Pentecost, justice and the death of the Babel clique
Pentecost is an important time in the church calendar. We remember the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church. I wonder if we often underemphasise how central justice is to that story.
Through the bible, justice is God’s white-hot passion to make right all that has gone wrong in his creation. To see how this golden thread of justice is bound up in the story of Pentecost, we need to turn right back to the start of the bible and the story of Babel.
Have a read of Genesis 11.1-9.
In Sunday school, I was taught that God punished the people of Babel because of their arrogant desire to ‘make a name’ for themselves (11.4).[1] That certainly seems to be a factor at play. That same verse (11.4), however, also identifies their fear of being ‘scattered over the face of the earth.’ That seems to be important too, because this fear of being scattered was a direct violation of God’s command to fill the earth (Genesis 1.28, 9.1). [2] Rather than living into their image-bearing vocation to move outward, joining God in the work of cultivating creation to bring life and beauty and goodness out of chaos, the people of Babel opted to play it safe, to turn inward, to circle the wagons and reinforce a culture of uniformity. It’s what Jon Yates calls people-like-me-syndrome – that very human tendency to be drawn to sameness – to the safety and affirmation of people who remind us of ourselves. The people of Babel got two things wrong: their arrogance and their inward-looking sameness.[3]
God responded to their arrogance and people-like-me-syndrome by confusing their language and ‘scattering’ (11.8) the people. There may be an element of punishment here, but the ‘scattering’ is also a positive action – God pushing the people of Babel towards a better way. God wanted them to spread out. They gathered into a little clique where everyone was the same. But God intervened to spread them out anyway.
What does any of this have to do with justice? Bear with me. If part of the sin of Babel was their people-like-me-syndrome in defiance of the command to fill the earth, then it follows that we ought to understand the story not so much as the unfortunate end of the uniform human culture, but ‘rather the release of a divinely intended cultural diversity.’ [4] The fact we speak different languages is not an unfortunate consequence of human sin and divine punishment – it was God’s intention all along, and he actively intervened to encourage humanity in that direction. Cultural diversity is a good thing. A God thing.
People sometimes say that Pentecost is the reversal of the confusion of languages at Babel. But I wonder if that’s not quite right because it assumes that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit leads to cultural uniformity. It doesn’t. In Acts 2, the disciples are gathered in one place (2.1) just like Babel, and God intervenes to scatter them – to send them out to the nations. When the Holy Spirit falls on the disciples they don’t all start speaking the same language, rather ‘God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven… heard their own language being spoken.’ (2:5-6)
Pentecost is not a reversion to the Babel project of people-like-me-syndrome; it’s the continuation of God’s consistent desire for cultural diversity. The point is not that diversity is overcome with same-ness, the point is that this new humanity are able to understand each other.
As he addressed the astonished Jerusalem crowd that morning, Peter quoted from the prophet Joel:
I will pour out my Spirit on all people… (Acts 2.17)
All people. Sons and daughters, old and young – this new, spirit-empowered humanity is emphatically not a clique. It is not the reserve of a powerful elite or a dominant culture. It is for all people. It is a beloved community in which inward-looking anxiety turn outwards and difference is embraced as a gift not a threat
In Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf unpacks how this will to embrace rather than exclude people who are different from us underpins God’s justice.[5] We who are a new humanity in Christ, who receive the Holy Spirit, are moved to embrace difference – to understand not dominate, to celebrate not squash cultural diversity.
‘If we believe rightly in Jesus Christ who unconditionally embraced us, the godless perpetrators, our hearts will be open to receive others, even enemies, and our eyes will be open to see from their perspective.’ Miroslav Volf [6]
We see this flow in the early chapter of Acts. The gift of God’s grace and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit form a multi-ethnic community that shatters all social hierarchies of worth and status and who practice an alternative economy of sharing that eradicates material poverty:
With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them allthat there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need. (Acts 4.33-35)
In this way, the church acts as a prototype, a beachhead, a foretaste of God’s new creation. That remains our calling today.
So this Pentecost, let’s remember that the sending of God’s Spirit was never primarily meant to be about ecstatic experiences or escape from the pain of the world. As Rene Padilla puts it, ‘the purpose of the anointing by the Spirit is the realization of the mission of the Messiah.’[7] The Spirit comes to empower us to join in with God’s mission to put the world to rights.
Our culture is increasingly polarized and fractured. We are taught to fear outsiders, to treat difference as a threat. Pentecost invites us into a better story. The Holy Spirit comes as a gift – liberating us from our idols, our people-like-me-syndrome, our fear of difference. And the Holy Spirit forms us together into a working model of God’s new creation – displaying to the world the ‘polychrome wisdom of God’ (Eph 3:10), where our unity-in-difference (not our fearful uniformity) testifies to the God who bring unity to all things (Eph 1:10) and who has reconciled dividing walls of hostility (Eph 2:14).[8]
Come, Holy Spirit.
To reflect more on polarization, hospitality and welcoming the excluded into family, see our Justice Practice of Love Widely.
[1] Gerhard Von Rad, ‘The Story of the Tower of Babel and the Confusion of Language,’ in John H. Marks (ed.; trans.;) Genesis: A Commentary (London: SCM, 1972), 148, 151
[2] Richard S. Briggs, ‘The Book of Genesis,’ in Richard S. Briggs and Joel N. Lohr (eds.), A Theological Introduction to the Pentateuch: Interpreting the Torah as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012),40; Bruce C. Birch, Walter Brueggemann, Terence E. Fretheim & David L. Petersen, A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament, second edition (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005), 58
[3] Birch et al., Theological introduction, 58
[4] Briggs, Genesis, 41, 44, 48-9; Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 226-7
[5] Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 193-232
[6] Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 215
[7] C. Rene Padilla, ‘The Kingdom of God and the Mission of the Church,’ in Marijke Hoek and Justin Thacker (eds.), Micah’s Challenge: The Church’s Responsibility to the Global Poor (London: Paternoster, 2008)
[8] Tom Wright, The Vision of Ephesians (London: SPCK, 2025)
