Pentecost: Reversing the Confusion of Tongues

In Genesis 11 we see a rather unpleasant story: God comes down and looks around in the newly constructed town of Babel, where there is a high tower. To prevent the human from having “nothing… impossible for them,” He confuses the languages and makes them unable to communicate so they can’t raise the high tower of pride. If we see this in context, God has to constantly cut down the human from over-reaching. It is as if this is once again reaching for something forbidden as with the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil. He has to punish Cain. He has to destroy the violent generation of people at the time of Noah, according to the story. So our many and confused languages are like a sign of pride and disobedience (the fruit of the tree), fratricide (Cain vs. Abel), and a violence which soaks the earth with blood. We are very proud of our languages—our way of speaking, the art of speech, our cultural monuments of literature. We are proud of being able to speak others’ languages. But we have to remember that St. James says: “no human being can tame the tongue -- a restless evil, full of deadly poison “ (James 3:8). We can “bend [the]…tongue like a bow,” going “from evil to evil” (Jeremiah 9:3).

   This event of coming down to confuse the tongues is the last event of the long fall of humanity, even after the salvation of righteous humanity in the person of Noah and his family in the flood. Humanity falls again through pride—this time not by reaching out to a fruit that God has made and placed within the natural world, but by pure human invention: building a tower. By the fruit Eve was deceived into reaching proudly for divine status, by the tower the human race constructs its own pride.

   Notice that God in this story says, “Let us go down and there confuse their language.” This is parallel to the discussion amongst the persons of the Trinity in the making of the human being in Genesis 1:26. So God unmakes us in a way that is counter to our existence in his image, when we are divided. We cannot achieve the true likeness to his image in division.

   So it is that the Holy Spirit must come down to destroy the pride of the tongue, while raising it up also to the heights of divine speech. The tongue is put to death with Christ and rises in the Spirit to say divine things and to speak even the Word of God—Christ—by the power of the Breath of God, the Spirit in our mouths. No other word of human pride should be allowed to divide. Certainly not the passion of the remembrance of evil. If God remembered our sins in order to hold them against us, he would label us with the worst name and shame for the murder of the Only Begotten Son. But, instead, he has asked us to join him, and to even be Christ to the world. To be Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, is to allow of no division between humans. It is to love sacrificially, speaking the Word of the Cross and the Word of Life, which is Christ. The true joy of the tongue is not to find the juiciest gossip, the best or coolest word, the most impressive command of speech, but to be humbled by the way Christ enters us by the Spirit and through Communion and comes out of us, training and remaking us to speak and live a new life.