Answering Babel

One doesn't need to be a biblical scholar to recognize the link between the story of the Tower of Babel and the story of Pentecost. The former is the divinely appointed confusion of human languages, while the latter shows how the Holy Spirit transcends that barrier to translate the good news of Jesus Christ into every language. In many intentional ways, the two stories go together, and I'm a little surprised that the Genesis 11 reading is only available in lectionary Year C.

That means that this year is the triennial opportunity for the congregation to be thoroughly baffled by a God who (apparently) wants to confuse human speech to prevent us from accomplishing whatever we want and then see how God's will is for Christ to override that separation as he is proclaimed in the power of the Spirit in Acts 2. Does it get any better than that?

Biblically speaking, the Tower of Babel is an etiological story written to explain how human kind could advance from a single post-flood family (Genesis 10) to the nations of the earth whom Abraham will encounter (Genesis 12 and beyond). Anthropologically speaking, the advent of different languages is a product of limited resources. I'm no expert, but it seems to me that, when early human families could not find enough food or water to stay in one place, they moved and separated. Decades, centuries, even millennia passed, and different dialects and eventually languages arose—all because of competition over limited resources. If there were unlimited food and water and land and reproduction partners, we would all be together in one place, speaking the same language. But we're not. And the fact that I'm writing this in English on a computer to be published electronically on the Internet where anyone with online access could read it and, in theory, ask Google to translate it into almost any language is a sign that, despite our separations and linguistic confusion, the human species has turned out OK.