- Reading : 1 Peter 2:2-10 -
“2:2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation-
2:3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
The Pentecost we are approaching in the timeline of our lives, it is a destination where Pentecost is not only a milestone but a crossroad marking. According to The Hebrew Testament the ancient name of the Pentecost is Shavuot, which means the Feast of Weeks, literally, designating the waiting period between Easter and Pentecost. The Shavuot is also the celebration of the Wheat Harvest in Israel. But it is not only that but also the commemoration of the receiving the Bible (the Torah: the five books of Moses) on the Mount Sinai in the desert.
Thus the waiting period between Easter and Pentecost covers a journey of Israel, comprised of 49 days, seven weeks, when they escaped from Egypt , the house of slavery through the opened Red Sea, as they proceeded to the Mount Sinai.
From a Christian point of view we can say that it's a liturgical, celebrative journey from Easter throughout seven consecutive weeks to reach Pentecost. Nonetheless it's way more than that.
It is also a spiritual opportunity to evolve achieving spiritual merits, like higher wisdom, higher devotion, approaching God's presence closer and closer.
It is also a spiritual journey from the resurrected and ascended Jesus, who is in Heaven praying for the growth of our Faith, as we proceed to the Presence of God who gave the revelation, the very word of God to the people.
It is a part of a great circle, where the next part is the Journey not toward but from the Pentecost to Easter, from the receiving of the Word of God by the Holy Spirit to the Resurrection and the Ascension of Jesus.
There are physical journeys and spiritual journeys, and many times they overlap each other. We have a lifetime of journeying and it happens on Earth even when we never leave our hometown or when we cross the oceans or roam continental distances.
Whatever we do, meanwhile we love and hate, getting zealous or disappointed, being happy or depressed, acting generously or jealously, we tend to forget that the Earth is spinning around its axis everyday by 465 meters/second aka a supersonic 1675 km/hour which is literally faster than the speed of sound, every day and night non-stop.
The Earth is also speeding in the space orbiting the Sun with an approximate 100 thousand km per hour. We also tend to forget that also the Sun is orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy with an approximate speed of 825 thousand km per hour.
Sometimes our personal space is as small as a manger in a stable. Sometimes the place we inhabit regarding size and quality is like living in a tight cave. An enormous amount of people do not have a home at all, as even Jesus had to complain about it when :
19 A scribe came and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” 20 Jesus said to him, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Gospel of Matthew, chapter 8)
The nations, almost each and everyone, have their homeland, though some tribes and nations are denied by the mighty to have a state on their own homeland. Humanity populate the Earth, according to the creation order that announces it in the book of Genesis:
“27 God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them. God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Sometimes the space we live is a little town, yet when people leave them behind, usually they are painfully homesick for a long while, like they lost the paradise or at least their little universe, and they are right. Sometimes the space where we live is a metropolis like New York or Tokyo, unbelievable crowds of millions, and still many people are lonely, isolated, antisocial and alienated from each other.
We have to see through the boundaries of our bubbles we inhabit in order to get perspective of life and space. If we leave behind our bubbles, it is a good start to understand distances and spaces, when we realize that the perimeter of our Earth is 40 thousand km.
The distance from the moon is around 280 thousand km. The distance from the Sun is around 150 million km. The distance of the Sun from the center of our Galaxy and the huge black whole in the middle of it, is 27 thousand light-years.
The diameter of our Milky Way Galaxy is around 100 thousand light-years, as the light travels around 1 billion km per hour for a period of 100 thousand of years from one end to the other end of the galaxy. Our galaxy is comprised of around 200 billion stars and outside of our galaxy there are around two trillions of other galaxies in the observable universe.
The universe is so huge in space and distance that it is unperceivable for our tiny bubbles. Nonetheless, as it is required in the Bible, we have to elevate our spirits over our own boundaries to see the face of the Creator throughout the vastness of the creation.
