Pentecost 4o
Pentecost (meaning “50” [days]) is an ancient Jewish festival celebrated 7 weeks after Passover. It was one of 3 times in the year that Jewish people in ancient times were required to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Pentecost was a celebration of both the wheat harvest and of the giving of the Torah, which laid the foundations for what made the people of God distinct in the world around them. For Christians, the first Pentecost after the Passover when Jesus was crucified and raised is considered the birthday of the Church and has thus been a significant ecclesiastical anniversary ever since.
This year Pentecost happened to come at the end of the same week in which both OpenAI and Google demoed incredibly human-sounding voice translation. Many heard in the AI’s natural tones the death-knell for both the translation industry and the need for us to learn foreign languages. Some asked if this might be the undoing of Babel, the proliferation of languages that prevented communication and drove people apart?
In fact, the Church has long seen the undoing of Babel as having begun with its birth. In Acts 2 we read: “When the day of Pentecost came … all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now … a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? … we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”
Those attending that Pentecost festival 2000 years ago had already experienced a similar wonder to what we experienced last week watching the latest AI demos. And they, like we, asked “What does this mean?”
In the demos, each person spoke their own language and AI translated what they said into a language the other person could understand. Neither speaker moved towards the other; both stayed in their own worlds, using their own words and thought patterns. The AI transferred what could be translated and smoothed over what could not so effectively that no-one was aware of the differences.
The Spirit could presumably have done the same, falling on the hearers or on the air between the two and translating the words that were spoken. Instead, the Spirit fell on the speakers, transforming the way they spoke. The full diversity of people and languages that Babel had produced was not being nullified but affirmed. Each was being valued as part of the whole, not just in what they had in common but also in their difference. This, it turns out, is what it means to be God’s people. And finally we see why Babel was necessary in the first place.
In our AI-enabled age, we must be wary of settling for what is at hand. We must beware of staying in our own small worlds and allowing machines to convert the full diversity of what God has created into a simple bland mush that is spoon fed to us. Let the AI help us instead to do the work of moving towards the other so that we can begin to appreciate life in all its God-intended fullness like never before.