We live life with language, with signs. Even a baby, who doesn’t speak English or Spanish or Latin, knows how to say things, and figures out pretty quickly how to say more—a cry, a cuddle, a coo. We speak with gestures and forms of dress, with emojis and text shorthand, with eye rolls and notes folded up and passed up the aisle when the teacher isn’t looking. We say things with songs and sounds, with sculptures, paintings, screenplays, cameras.
Even in our own interior way, we communicate. My body sends me, or rather I send myself, signs of pain, of delight, of confusion or fear. My mind—what for St. Augustine is the clearest sign of the Holy Trinity—is a kind of constant communication with itself: memory, understanding, will.
Language, signs, is wrapped up in the mystery of creation. So, too, it’s wrapped up in the mystery of sin, for every one of those signs can be misunderstood, distorted, ignored, and corrupted—whether with the tragic translation error leading to violence or the tragic interior communication gaps of mental illness. And so it’s no wonder that some key moments in the human story focus on this collapse.
The Tower of Babel—that great story from Genesis 11—is very much in the background of Pentecost. We don’t read it this morning, though it was read at last night’s vigil. The scene in Acts comes across as a kind of reversal of Babel. Human arrogance led to division and confusion; the Holy Spirit brings peace and understanding.
The Holy Spirit also brings . . . well, the Church as we know it. From one perspective, the Church was already Catholic in the upper room on Holy Thursday; some of the Fathers even speak of the Church going all the way back in the history of Israel and the Patriarchs. But whether the Church was born on Pentecost or simply transformed on Pentecost, it’s interesting that the main sign of this transformation, this new life, was the sudden miraculous translatability of the apostolic witness.
I use that term intentionally, because every translation is, I think, a kind of miracle, a kind of transcendence. I think the Jewish people of the first century understood this; their Bible, the Septuagint, was a Greek translation of ancient Hebrew texts. The legendary origin story of the Septuagint, where seventy translators independently produced the exact same Greek text, is meant to show not so much how special the Greek Septuagint is, but how special God’s Word is. God’s Word is alive. Muslims revere the Quran, but the Quran is the Quran only in Arabic; translations may be useful in academic contexts, but Islam does not consider them scripture. But Jews and Christians have been using translations from the beginning. And Pentecost is in one sense the ultimate validation of that tradition.
What does Jesus mean when he says that the Spirit will guide us “into all truth”? The passages for today take pains to show that the Spirit is not some independent agent, but the Spirit of the Father and the Son. So whatever “all truth” means, it cannot mean something contrary to the existing testimony of scripture and apostolic tradition.
The Catholic Church understands, thanks in large part to St. John Henry Newman, that doctrine does develop—not that the Church changes its teaching, but that it gains deeper insight into the deposit of faith over time, especially when it comes to the implications of that deposit and how it might be applied in any given age. Yet I’m not sure if that’s the main takeaway from Pentecost. For Pentecost isn’t about new knowledge—as if St. Peter stands up and declares that the Holy Spirit has taught him something new. Rather, Pentecost is about translation.
But that’s not quite right, either, at least the way that we often think of translation. In the age of Google Translate—and any number of other apps and tools out there—we think of translation as a technical achievement. So obviously it can be mechanized, perfected. But Christians are perhaps better equipped than most to understand the problem of this: we have, after all, been translating our holy scriptures for more than two thousand years. And somehow we continue doing so. Seminarians still learn Greek and Latin and Hebrew. Why bother? Why not just improve the older translations? The answer is that we know that language is not that easy. Language and human culture and society go hand in hand. How we speak, so we think, or vice versa, or both.
But if a language like Greek or Hebrew is hard to translate, how do you translate a new language like Christianity? For isn’t the Church a kind of language? It’s not just a social club; it’s a sacramental body. It’s not just a source of information; it is the information. It’s not just an abstraction; it’s a particular group of people. It is, in short, our grammar and vocabulary for approaching life. Because, in baptism, we have a new identity, a new life in Christ, we also have a new way of understanding and structuring reality.
Like any language, Christianity can never be fully understood from the outside. You can’t ever make sense of French until you speak French. You certainly can’t make any sense of Hungarian until you’ve lived in Hungary and eaten a lot of Hungarian food. Yes, you can watch a movie in Mandarin with English subtitles. But in a certain way, the movie you’re watching is not the movie that was made. It is something else. All translators know this—perhaps translators of higher art forms most of all. Can you translate a film into a poem? Can you translate a poem into a painting? Can you translate a symphony into a paragraph?
Or can you translate the experience of a group of friends who got to know the incarnate Son of God, watched him die, then met him raised to life and saw him ascend to heaven? Can you translate all that into a message, an invitation?
On Pentecost, the answer is yes. But it’s not yes in the sense that we can run it all through Google Translate, and that’s the end of it. It’s yes in the sense that the experience of Jesus has been translated—transformed by the Holy Spirit—into this language, this structure of life that we call Church. And so the miracle we see on Pentecost isn’t simply tongues, if by that we mean a supernaturally efficient translation of information. It’s that our mission to the world—our mission to preach the gospel to all creatures—isn’t something we have to bring about by force of will or brilliance of strategy. It is achieved by the Spirit working through us. He is the translator, the missionary; he is the fire.
I’m reminded of that famous motto chosen by St. John Henry Newman, “Heart speaks to heart.” It comes from St. Francis de Sales. And I think the way that both Francis and Newman use it is to remember that conversion comes to the whole person, not just to the head. Peter’s sermon on Pentecost is not a magic formula for converting souls; it’s not that he all of a sudden got the right information to share. No, he spoke from the heart, and the Spirit moved. This is always the pattern.
You see, if Church is a kind of language, it’s not always going to make sense from the outside. I say this from experience, both as a convert and as someone with Protestant family. Personally, I was something of an expert on Catholicism for many years, but my knowledge was like someone who has read a lot of French textbooks but never actually tried to speak French. Similarly, my non-Catholic family members can respect Catholicism, and they can try to understand certain parts of its idiom, but often I realize that they do not really understand it at all. And often this is how the conversation goes in the public square. We simply speak our own language.
This reality can be hard. We can get discouraged and wonder if anything we say or do will ever make any difference or even be understood. But Pentecost is a day of hope in just this way: it is God’s promise that, if our hearts are inflamed with his love, that fire can and will spread. It is translatable. Not by us: by the Holy Spirit. Come, Holy Ghost, and fill the hearts of thy faithful people: and kindle in them the fire of thy love.