Space and time bound together in Physics. Our human lifetime is not too long, we can admit that easily, as it is written in the book of Genesis that the Lord said, “My Spirit will not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; so his days will be one hundred twenty years.”
Although the early patriarchs like Adam himself, Methuselah and Enoch lived way more years than that, nowadays we might acknowledge that the ancient biblical estimation of the human lifespan was correct. We think that people, having their 100th birthday, are exceptional, having 120th birthday, are rare like a white buffalo, and we think they lived long. Thus we live not only a space bubble but in a time bubble as well. We can call it a journey, but we have to compare our timeline to the universal ones. We can count the life of the humanity in generations as it is written in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter one:
“17 So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen rgenerations; from David to the exile to Babylon fourteen generations; and from the carrying away to Babylon to the Christ, fourteen generations.”
The known or written or documented history of humanity is dealt by centuries or rather by millenia as the time just ran away since the flood even according to the Epic of Gilgamesh or the building projects of the pyramids.
Almost everything should be put in the right perspective which is almost always the broader picture that requires some time distance. The appearance of the human race, called Homo Sapiens occurred around 250 thousand years ago, and since then hardly anything happened, except that the Bible says that every single life or soul is an independent universe. How many wars and tears marked the human sufferings on Earth, Heavens knows only. The Bible sages maintained that if you can save a single life or soul it is as if you saved the whole world or at least one world out of the many.
Still the presence of the Homo Sapiens on Earth is almost just a last minute in the history of the globe when it is compered to the astronomical events. The oldest rocks on Earth are dated as 3.8 billion years. The age of the solar system is near 5 billion years; that of the Earth is taken as 4.6 billion years. The age of the universe is estimated around 14 billion years.
Our personal journeys naturally are a part of the Journey of the whole Universe.
Our personal journey can be seen as a singular lifetime affected only by our here and now environment, our here and now decisions and actions made by our individual entities or rather it can be viewed as a part of the whole universe, where everything and everybody is interconnected.
We should also remember that the creation order of the marriage rendered us as a family. The extended family is the clan. The union of clans is the tribe. The union of tribes is the nation. The union of the nations is humanity.
From the very beginning we all are an extended family originating from Adam and Eve, whose parent is God, himself, thus we can really call him our Grandfather. And because God is Spirit, he is our Grandfather Spirit. Some people think that the story of Adam and Eve is a Biblical fairy tale, however that is exactly the view of the most modern Genetics that all women on Mother Earth are originated from a single women called by a genetic term the mitochondrial Eve. She lived approximately 150 thousand years ago. And all men on Mother Earth who live today, are originated from a single man, called the Y-chromosomal Adam. He lived approximately 250 thousand years ago, according to modern science.
The Bible sees us not only in our individual isolation but as intertwined and interconnected members of community, generations after generations. As it is written in the second commandment in the Book of the Exodus chapter 20: “You shall not make for yourself any graven image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
The spirit of the commandment shows the interdependence of the generations, not only the generations alive, but also those who were passed away, and also the future generations. That is why the knowledge of the past of the community and the world, the knowledge of the old traditions, wisdom and experience is so important. Whatever we do, it effects the life of the next generations, and the past has an ever enduring long impact in the present or on the future.
From Easter to the Pentecost, from the very presence of the Creator of the Universe on Earth, manifested also in Jesus, to the Revelation of God on the Mount Sinai, to receiving the Ten Commandments, the moral axis of the civilization, our personal, spiritual journey can be seen as a flying vehicle which elevates us over the boundaries of our own life bubbles, over space and time, to understand sin and punishment, love and redemption, justice and mercy, life and death, the afterlife and the world to come, to understand and accept salvation.
As more we know, so more we want to know, as more we want to know, so more we read the Scriptures, as more we read the Scriptures, so we are closer and closer to God, as it is written that the study of the Scriptures softens the heart.
That is a journey toward understanding. Sometimes it takes only Seven Weeks, sometimes it takes a lifetime or long generations, when finally having hearing ears we listen to the Word of God and finally we obey.
AMEN.
