8th June 2025

8th June 2025, Pentecost - David Matthews

Readings: Genesis 1.1-13; John 20.19-23

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord. Amen

‘and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters’

It’s a powerful, brooding image. But there is another account of the creation, of course, which we are familiar with. It’s the opening of John’s Gospel: “…in the beginning was the Word. He was in the beginning with God and without him not one thing was made. Each account is serving a different purpose, written at different times for different audiences. The Genesis account (and there is a variation of this in Chapter 2) was intended for the Jewish people, giving them their own Creation story to set against all the creation myths that belonged to neighbouring Middle Eastern civilizations. John’s – a far more spiritual and enigmatic account was written for the early Christians, with the explicit purpose of establishing Jesus’ eternal significance.

Perhaps it was a sense of possible tension between these two accounts – in Genesis and John – that nudged modern translators (The new revised and New Jerusalem versions of the Bible are two examples) to tell of a wind from God rather than his Spirit, sweeping across the face of the waters. The Hebrew word ruah can mean either. Maybe the 20th century translators chose the meteorological rather than ethereal meaning to avoid any suggestion that it was the Spirit rather than the Word active at creation.

We must not forget that every English Bible is a translation and that the original texts were themselves constrained by human language, often struggling to put into words truths that transcend human understanding, but that must not stop us from responding sensitively to the texts we have inherited.

For me, the words used in these opening verses in Genesis are profoundly powerful. Not only do they attempt to describe the original act of creation (much more effectively to my mind than the phrase’ The Big Bang’) they also reach forward, through tracts of Jewish history to that moment billions of years later when Jesus breathed on his disciples. And, far from knotting us up wondering precisely which of the persons of the Trinity were involved in the act of creation, the choice of the word ‘spirit’ rather than ‘wind’ to move across the face of the waters actually leads us deeper into the significance of creation and its sequel.

Trinity. Father, Son and Spirit. Three in One. One in Three. The Trinity is a mystery – another of those truths where we have to accept that language is barely adequate. But however we want to unpack these divine dimensions, we can still see that they are all here in the beginning.

Whether we call it a wind from God or the Spirit of God, the Hebrew word used to describe its movement, rachaph,  is the same word that is used to describe the way a bord flutters or hovers/ And although the word is, I gather, applied more often to an eagle, surely the bird imagery must take us to the description of the dove that is present at Jesus’s baptism.

At the moment of creation, we see the spirit hovering or fluttering over the face of the waters. The Hebrew word for ‘face’ is derived from a verb, panah, which means ‘to turn’ or ‘to face’. We face something when we engage with it. Our face is the most expressive, dynamic part of our body. At the moment of creation we have a physical reference; the waters face the creator as the spirit hovers over them. We can imagine the flat surface ruffling; there is movement, there is energy. It has begun.

The language of these opening verses also ripples with energy. This is a dynamic moment and held within it are references to God the Creator, images of a hovering, bird-like spirit and a physical quickening. It pulses with echoes of the Trinity and yet this account was written thousands of years before Jesus walked the earth. The writing is heavy with significance – and we’re not even half-way through Day One of Creation!

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Let’s go back to the word ruah, translated as ‘spirit’ or ‘wind’. It is also, in other contexts, translated as ‘breath’. There is no doubting that this word has layers of meaning. It suggests that, by using it, the priestly scribes of Judaism wanted their readers to understand that creation was bursting with life, with a great fluttering of metaphorical wings, and a dynamic, creating breath. And thousands of years later, we cannot fail to make the link to John’s creation account where in the beginning was the Word. The Word. What is a dynamic word without a breath to give it utterance?

The connections continue. In the second creation account, in Genesis chapter 2 verse 7, God breathes the breath of life into Adam, the first man. The Hebrew word for breath here is neshamah, It is significant that the Greek translators of the Old Testament used this word, neshamah, to describe both God breathing life into Adam and Jesus breathing on his disciples, which we had described in the second reading. Now the connection with the origins of human life and the re-creation of humankind after Jesus’s saving ministry becomes apparent. A deliberate link is forged through the translators’ inspired work. And we can start unpacking the significance of this link.

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To breathe on something is to exhale. The creator breathes out. The created, the creature, breathes in. The rhythm of life is thereby established. But how does this connect to the events we commemorating today, at Pentecost?

