Him on the spot.
The God we believe in is one God existing in three distinct persons 位格: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. By “person”, we don’t mean “human” in a contemporary way, but personhood in a generic sense. The three persons are not the same as each other, however, they are God, in one.
Holy Spirit is also called simply the Spirit, or Spirit of God. You may also have heard people referring to Him, (yes, Him, not it), as Holy Ghost. That, my friends, shouldn’t be a cause for your concern. The word choice comes from the King James Version, which uses Shakespeare-era English that predates any modern connotation of the word “ghost”. You can find many words in KJV that mean very different things back then than what we now understand. For example, “bowel” used to also mean “heart” during that time, which is why Song of Solomon 5:4 says, very romantically I might add, “my bowels were moved for him.”
Okay, let’s move on…
Pentecost 五旬節 {wu3-xun2-jie2} quite literally means “the fiftieth day” in Greek. Why 50, you ask? During the very first Pentecost detailed in Acts 2:1, the disciples hadn’t experienced the downpour of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost wasn’t even a thing, yet. They only knew that day as the celebration of the Jewish festival Shavuot 七七節 {qi1-qi1-jie2}, or Feast of Weeks, which was first instituted for thanksgiving for the harvest, and then for the giving of Torah. Shavuot is celebrated 7 weeks after the first day of Passover. So, 7 x 7 + 1 = 50.
Ever since the Upper Room event that happened on the Shavuot that year, that day was known as Pentecost to commemorate a different cause from Shavuot. The dating of it also changed to the 50th day from Easter Sunday rather than Passover (they are very close though). As a result, Pentecost was no longer coupled to Passover.
Upper Room 馬可樓 {ma3-ke3-lou2} was where Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples on Pentecost. Its proper name is Cenacle [SE-nuh-kuhl], derived from Greek and Latin words that mean “upper room”, so you will not be wrong to simply call it Upper Room.
Interestingly, the Chinese name literally means “Mark’s Building”, quite different from “upper room” if you have been paying attention. The story goes that the Upper Room was one of John Mark’s real estate properties, although that story is more archaeological than theological so I will not stake my life on it.
With that, you should be ready to interpret most of the messages about the Holy Spirit. But more importantly, let us always be filled with the Spirit and not just knowledge, for what’s better than a living God living in us? Finally, let’s look at how to interpret some of the gifts of the Spirit: 1 Co 12:8-11
智慧的言語 word of wisdom
知識的言語 word of knowledge
辨別諸靈 discerning of spirits
說方言 (speaking in) tongues
翻方言 interpretation of tongues
Photo by Joshua Eckstein on Unsplash