NOTES for Act 2:6
The apostles' preaching on the day of Pentecost lets us look at the Kingdom from a side that is somewhat unexpected for us, seeing it from within and seeing it through the eyes of those who dwell in it in all the fullness possible for a person not yet transfigured. In particular, it partly opens to us something important about the forms of communication that are possible in the Kingdom.
Of course, both in the Kingdom and in our transfiguring but not yet transfigured world, speech plays an enormous role not only as a means of communication in the strict sense, reduced to the transfer of information, but also as a form of expressing and embodying the meanings we want to convey to another person. And meaning is not limited to informational content alone; it presupposes, as modern psychologists say, an intentional coloring, our attitude toward the information being communicated, without which there can be no talk of meaning. And this attitude, without doubt, needs living language for its expression, with its sound and its outward form.
But, on the other hand, precisely this outward sound form of language often becomes an obstacle not only on the path of communication, but also in the process of expressing and embodying meanings. This includes the diversity of languages and the limited forms of each particular language. It appears that in the Kingdom these obstacles are overcome, not by some transformation of languages as such, but through the direct, immediate transmission of meanings from person to person.
Indeed, the mere number of peoples and tribes listed in the Book of Acts as listening to the apostles forces us to forget the possibility of any ordinary verbal communication: even if the preaching apostles had suddenly been able to speak all the languages of the world, there were too few of them to preach simultaneously in all the languages the audience might have required.
Evidently in this case what took place was precisely a direct, immediate transmission of meanings, which each person then embodied in words himself, and, unsurprisingly, in the words of his own native language.
It appears that in the Kingdom, genuine communion is not hindered by any individual differences, including linguistic differences, which of course remain: there can be no talk of leveling or uniformity in the life of the Kingdom. But when the matter concerns the embodiment of meanings that have been communicated and received, a person is absolutely free: receiving what has been communicated without distortion, he finds a fully adequate instrument for expressing what he has received. Such communion spiritually enriches both the Kingdom and its inhabitants.