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I think we are recognising the continuum from creation to salvation. The gift of life transforms into the gift of the spirit. Onto mortality is grafted something transcendent. We heard in the second reading how Jesus links his bestowal of the spirit to the forgiveness of sins: that which gets in the way of a closer union with God can be dissolved. And his disciples are granted this agency. Activating the spirit in them, obliges them to interact with others in a dynamic way, bringing these others closer to God.

Nearly fifty days pass between Jesus breathing on his disciples, behind closed doors, and the events at Pentecost. The apostles were again gathered together when there came the sound like a rushing wind – we note the association – and divided tongues, as of fire, rested upon each of them.

The apostles began to speak and, amazingly, those who heard them heard their own language. The barriers of language no longer existed. The only obstacle to understanding was one of attitude: some people sneered and dismissed what they were hearing as the ravings of drunks.

Back in Genesis we learned in Chapter 11 that, when humankind had one language, they used it to challenge God by co-operating to build a tower with its top in the heavens. It was a monstrous vanity project. Self-aggrandisement was their motive. Now, at Pentecost, in the centre of Jerusalem, people from all corners of the known world have a chance to hear a message of love and salvation from God. The curse of babel has been – if only for one morning – reversed. We have a glimpse of how things can be – even with the sneering cynics on the sidelines – when all humankind is united in clarity of understanding. The only obstacle to understanding is a smug superiority. Language barriers need not be insurmountable. In fact, as we have seen  just by dipping into different translations our understanding can be enriched by crossing these linguistic boundaries. We are faced with various perspectives, all worth considering. We are obliged to step out of our own silo and look at the world as others, who have grown up in another culture, or from a radically different background, see it. The ego becomes less dominant. We mature.

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However, with all this exploration of words, it's interesting that at the heart of effective counselling we do not find talk; we find listening, silence, a space to think. A counsellor may ask a question but they rarely propose a solution or course of action. They understand that words, for all their multi-spangled brilliance, can carry too much baggage: misunderstanding or confusion or complications can ensue which for a vulnerable person may be harmful or counter-productive.

The counsellor listens and waits, projecting positive affirmation in their mute body-language. And the counselled ponders and considers and lets the tangle gradually unravel.

We live in a world with too many unconsidered words. Chattering. Twittering. Commenting. Posting, pasting, liking all the social media detritus that we can allow ourselves to be burdened by. Words, words, words.

And although in the beginning was the Word, it was not our Word. It was not even a word shared by all, but lost when the Tower of Babel collapsed and we fell to babbling.  And there’s the significance. God’s first exhalation, when his Spirit ruffled the face of the waters, when the wind of creation first blew, was a Word, the Divine Logos. And it is in John’s Gospel, and throughout the New Testament, that we are told the Word is embodied in Jesus. He is the Word. He is God revealed. That is why he was there at the beginning in that first exhalation. This is extraordinary, mind-bending stuff. It means nothing less than God revealing himself to humankind through Jesus was the plan from the very start. The continuum from creation to salvation is knitted into the whole scope of creation.

God breathed on the moulded dust of the earth and made a human being in his own image. He breathed out. Humankind breathed in. Jesus breathed out upon his disciples. They breathed in. They were literally inspired.

And so it falls to us that, as we breathe in, we too should be inspired. And that cannot be a passive reaction. We must feel and heed the nudge, the guidance, the activation.

We may wonder how we can ever hear God’s word when we are bombarded by some many rattling, cackling, trivial, troublesome, noisy, niggling, rumbling words?

Isn’t this when we must remind ourselves that prayer is primarily about listening or, as it has been described, being ‘on receive’ rather than ‘transmit’. And to do that, we need to seek out those still places and focus sometimes on the simple (simple?!) act of breathing, simply remembering perhaps that we are here because God breathed out and we breathed in, that the whole of life is circular.

From God and back to God, from God and back to God and somewhere, in between the first and the last, we must settle, find ourselves, and seek inspiration for how we may be what God has created us for.

Breathe on me, Breath of God

Fill me with life anew,

That I may love what thou dost love,

And do what thou wouldst do.

Beathe on me, Breath of God,

Until my heart is pure,

Until with thee I will one will,

To do and to endure.

Breathe on me, Breath of God,

Blend all my soul with thine,

Until this earthly part of me

Glows with thy fire divine.

Breathe on me, Breath of God,

So shall I never die,

But live with thee the perfect life

Of thine eternity.

Edwin Hatch 1835-89 David Matthews