Commontide
Paschal Cycle
Moveable feast
The Day of Pentecost, observed fifty days after Easter, commemorates the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the assembled disciples in Jerusalem (Acts 2:1–21). The Spirit's descent fulfilled the promise of Christ and inaugurated the age of the Church's witness to the ends of the earth.
The liturgical color for Pentecost is red, signifying the fire of the Spirit's coming. The BCP 2019 proper draws on the Johannine account as well as Acts — the Paraclete whom Christ promised is poured out on the Church as its animating breath, uniting believers to one another and to the life of Christ himself.
With Pentecost the Easter season ends and the long season of Ordinary Time begins. The fifty days from Easter to Pentecost constitute the Great Fifty Days of the Paschal season — a single extended celebration of the resurrection that finds its close and completion in the gift of the Spirit.
"Fifty days" is not incidental to the feast; it is inherited. In the Law of Moses, the Feast of Weeks, Shavuot in Hebrew, fell exactly fifty days after the presentation of the firstfruits sheaf at Passover (Leviticus 23:15-21; Deuteronomy 16:9-12), one of Israel's three pilgrimage feasts alongside Passover and Tabernacles. Its earliest character was agricultural, the close of the wheat harvest, marked by an offering of two loaves of new bread (Leviticus 23:17). Greek-speaking Jews of the first century simply called the fiftieth day Pentecost, and that is the name Luke uses in Acts. The familiar Jewish tradition tying the day to the giving of the Law at Sinai is itself a development of uncertain age. The book of Jubilees, from the second century before Christ, already binds the day to covenant-making, setting the covenants with Noah, Abraham, and Moses on the same date, but it does not yet name Sinai outright, and neither Philo nor Josephus, writing in the first century, connect Shavuot to the Law at all. The clearest early statement of that identification comes later, in the Babylonian Talmud (Pesachim 68b), attributed to the third-century rabbi Eleazar ben Pedat. Whether the connection was already assumed, simply unrecorded, in the Judaism of Jesus's own generation is a real question, not a settled fact.
Christian writers took up the Sinai reading and turned it toward the gospel. Augustine's treatise On the Spirit and the Letter, written around AD 412, draws out the parallel of days explicitly: fifty days from the Passover lamb to the Law given on Sinai, fifty days from the true Passover Lamb's death and resurrection to the Spirit given at Pentecost. In Peter Holmes's translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Augustine states the contrast plainly: "There it was on tables of stone that the finger of God operated; here it was on the hearts of men. There the law was given outwardly, so that the unrighteous might be terrified; here it was given inwardly, so that they might be justified." The Law once cut into stone by the finger of God (Exodus 31:18) is, at Pentecost, written by that same Spirit on the heart, fulfilling what Jeremiah had promised long before: "" (Jeremiah 31:33). Paul makes the same figure his own, describing believers at Corinth as a letter from Christ, "" (2 Corinthians 3:3).
The center of the day is Luke's account in Acts 2:1-21: the sound of a rushing wind, tongues as of fire, and Peter's sermon reading the event as the fulfillment of Joel, "I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh" (Joel 2:28-32, quoted in Acts 2:16-21). The Old Testament had already given a partial anticipation of that outpouring. When the burden of leading Israel proved too heavy for Moses alone, the Lord took some of the Spirit that was on Moses and put it on seventy elders, so that they too prophesied (Numbers 11:24-30). Moses's own response, when told that two men outside the appointed seventy had also received the Spirit, reads almost like a wish for Pentecost itself: "Would that all the LORD's people were prophets, that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!" (Numbers 11:29).
John's Gospel preserves a related but distinct tradition of the Spirit's gift. On the evening of Easter day itself, well before any Ascension and fifty days before the wind and fire Luke describes, the risen Christ breathed on the assembled disciples and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit" (John 20:22). The two accounts are read here as complementary witnesses rather than one event told twice: John's Easter-evening breath and Luke's fiftieth-day wind and flame both belong to the New Testament's witness to how the Spirit came to the Church, each faithful to its own Gospel's telling.
Alongside Easter, Pentecost was, from the earliest centuries, one of the Church's two great days for baptism. Tertullian, writing around AD 200 in Sydney Thelwall's translation for the Ante-Nicene Fathers, called it "a most joyous space for conferring baptisms," noting that the day itself recalled both the Lord's repeated appearances to his disciples after the resurrection and the promise of his coming again (On Baptism 19). The custom shaped the day's character for centuries: candidates prepared through Eastertide were baptized at the Pentecost vigil, in white, and received the Spirit sacramentally on the same day the first disciples received him at Jerusalem.
