50 Days Later...
Posted on Jun 04, 2025 by Shari Van Baale
This Sunday is Pentecost. We celebrate the birth of the church and wear red. But when I did a search on the internet for the word Pentecost, it was interesting to me that not only the Christian celebration came up, but also the Jewish one.
In Acts 2:1-21 (our First Reading for this Sunday), the Jews were celebrating Shavuot. They were “all together in one place” to celebrate the holiday.
According to International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, “Shavuot, the Jewish Pentecost, is a holiday that commemorates the single most important event in Israel’s history: the giving of the Torah (the first five books in the Hebrew Bible) to Moses. … Christians will be more familiar with the Greek name for Shavuot, Pentecost — the holiday that Jesus’ followers were observing in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit was given to them. Since Pentecost is the Greek word for 50, and as Shavuot occurs 50 days after the first day of Passover, it was referred to as Pentecost in the Christian Bible.”
Wikipedia says, “The Christian holiday of Pentecost … commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and other followers of Jesus Christ while they were in Jerusalem celebrating the Feast of Weeks, as described in the Acts of the Apostles.”
The Feast of Weeks is the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, the same holiday the disciples were celebrating when the Holy Spirit came upon them. The Feast of Weeks, Pentecost, and Shavuot are all different names for the same holiday in Judaism. It is a spring holiday, originally marking the start of the wheat harvest. It is celebrated seven weeks after Passover.
Both Shavuot and Pentecost celebrate the culmination of a 50-day season in the spring, after Passover and Easter respectively. The Christian Pentecost is celebrated seven weeks after Easter and Shavuot is celebrated 50 days after Passover. That is no coincidence.
According to Center for Excellence in Preaching, “These two holidays are inextricably linked by the calendar and, it turns out, their themes. Whereas one holiday commemorates the giving of the law, the other holiday celebrates the giving of the Spirit.”
The parallels between Jewish and Christian holidays never cease to amaze me.
Shari Van Baale
Salem Communications Coordinator