“The Gathering In of the Firstfruits”
Acts 2:1-21
5/31/09 Sermon
Today we celebrate the day of Pentecost in the
Church year. Pentecost is actually an O.T. holiday, which
celebrated the end of the grain harvest. On that day the
Israelites brought two loaves of leavened wheat bread as the
firstfruits from their harvest to present to the Lord at the
temple. The word Pentecost is Greek in origin, and it means
“the 50th day.” The holiday got this name, because it
was celebrated 50 days after Passover. Passover, as you remember,
is the holiday which celebrated God’s deliverance of His people
from their slavery in Egypt. On the eve of that night, the people
were to kill a lamb or goat, roast it and eat it, and then apply its
blood to the doorframes of their homes. Everyone who was inside a
home where the blood had been applied would be safe from the judgment
on all the firstborn of the land, which the Lord would pour out on
their enemies that night. The celebration of Passover went on for
7 days. It was also known as the Feast of Unleavened Bread,
because no leaven was to be used in the baking of bread during that
time. During that season another holiday was celebrated on the
Sunday following the Passover, and that was the waving of the sheaf of
the firstfruits of the grain harvest before the Lord. Before the
Israelites could eat any of the new grain of that season, they had to
offer up this first bundle of grain to the Lord. After that, the
Jews could then harvest the rest of the grain for themselves up until
Pentecost, when again they would offer up a sacrifice of the
firstfruits of their final grain harvest to the Lord. What was
begun, then, at the offering of the firstfruits of the sheaf at the
beginning of the 50 days was continued and completed at the end of the
50 days on Pentecost.
So, what is the significance of all of this
harvesting for us Christians? What does it have to do with Christ
and the Holy Spirit? We have to ask these questions, because
according to Jesus everything in the Scriptures points us to Him and
speaks of our salvation in Him. Beginning with the Passover, we
see that Jesus fulfilled this holiday by being offered up on the cross
as the sacrifice for our sins. He was the Lamb of God, whose
blood has been applied to the doorframes of our hearts in our Baptism,
so that now God’s judgment passes over us and He delivers us from
our slavery to sin, death, and the devil. Jesus’ death took
place on the day the Passover lambs were to be sacrificed. His
resurrection then took place on the day when the Israelites offered up
the sheaf of the firstfruits of their grain harvest. In rising
from the dead on this day, Jesus was signifying that He was the
firstfruits of a larger harvest for God to come. The Apostle Paul
refers to Jesus as the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep,
meaning there are more to follow. This harvest is made up of all
who believe in Christ. It began on the day of Pentecost, 50 days
after Christ’s resurrection, when the Holy Spirit began His
ministry of bringing in this harvest. It was then that He started
scattering the seed of the Gospel into people’s hearts through
the preaching of Christ crucified and risen from the dead for our
salvation, in order that more people might be offered up to God as the
firstfruits of His creation. And just as Pentecost was celebrated
at the end of the grain harvest of the Jews, so the Lord’s
harvest is now being brought in at the end of the age, in these last
days, as the Scripture refers to them. The end of this harvest
will occur on the Last Day. That’s when, as Jesus puts it,
the reapers (His angels) will gather the weeds together to be burned
but will gather the wheat into His barn. John the Baptist also
proclaimed the same thing when he said that Jesus would clear His
threshing floor and gather His wheat into the barn, but would burn the
chaff with unquenchable fire.
The Holy Spirit was sent, then, on the Day of
Pentecost in order to gather you into the barn of heaven through the
preaching of the Gospel, so that you might not perish in the
unquenchable fire of hell. In the book of Acts we see the
beginning of this harvest as the Spirit’s ministry of directing
people to Jesus, crucified and risen from the dead for our salvation,
begins. But the book of Acts doesn’t end. It’s
been going on now for over 2,000 years, and will continue to go on
until the end of the world, until the Lord returns for His harvest.
In the meantime, the text from the book of Acts for
this morning tells us something both about who does the harvesting as
well as how He does it until the end of the age. Jesus previewed
this when He told a parable about a sower who went out to sow. In
that parable the seed represents the Word of the kingdom of God, the
ground represents those who hear the Word, but no direct mention is
made as to who the sower represents. From the Gospel itself,
however, it’s clear that the sower is Jesus. Throughout His
earthly ministry He proclaimed the Gospel, so that many came to faith
in Him and produced much fruit. But now that the Lord has
ascended into heaven, the Word is not sown directly from the
Lord’s mouth, but from the mouths of His Church and ministers as
they are empowered by the Holy Spirit to do this. We observe that
going on here in today’s text, when the Holy Spirit fills the
Apostles and disciples and distributes tongues of fire upon each of
them, so that they are then enabled to speak of the mighty works of God
even in foreign languages.
