The Tuesday in Whitsun Week carries the Pentecostal fire down a quieter road than the Monday's. There is no rushing wind in the Epistle for the day, no astonished crowd, no speaking with other tongues. Instead there is Samaria, where the word of God had been received and the people baptized, yet where something still waited to be given. So the apostles at Jerusalem send Peter and John; and they come down, and pray, and lay their hands upon the new believers, and they received the Holy Ghost. The fire of Pentecost, it turns out, is not only poured out from heaven in a single day. It is also carried — prayed down, handed on, conveyed from those who have received to those who still wait.
This is worth pausing over, for it tells us something about how the Spirit ordinarily comes to us. We are tempted to imagine the gift of the Holy Ghost as a private lightning-strike, a solitary transaction between the soul and its God. The Samaritan account corrects us. The Spirit comes through the Church — through hands laid on, through prayers prayed over us by name, through the long apostolic chain of those who first received and then gave. Pentecost is not a private flame. It is a fellowship of fire, passed from hand to hand down the centuries until it reaches the head bowed beneath our own.
The Gospel for the day tells us why this matters. The Lord speaks of the sheepfold, and of the shepherd who calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. The sheep follow him, St. John says, for they know his voice; a stranger they will not follow, for they know not the voice of strangers. Here is the work the Spirit does in the soul that has received him: he tunes the ear. He teaches us to recognise the Shepherd's voice amid the clamour of every other voice that calls to us, each one promising life and most of them intending only to steal, to kill, and to destroy.
Pentecost is not a private flame,
but a fellowship of fire.
For there are many voices, and they are seldom silent. The voice of our anxieties, forecasting every ruin. The voice of our appetites, baptizing every craving as a need. The voice of the age, relentless and confident, certain that it knows the way to abundance and impatient with any older wisdom. Each of these climbs into the fold by some other way than the door. Each is, in the Lord's plain word, a thief. And the soul that has not learned to know its Shepherd's voice will follow them, one after another, out into the wilderness, mistaking the sound of its own hunger for the call of God.
But the Spirit given at Samaria is the same Spirit promised in the Gospel — the Comforter who will lead us into all truth — and his patient business in us is recognition. He does not shout down the other voices. He makes us able to tell them apart. The more a soul lives in the Spirit, prays in the Spirit, listens for the Spirit, the surer its discernment grows, until at last the false notes betray themselves and the true Voice, however quiet, is unmistakable. This is no small gift in an age that has industrialised distraction. To know the Shepherd's voice is itself a kind of salvation.
And the promise that crowns the Gospel is the promise of the whole of Whitsuntide: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. Not life merely prolonged, but life enlarged — life with the windows thrown open, life filled with the very breath of God. That abundance is what the laying-on of hands at Samaria was reaching toward, and what the Spirit still reaches toward in us. So let this day be spent in listening. Amid the strangers' voices the Shepherd is still calling, still leading out into open ground; and the sheep that knows his voice has only one thing to do. Follow.