Hello, welcome to Form Now series on the glorious mysteries.

We're going through a Bible study.

We're going through scriptures, the New Testament and the Old Testament, on the different mysteries that we pray in the glorious mysteries on Wednesdays and on Sundays.

And my guest today is Dr. Mark Gieschak, a professor of scripture at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology.

Thanks for joining me, Mark.

It's great to be with you.

And we're talking about the third glorious mystery, which is the mystery of Pentecost. So where can we find Pentecost in Scripture? Yeah. So a lot of times people think of Pentecost as a Christian feast, which it is, but it actually starts as a Jewish feast. Oh, it does. Okay. Right. It's the of Shavuot, or the Feast of Weeks, which we can

find in the Old Testament, but back in the book of Litticus. Why is it called the Feast of Weeks?

So the Feast of Shavuot comes seven weeks after the Feast of Passover. And you'll notice that

our liturgical calendar is set up in the exact same way, right? Our Passover or Paska or Easter, right, is seven weeks prior to Pentecost. And so it's part of the,

this sort of connection between agriculture and worship and liturgy in the Old Testament, right? I think it's

where you have the wheat harvest, right, and you bring

sheaves to the temple. But what's significant about it from the perspective of biblical history

in Acts chapter 2 is that it's a pilgrimage feast. It's one of the three pilgrimage feasts with

Passover and the Feast of Booths, which takes place in the fall. So you have three different feasts

where all the men of Israel would come to Jerusalem to celebrate, and that's referred to in the text, right? You have all these people gathered together at the time of Jesus' trial, which happens at Passover, and then they're all regathered back at Jerusalem at the time of Pentecost. So they would often go home, they would go home if they weren't in Jerusalem and they would make it you know come seven or seven weeks later

to okay right now i mean of Pentecost. So they would often go home, they would go home if they weren't in Jerusalem, and they would make it come seven or seven weeks later to, okay. Now, I mean, the thing to remember

about the time of Jesus is that at this point, Jews live all over the world. So there are only a

handful of Jews that actually live in the Holy Land and are able to do the pilgrimage feasts,

but there's allusion to all these people from all over the world, right?

From Cappadocia and Mesopotamia and Pontus and Asia

and Phrygia, Pamphylia.

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