And the Lord Jesus still sows His Word today into
our hearts by way of His Holy Spirit, who goes with the office of the
holy ministry, to plant the seed of the Gospel into our ears. We
don’t harvest ourselves, then. We are the harvest, and the
Lord harvests us as His Word has its way with us and produces the fruit
of faith in our lives. The Word of the Gospel about Jesus Christ
is the instrument the Lord uses to harvest us for His barn. When
these Apostles and disciples spoke in tongues by the Holy Spirit, they
spoke of the mighty works of God in the languages of the people who had
gathered together in Jerusalem to celebrate Pentecost, in order that
they might hear specifically of those mighty works of God which He had
just accomplished through His Son, Jesus Christ. Though
God’s works in creation are also mighty works, the greater works
are those works that Jesus performed for our salvation - His works of
preaching the Gospel, healing the sick, raising the dead, forgiving
sins, and especially the sacrifice of His body and the shedding of His
blood on the cross in order to atone for our sins. Having
accomplished all that was necessary for our salvation, He now continues
to work for us at the right hand of God the Father Almighty as He
pleads us righteous with His blood and delivers that righteousness to
us through the Word and the Sacraments.
All these mighty works of God continue to be
proclaimed to us today, as the Holy Spirit’s ministry of sowing
the seed of the Gospel goes on in the Church, so that the Lord’s
harvest might increase, as more people are brought to faith in Jesus
Christ, so that all who call upon the Name of the Lord might be
saved. Luke (the author of the book of Acts) reports that after
the Apostle Peter concluded his sermon, those who received his word
were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand
souls. This is a witness to the power of the Word of the
Gospel. It may appear to be weak and foolish to Gentiles;
it’s a stumbling block to the Jews. But as the Apostle Paul
writes, “...it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who
believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”
With God, there’s no distinction. He
doesn’t care what kind of fruit you are. I love the movie
My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Throughout the film the father of the
bride (who’s Greek) has a hard time accepting that his daughter
is going to marry a non-Greek. At the reception, however, he
shows that he has come to the realization that we’re all just
people, when he compares everyone there to apples and oranges.
“We’re all different,” he says, “But in the
end, we’re all fruit.” Jesus is the Savior of all us
fruits. God wants all to be saved and come to the knowledge of
the truth. Just as the firstfruits of the grain harvest were
offered to Him in the O.T., so He wants you to be His own. But He
only wants the best. Everything offered to Him in the O.T. had to
be without defect. Unfortunately, we’re a bunch of rotten
fruit by nature. We’re apples that are mealy, oranges that
are dry, bananas that are bruised. We’re all contaminated
by sin and are therefore unacceptable to God on our own.
But the good news about Pentecost is that the Holy
Spirit has been sent to deliver to you the perfect righteousness and
holiness of Jesus. He did this for you at your Baptism, where you
were cleansed of your unrighteousness and clothed with Christ.
Through the Lord’s Supper He puts Jesus’ body and blood
into your body and blood, so that before God you no longer appear dry,
mealy, and bruised by sin, but holy, righteous, and blameless in
Christ. In Him by faith as you are, you too are given to God as
the firstfruits of His harvest just as Christ has become by His
resurrection from the dead.
And finally, let’s not forget the 50’s
of Pentecost. In the O.T. God commanded that every 50th year was
to be a year of jubilee. This meant that for any Israelites who
had sold themselves into slavery or had sold their property to their
fellow Jews this was a year of freedom, a year when all their property
would be returned to them and they would be freed from their
slavery. The number 50, then, in the Scriptures is a number that
signifies freedom. So you too: By the work of the Holy
Spirit, whose ministry of delivering the salvation won by Christ began
on the day of Pentecost, you have been delivered from those things to
which you were enslaved - sin, death, and the power of the devil - so
that you might be the free people of God.
As those firstfruits who have been harvested for God
from among the chaff of the world, and as those who will be harvested
from the grave on the Last Day when the Lord returns, live now as the
redeemed people of God that you are by the power of the Holy Spirit,
receiving the Lord’s gifts through His Word and Sacraments and
producing the good fruit of faith towards Him and love towards one
another, in this perpetual age of jubilee for you who are in
Christ. Amen.