Friday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time

Mischief

That is why it was called Babel,

because there the Lord confused the speech of all the world.
It was from that place that he scattered them all over the earth.

And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim.

We should "compare and contrast" the stories of Pentecost and the Tower of Babel:

The “upper room” is a high place, reminding us of the Tower;

The people of Babel do not know God and are arrogant,

But the disciples love Jesus and wait on his Spirit;

God comes down to both places:

To confuse in Babel,

To reconcile in the Cenacle;

God intervenes in human life. He does not let things go on without Him.

In both stories people suddenly speak unknown languages:

and cannot work together in Babel,

but build one edifice of the Spirit from the Cenacle;

the people in both stories scatter over the face of the earth

to make war with each other

to build a unified world of peace.

In Genesis, “Babel” is the story of sin’s inexorable increase. The confusion, misunderstanding, suspicion and hostility that occur when people speak different languages are all the result of sin. And differing languages only increase sin’s intensity. Even when people speak the same language with different accents tragedy can ensue.

But at Pentecost God gave the Church a common language with which to address the whole world, the language of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost represents the healing of tongues which were wounded at Babel. They can now announce the gospel with one “language.”

Pentecostal Christians might suppose that the "language" is the glossolalia so common to their prayer gatherings, and there are other references to that phenomenon in scripture, but Acts 2 describes the gift of understanding.

Pentecost is the inaugural event of a Church which is sent to the whole world to speak of Jesus Christ in every human language. With that “language of the Spirit” missionaries bring the same, consistent, healing and unifying doctrine to all people. There is no culture which is so alien or barbaric that it cannot find itself in the gospel, nor is there any culture which must not change under its impact.

As we grieve over the Fall and rejoice at the coming of the Son of Man, so can we regret the tragedy of Babel and celebrate with gratitude the Evangelical Language which God has given us.