What the Spirit did once, at Jerusalem, he does still. The wind and the fire are not primarily a memory to admire; the same Spirit poured out that morning is the Spirit given at every Christian baptism, the Helper Christ promised would not leave his own to themselves. The tongues of Pentecost were given for witness: ordinary people, speaking of the mighty works of God in words their hearers could understand. That gift did not end with the wind. It is still being given.
Red is the color of the day, and has been since the medieval Western Church first standardized liturgical colors. Pope Innocent III's treatise on the sacred mysteries of the altar, written before his election in 1198, fixed red for Pentecost, alongside the feasts of martyrs, reading the color as the fire of the Spirit that appeared as tongues over the disciples' heads. Parishes still vest in red and hang red banners for exactly that reason.
The day's English name, Whitsunday, is older than its usual explanation, and the explanation itself is genuinely contested. The familiar account ties "White Sunday" to the white robes of catechumens baptized at the feast, and the same logic gave the Sunday after Easter its old Latin name, Dominica in Albis, "Sunday in White." That reading is widely repeated and plausible. But as one nineteenth-century reference work, quoting the theologian John Henry Blunt, put it: "the etymology of the term has been strangely confused." The same entry sets the baptismal-garment theory against a rival derivation from an older "Wytsonday," Wit or Wisdom Sunday, "in reference to the outpouring of wisdom upon the apostles." Other writers have proposed a pre-Christian midsummer festival absorbed into the Christian calendar. The baptismal reading is the strongest tradition here, not a settled fact.
In the medieval West, Pentecost kept its own octave, an entire festal week known as Whitsun week. The custom faded from most calendars in the twentieth century, though its memory survives in the older names still used for the days that follow, Whit Monday and Whit Tuesday.
The Church's oldest and most enduring Pentecost hymn is the Veni Creator Spiritus, "Come, Creator Spirit," traditionally though not certainly attributed to the ninth-century monk and archbishop Rabanus Maurus. Bishop John Cosin's English paraphrase, "Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire," first printed in 1627 and later admitted into the Book of Common Prayer, has been sung at Pentecost, and at ordinations, ever since.
Primary sources. Augustine's On the Spirit and the Letter (c. 412) and Gregory of Nazianzus's Oration 41, On Pentecost (381) are both freely available in their Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translations, hosted at New Advent. Reading either in full gives a far richer sense of the stone-and-heart and Babel-and-Pentecost typologies than any summary can, in the fathers' own voice rather than a paraphrase of it.
Commentaries. F. F. Bruce's The Book of the Acts (rev. ed., Eerdmans, 1988), in the New International Commentary on the New Testament series, remains the accessible standard for working through Luke's narrative verse by verse, including the Feast of Weeks background to Acts 2. Readers who want the fullest possible treatment of that Jewish festival context, and of the first-century Mediterranean world Luke wrote into, should go to Craig S. Keener's four-volume Acts: An Exegetical Commentary (Baker Academic, 2012 to 2015), the most exhaustively documented commentary on Acts available, though its scale suits a library shelf more than a single sitting.
Further reading. Charles Williams's The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (1939; reprinted by Eerdmans and, more recently, Angelico Press) traces the Spirit's activity through the whole of Christian history from Pentecost onward. It is a work of literary theology rather than academic history, idiosyncratic in places, but it takes Pentecost seriously as the hinge on which everything that follows turns.
The gift of tongues carried its own typology for the fathers: a deliberate answer to Babel. Preaching at Constantinople in 381, Gregory of Nazianzus set the two scenes side by side in his Oration 41, On Pentecost, in Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow's translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: "the old Confusion of tongues was laudable, when men who were of one language in wickedness and impiety... were building the Tower; for by the confusion of their language the unity of their intention was broken up, and their undertaking destroyed; so much more worthy of praise is the present miraculous one. For being poured from One Spirit upon many men, it brings them again into harmony." Where Babel had scattered a humanity united only in pride, Pentecost gathers a humanity still divided by language into a single praise, spoken in many tongues at once.
Peter's sermon that morning does its own theology by quotation, reading the wind and fire through Joel's prophecy rather than simply reporting them. Irenaeus, writing in the late second century, took the same event as proof that the Spirit had come for the whole human family and not for a remnant, describing the Spirit given at Pentecost as one "having power to admit all nations to the entrance of life, and to the opening of the new covenant" (Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut's translation, Against Heresies III.17.2). None of this could happen, in John's telling, until Jesus had gone. At the Last Supper he had told his disciples plainly that his departure served their good: "it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you" (John 16:7). The Ascension is not the absence Pentecost consoles; it is the necessary condition Pentecost fulfills. The disciples who stood watching Jesus go up become, ten days later, the disciples who go out.