Some years ago I visited the magnificent medieval cathedral of Alaverdi in the ancient Christian country of Georgia. Its walls were covered with frescoes, showing scenes from the life of Christ, and the saints and the worship of heaven, reminding those who came to pray that Christian worship is always “with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven”.

My eye was caught by one particular fresco, showing the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, with the apostles and the Virgin in a semi-circle as the Spirit descends in radiant rays of glory, tongues of flame dancing on their heads. It was a traditional depiction of the Pentecost story in the Acts of the Apostles.

But in the middle of the semi-circle was a crowned figure holding what seemed to be cloth with 12 scrolls on it. I was puzzled. Who was this king? And what was he doing there? I found that the king represented the cosmos, the world into which the apostles, empowered by the Spirit, were sent out on mission. “Go out into the whole world, proclaim the good news.” The 12 scrolls represented the individual mission of each of the apostles, and later legend would tell of the 12 going out to different parts of the world — Peter to Rome, Thomas to India, Thaddaeus to Persia, and so on.

The Feast of Pentecost, which the Church celebrates tomorrow, was originally the Jewish feast of the first-fruits of the harvest — not the “all is safely gathered in” of English harvest festivals, but a bringing of the first-fruits of the corn harvest. It was also the day on which the giving of the law to Moses was commemorated. As St Luke tells the story in Acts, it is on this feast of first-fruits that the Spirit promised by Jesus comes in power on the apostles. The symbols of the Spirit are a whirlwind and tongues of flame, which dance on the heads of the apostles. What is given is the gift of communication, of language. Inspired by the Spirit the apostles can speak to a multitude of races gathered in Jerusalem. Luke is mindful of the story of the tower of Babel, perhaps based on the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, whereby human beings sought to climb to heaven, supplanting God. In that Genesis story the consequence of false ambition and pride was the confusion of language. Communion was broken in a babble — a Babel — of tongues. At Pentecost the tongues of fire that make up the purifying boundary wall of heaven, bring new language, new inspiration, and new life to gather those who hear into the communion of the new creation. Those who hear and respond are the first-fruits, and for Christians to celebrate Pentecost is to celebrate the birthday of the Church.

The Spirit, the dynamic energy of God, the breath of the divine life, is often associated with random inspiration, with inspired prophets and enthusiasts who do their own thing. But in the Bible the Spirit is also the one who orders. The mighty wind that swept over the waters of chaos in the very opening verses of Scripture brings order and pattern and shaping life. Energy and order are not opposed in the order of the new creation of God’s life-giving Spirit any more than they are in the patterns of energy that make up the order of the universe. The church is to be and to live the order of the new creation. The Spirit is the Spirit of transforming holiness, shaping men and women in the pattern of the divine love in whose image they are made.

St Augustine knew that a fallen world was a world of disordered desire. He went so far as to say that all thefts, all murders and adulteries sprang from disordered love. “Shall we stop loving then?” he asks. “No, if you stop loving you will become a block of wood, a dead thing.”

Our calling is to “set love in order”, to be shaped and ordered, we might say, by the internet of the Spirit, the Lord and the Giver of life, who “alone can order the unruly wills and passions of sinful men”. And that grace and that life is at the heart of the Church’s being, and of what it is to be human, and so at Pentecost we pray: “Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten with celestial fire!” for “the Spirit of the Lord has filled the whole world. Alleluia!”.

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe