Grace, peace, and mercy are yours
from the resurrected and living Christ who will never leave us orphaned. Amen
In today’s Gospel
text we have Jesus sitting around with his disciples on a Thursday
evening. He knows that he will be
crucified the following day, Good Friday, and he has spoken this painful truth
to the disciples. He has already
foretold his betrayal by Judas and his denial by Peter. The weight of impending
loss crushes all the air out of the upper room. This Gospel reading comes from
a portion of John’s Gospel called the Farewell Discourse. Jesus is preparing his disciples for his
death. He says that the Spirit of truth
will be with them, even after he is gone.
However, this text is not a systematic
development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
It is a word of comfort spoken into a community that is already feeling
crushed by grief. The word used in the Greek text for this Spirit of God is
Paraclete, which translates to “advocate” or “one who stands alongside”, and
has legal overtones, such as a advocate that stands beside you while you are
being accused by a powerful judge. The disciples and other followers of Jesus
were part of a marginalized group living in a time of imperial rule. The far
more powerful Roman Empire perpetually put the Jews, and other disenfranchised
groups, on trial. The description of the
spirit as an advocate would have provided tremendous comfort for those who were
repeatedly stripped of their most basic rights.
All of this
historical explanation is to frame this sense of communal liberation by the
Spirit of truth. It is very easy for us to hear preaching about the Holy Spirit
and immediately think of warm, personal feelings of security and comfort with
God. We want to think of the Holy Spirit as sort of
our own personal electric blanket. We want to think that when we are
feeling sad or distant from God, we can just turn on our access to the Holy
Spirit and before we know it, we are warm and cozy and we feel better.
But that is not the
Spirit that we hear about in today’s text. This spirit is not our therapist or
best friend, this is a Spirit that comes in Love, but also comes with
fire. This spirit burns away all that is
false in this world and leaves behind newly forged truth. This spirit exposes
injustice and oppression and demands and orchestrates change out of pure love. This spirit wants to burn away all that which
keeps us from God, that is, sin and death. This
Spirit is ANOTHER advocate. Jesus
himself is the first advocate, working in community, present and active in the
world. Crossing the hurtful boundaries that we erect between ourselves and
others, and building bridges of reconciliation.
This Spirit continues the liberating work of Christ.
We so often want
to confine the Spirit to Pentecost. It
seems to be less messy that way. None of
this talking in tongues or being slain in the spirit business. The Spirit gets
her one Sunday of the year, and then is put back into the box of church
doctrine. But aside from the
unpleasantness and chaos that comes along with the Spirit, I suspect we might
have an even deeper motive for containing the spirit. The Spirit exposes the painful
truths about ourselves that we wish would stay hidden. Because I fear that we
as Americans are much more like the oppressors in the Roman empire than the
oppressed.
But we need to see
what the Spirit reveals to us about ourselves. The work of Jesus, and indeed
the work of the Advocate that comes after him, is to continually be forming and
reforming the people of God. To strike
down the walls that we build to separate us from one another. To liberate
the oppressed from their oppressors. To
liberate the oppressors from themselves. To bring us all to new life in Christ.
At first reading,
today’s Gospel text appears to be full of divisions. The disciples receive the Spirit, but the
world cannot. The world will not see
Jesus, but the disciples will continue to do so. There seems to be a group that
is “in” with Jesus, and a group that is “out.”
But if we place this text into
the whole of John’s Gospel, we understand that the world has been forever
changed by the incarnation of Jesus Christ.
The world cannot simply remain “the world” after Jesus has been in it.
For the world to receive the Spirit means that it is no longer simply “the
world.” It is a place that has been changed by love. It is God’s world.
It is this
incredible promise that makes the disciples feel the impending loss of Jesus so
acutely. Loss is a universal aspect of the human condition. Loss is something
that afflicts us whether rich or poor, young or old, man, woman, child. Just by living and loving we are open to the
pain of loss. The disciples felt the
love of God in Christ and were transformed by it. To imagine losing that sense of belonging and
belovedness was too painful to bear. This
is why Jesus speaks the promise, “I will not leave you orphaned.” And he speaks it to us too.
Jesus is not our
personal savior, but rather, the savior of the whole world. We
hear this promise of the Spirit in these weeks after Easter to emphasize the
promise that the resurrection is not a one-time culmination of the
ministry of Christ. The resurrection
of Christ on Easter is the beginning for us.
It is the beginning of a lifelong process of dying and rising, put into
motion by the work of the Spirit. We are so loved by God that God sent Jesus
Christ into the world that we might be saved from sin, death, and
ourselves. Jesus sends his Spirit into
the world so that what was begun so long ago on a cross will continue now and
forevermore in abundant life in community.
Let us pray:
Spirit of God, you comfort us in
our grief and affliction. You also afflict us in our comfort. We know that you are continually making us
new and giving us abundant life as members of your body. Thank you for calling us into abundant life
in community. Amen.
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