The Seventh Station

Seven sevens give you today, if you started counting from Passover.  A week of weeks, you could say.  So the name for today’s feast, Weeks, or Shavuot, is appropriate.

What is celebrated today?  That of course goes back to the question, what is celebrated on Passover.  Get that one right, and then figure out what the Jewish people would have been doing 50 days (Greek: pentecoste) later.

If you answered that Passover had to do with the Lord delivering Israel from Egypt and bringing them into freedom, you’re right on target.  Journey forward seven weeks, and where were the Jewish people?  In the heart of the desert of the Sinai Peninsula, they were at the foot of the rocky crest with the same name.  Moses at its summit today receives the new Law that would allow Israel to live as God’s people.

Seven wasn’t enough when it came to the Torah itself.  The Jewish Encyclopedia explains that the Law was in fact given in 70 languages:

The word of God was pronounced on Mount Sinai in seventy languages (Shab. 88a; Ex. R. v.; comp. Acts ii. 5). The Torah was written in seventy languages in order that the nations should not be able to plead ignorance as their excuse for rejecting it (Tosef., Soṭah, viii.). Among the seventy languages the most noble is Hebrew, for in it was pronounced the creative word of God (Gen. R. xviii., xxxi.; Yalḳ., Gen. 52).

Because of this, regarding today’s feast, the Encyclopedia continues: “The relation of the Jewish to the Christian Pentecost with its pouring out of the spirit as an analogy to the giving the Law in seventy languages is obvious.”

Speaking of sevens, I was at the Seventh Station on the Via Dolorosa today.  Every Friday the Missionaries of Charity host a Mass in a tiny chapel hidden above the Way of the Cross, followed by adoration throughout the day.  It was beautiful to stay afterward and pray, because throughout the day when children came in to pray the rosary with the sisters, you got to see what exuberance meant.