The Judeans who had believed in Jesus and had found a new joy and hope in his presence and love couldn’t resist telling their non-Judean friends and neighbours, and some of them came to believe in Jesus too. Tom Wright

The unity of the church across traditional lines of class, culture, ethnicity, gender, whatever: that, and only that, is the God-given sign that the new creation has been launched. Anything else looks like simply shuffling the cards of the old one. Tom Wright

At the heart of this is holiness: if the church is the new Temple, with God really in the midst, that means fear and trembling, not playing fast and loose. That applies in many areas, not just – though not least – with money. If we really are doing business with the Creator God, this isn’t just a strange religious game. It is claiming, riskily, to be part of the ongoing life-giving project of the God who made heaven and earth. Tom Wright

If we take on this vocation, the principalities and powers – of whatever sort – will tell us to concentrate on heaven while they run the earth. Or they will warn us not to shove our religion down their throats, while they (of course) continue to shove their secular materialism and rampant hedonism down ours. We must not lose our nerve. Tom Wright

Acts is not written, then, to describe examples of a ‘normal process’ of the spiritual development of individual believers. It is written to describe the one-off inauguration of a quite new reality. Pentecost, along with Good Friday, Easter and Ascension, constitutes the great turning point in the history of Israel and the world. Tom Wright

The early church is constituted as the single global family, the genuine article of which modern secular multiculturalism is a kind of parody. Tom Wright

And the point, putting together Acts 1 and 2, is this: Jesus and his people together constitute the new Temple, the heaven-and-earth place, the launching of new creation. Tom Wright

The New Testament declares that God has come back at last. In Jesus, God has come back to judge and to rescue. In the spirit, God has come back to dwell in and with his people – as the advance sign and means of his eventual filling of all creation with his presence and love. Tom Wright

So the point of Pentecost is not simply God giving his people a fresh injection of spiritual energy so that they can evangelise, teach, perform remarkable healings and so on. The point is the homecoming of God: God is doing at last what he had long intended and promised. Tom Wright

With the ascension, the human body of Jesus is gloriously at home in his father’s territory, against the day when he comes again to bring everything to judgement and to the long-awaited universal restoration, of which Peter speaks a couple of chapters later (3:21). Tom Wright