From Pentecost to press

It is very easy to take the media for granted. To treat it like the weather. Or like a whining insect. If it gets under your skin, swat it away. Unsubscribe. Switch channels.

But a free, albeit raucous, media is a gift for which we should be grateful.

It may seem an unlikely and even offensive connection to make, but a free media is one of the fruits of Pentecost.

Yes, our unruly, irreverent and even divisive press is a derivative of the beauty of the third person of the Trinity.

Pentecost gives the clue. The disciples who were assembled in the upper room on that momentous day began to raise their voices ecstatically. So loud were they that they could be heard outside. We are not told where exactly they were, but it was likely to be near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where many Jews had come for the Feast of Weeks to celebrate the harvest. The disciples were not “babbling” drunkenly and meaninglessly. They were communicating: speaking in such a way that everyone, no matter their origin, could understand what they were uttering. The disciples on whom the tongues of fire manifested were divinely empowered to make the things of God known to all the people there, from wherever they came, in whatever language they spoke. And so it has gone on and on ever since.

People matter to God. The Pentecost story, the birth of the church, is illustrative of the fact that God wants us to know and understand what He is about. If Jesus is the Word, the Holy Spirit is the means by which that Word is communicated, and understood, and acted upon. The source of communication is God Himself and He uses language breathed out to the very heart’s core. Another word for spirit is breath (ruach), and breath is life. God’s very breath is “packaged” – if you like – in such a way as to knit the soul together, and in the process to energise liveable societies.

As the prophet Habakkuk says to the herald: “Write the vision, make it plain, that they may run that read it” (Hab. 2v2).

But he wrote that after the invention of vernacular writing. Before that, there were only dreary royal edicts inscribed on stones and waymarks. These posts or steles were erected all across the Near East during the Bronze Age (3000–1200BC) to impress the subject populace with the king’s power and prestige, to mark out where his writ ran, to subdue and control those within his territory. We have some of those edicts, such as the famous Laws of Hammurabi (1750 BC and now in the Louvre in Paris). But, by contrast, after the giving of the Ten Commandments, which spurred on the invention of Hebrew, there was communication for the people, to build societies in which personal value, not just regal rule, mattered. These things can be dated, and are studied as Biblical archaeology. (I recommend The Invention of Hebrew by Seth Sanders.)

Wherever the written word of God – the Bible – is translated, social institutions cannot help but follow. And they don’t, theoretically, need force. The Decalogue is the very basis of Western civilization. When the actions and motivations of free people (people freed by the Word and power of God) are written down as law, history and prophecy, they build up to become justice; politics and media.

What are called the “mediating institutions” found over time in Judeo-Christian societies are unique. The small platoons, the voluntarism, the restraints against arbitrary power, are not found by and large in Islamic or oriental societies. What is found there, as we are witnessing in Iran, is the existence of state coercion, exerted over family and clan without protecting buffers, without rights.

It is a dazzling axiom familiar to all students of sociology that the church is the germ of true community. Throughout two millennia, the church has drawn people to it, who then form those small groups; whose appeal persuades rather than coerces; whose unity guarantees all manner of social goods.

My heart sinks when I see a huge billboard at the entrance to yet another dull new housing estate announcing “Persimmon Homes – proud to be building communities” or whatever, in a creepy pastiche of reality, where there is no church, no meeting hall, not even a shop. Nothing “builds community” in fact but the spirit of the people in them. And the source of that spirit is what we celebrate at Pentecost.

It needs nurture, and nurture comes from and leads to communication.

So don’t knock the media. Pray for it with a thankful heart, for its impetus is a fruit of the Spirit.