Each aspect of the old Feast of Weeks, now known as Pentecost, or the “Fiftieth-day” Feast, presented a symbolic meaning which made it, in greater or less measure, typical of the work now about to be accomplished. It was the “feast of harvest, the feast of the firstfruits;” and so it was meet that it should witness the first great gathering of the fields that were white to harvest (Exodus 23:16). It was one on which, more than on any other, the Israelite was to remember that he had been a bondsman in the land of Egypt, and had been led forth to freedom (Deuteronomy 16:12), and on it, accordingly, they were to do no servile work (Leviticus 23:31); and it was, therefore, a fit time for the gift of the Spirit, of whom it was emphatically true that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Corinthians 3:17), and who was to guide the Church into the truth which should make men free indeed (John 8:32). It was a day on which sacrifices of every kind were offered — burnt offerings, and sin offerings, and meat offerings, and peace offerings — and so represented the consecration of body, soul, and spirit as a spiritual sacrifice (Leviticus 23:17-20). As on the Passover the first ripe sheaf of corn was waved before Jehovah as the type of the sacrifice of Christ, of the corn of wheat which is not quickened except it die (Leviticus 23:10; John 12:24), so on Pentecost two wave-loaves of fine flour were to be offered, the type, it may be, under the light now thrown on them, of the Jewish and the Gentile Churches (Leviticus 23:17). And these loaves were to be leavened, as a witness that the process of the contact of mind with mind, which — as the prohibition of leaven in the Passover ritual bore witness — is naturally so fruitful in evil, might yet, under a higher influence, become one of unspeakable good: the new life working through the three measures of meal until the whole was leavened. (See Note on Matthew 13:33.)
(2) And suddenly there came a sound from heaven.... — The description reminds us of the “sound of a trumpet” (Exodus 19:19; Hebrews 12:19) on Sinai, of the “great and strong wind” that rent the mountains on Horeb (1 Kings 19:11). Such a wind was now felt and heard, even as the wind, the breath, the Spirit of God, had moved upon the face of the waters, quickening them into life (Genesis 1:2).
A rushing mighty wind. — Better, a mighty breath borne onwards, so as to connect the English, as the Greek is connected, with St. Peter’s words that, “holy men of old spake as they were moved (literally, borne on) by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). The Greek word for “wind” is not that commonly so translated (anemos), but one from the same root as the Greek for “Spirit” (Pnoè and Pneuma — both from Pneô, “I breathe”), and rendered “breath” in Acts 17:25. It is obviously chosen here as being better fitted than the more common word for the supernatural inbreathing of which they were conscious, and which to many must have recalled the moment when their Lord had “breathed on them, and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost” (John 20:22). Now, once more, they felt that light yet awful breathing which wrought every nerve to ecstasy; and it filled “the whole house,” as if in token of the wide range over which the new spiritual power was to extend its working, even unto the whole Church, which is the House of God (1 Timothy 3:15), and to the uttermost parts of the earth.