“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
(Strother Martin in the role of prison warden in Cool Hand Luke)
Many biblical scholars link today’s first reading account of the Pentecost event to the Hebrew Bible’s account about the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11).
The Tower of Babel
The Babel story probably originated out of a Hebrew child’s question: “Daddy, how come I hear so many people talking differently at the market place?” To which the father says,
“Well, once upon a time everybody talked the same way. There was only one language. So, soon after Noah’s flood, when they felt threatened by nature’s unpredictability, they came to an easy consensus to build a protective tower (and city) far above flood and storm and the wilderness – indeed as high as they could go. (There was no quibbling about this as might happen in Congress, no argument, no difference of opinion.) The one language made them very efficient; no time wasted explaining things. There was cohesion, everybody on the same page. Mathematics, measurement, technology came easy. Their uniformity, like the old Sherwin Williams paint add, threatened to “cover the earth” – as in ein volk, ein reich, ein fuhrer in 20th century terms.
“To prevent that”, so goes the story, “God varied their language. There were misunderstandings (as in Congress today). The whole project slowed down, people began to ask questions like ‘What did you say?’ or ‘What does that mean?’ Explanations began to take up time – like the United Nations without simultaneous translation. The once cohesive people became strangers, scattered. The construction ground to a halt. God used diversity to liberate their tongues, their minds, their possibilities.”
Pentecost
Biblical scholars see in our Pentecost account a counterpart to the Babel story. Isolated out of fear in a chamber in Jerusalem, the worried followers of Jesus suddenly explode with enthusiasm. They can only describe their experience in terms of a driving wind (a whoosh!) passing through the chamber and tongues of fire resting above the heads of each individual – loosening their actual tongues, inspiring each to speak in terms beyond catechetical abstractions, each word becoming a blossom to be savored as much as understood. As the prophet Joel had predicted, they spoke as visionaries, they spoke dreams.
They did not cancel the diversity of human language, limiting it again to one uniform, efficient dialect (as for example Latin) but aimed to set the world on fire, to ignite the many languages spoken by the crowd in Jerusalem with a new kind of language, a new kind of unity that embraced diversity! As Northrop Frye puts it, it was “a language that escapes from argument and refutation. The language used in the Bible is, in short, the language of love, which, as Paul reminds us . . . is likely to outlast most forms of communication.”