What Does All this Mean?- Scott Tjernagel

The Father delivers his promise. The first followers are baptized with the Holy Spirit. That initial indwelling comes with noise and supernatural phenomena. A bigger crows assemblies and the Spirit-empowered followers of Jesus give their first witness to their peers in Jerusalem. Is it possible that their witness was two-fold? The first is the supernatural phenomena which gathers the crowd and allows the multilingual crowd to hear a witness about God’s deeds of power in their own native language spoken by others who are not speakers of their language. That first witness climaxes in a question, “what does all this mean?”

The second witness is Peter standing up and speaking to the crowd helped by the Holy Spirit to answer their question.  We can imagine Peter starting his witness with words like these: “This does not mean this, but it does mean this...”

May the Holy Spirit empower the witness of the Church in 2021. In particular may the Holy Spirit help the Church answer the many questions coming from 2020 and summarized in the question asked in Acts 2. “What does all this mean?”