by 
Today is Pentecost, the day almost 2000 years ago that God’s Holy Spirit came to dwell among us. It is also considered the beginning of the Church. The Bible describes the event in Acts 2.
When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues[a] as the Spirit enabled them.
The name comes from the Greek Pentekoste, which means “fiftieth”. For the Jews it was the Feast of Weeks the fiftieth day after the second day of Passover and was celebrated seven weeks after the beginning of the barley harvest. It is also the day many Jews commemorate the giving of the Torah by God to the children of Israel in 1312 BC at Mount Sinai, seven weeks after the exodus from Egypt. It’s is a pilgrimage feast, which is why there were Jews from so many countries present in Jerusalem at the time.
Pentecost itself, of course, was a miraculous event, with the 120 or so apostles and other disciples of Jesus Christ, who up to then were hiding in the Upper Room, all of a sudden speaking languages they never knew before. That day would change the world forever.
How people come to faith is often a miracle. It is clear though that Jesus, through his Holy Spirit, can reach the seemingly most hopeless of cases. Take the case of the Mosab Hassan Yousef. He wrote Son of Hamas, the truly and utterly amazing story of his life. Mosab is the son of the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Hassan Yousef. He was destined to take over the leadership of the terrorist organisation. He grew up in the West Bank hating Jews with a passion, and was arrested several times by the Isreali police. After one such arrest, and in order to escape jail time, he agreed to become an informant for Shin Beth, Israel’s secret police. Later, he was forced to confess to Hamas leaders that he is an informant for Shin Beth, and becomes a double agent, for Shin Beth and for Hamas. However, his Shin Beth handlers were so much friendlier to him than had been his own brutal Hamas colleagues when he was in prison, that he started to feel divided about his loyalty.
Then in 1999, in Jerusalem, he is invited to a Bible study at the YMCA. Since he is bored and disillusioned with Hamas he gives it a try. He is struck by Matthew 5: 45: Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you. In 2005, he was secretly baptized in Tel Aviv by an unidentified Christian tourist.
As a result, he learnt how to love his enemies, and through his intelligence work for Shin Beth, many suicide bombings could be prevented. He even prevented a plot to kill Shimon Peres, the Foreign minister of Israel at the time.
He left the West Bank for the United States in 2007. Remarkably, one of his brothers, Suheib, also left Hamas, in 2019, disillusioned because of the corruption in Hamas, but he did not work for Israel nor became a Christian.
For me, the fact that the Holy Spirit can touch the hearts of the seemingly unredeemable, people like Mosab Hassan Yousef, is proof that our trust in Jesus Christ is justified, whatever the world will say. And I can only say this because of the Holy Spirit who came to us at Pentecost.
