The Wild Spirit.

John 16:4b-15

February 21, 2016

I.

Jesus continues to speak to his disciples on the night before his death.  It is the fact that he is going away that requires him to say all this.  While he was with them, he was there to tell them.  Now he won’t be with them in the same way.

But he will still be with them.  He will be with them in the form of the Advocate, or the Holy Spirit.  Actually, Jesus says that this will actually be better for them, then actually having him physically with them.  It is one thing to have Jesus with you; it is another to have him within you.  And that is what the Spirit will be.

When Jesus is with them there is a danger that they will turn him into an idol, that it will be all about him in his historical, mortal, individual form.  The danger is that they will start to worship him.  Remember that it was always Jesus’ opponents who saw him only according to his visible presentation.  They’re the ones who are always willing to reduce him to some guy from Nazareth, whose father was Joseph.  They’re the ones who only see him in his physical form as a person just like any other person.

When this mentality is translated to the disciples, the danger is that they will become so focused on this human form that they will forget to look beyond it to what he is actually teaching and pointing towards.  This is in fact what the church has largely done.  We gaze so intently and devotedly on Jesus that we forget that he is the Word and Wisdom of God who comes to show us the true nature of God.  We look at him as in a mirror and see only someone just like us looking back.  It doesn't occur to us that in him we are to see not only God, but God’s presence in ourselves.  Instead of seeing Christ in us; we see Jesus, this other person who lived a long time ago.

When that is all Jesus is — a good teacher, maybe even the best teacher who ever lived! a historical figure who was like us — that has the effect of turning Jesus into an object, even an object of worship!  But still an object, and objects can be manipulated, controlled, categorized, interpreted, assessed, evaluated, and eventually dismissed, or not.  The one thing that makes an object an object, and the one thing that all historical, mortal humans share is that they are dead.  Dead people may be disposed of as we please.  And when we turn a dead person into a god, what we have is an idol.  We have a thing that we can do whatever we want with.  We can put words in its mouth.  We can make up stories about it.  We can invoke its name to bless ourselves and our projects.  And we have to develop an entire spiritual bureaucracy to manage it.

Jesus was a human being, and like all human beings, he eventually went away.  He died.

II.

Jesus says, “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.  And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about [a lot of things]”.  He goes on to say that: “When the Spirit of truth comes he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own….  He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.  All that the Father has is mine.”  

In other words Jesus says that it is actually better for the disciples that his mortal, historical form disappear, and that this other Presence, the Advocate or the Holy Spirit, come in his place.  Because the Spirit is going to dwell in their hearts, the Spirit is free.  So the Spirit is going to be this interior touchstone by which they will be able to distinguish truth from falsehood, good from evil, light from darkness, and life from death.

And the Spirit is alive.  The Spirit is not subject to management and manipulation by human authorities.  The Spirit is like the wind that blows wherever it wants.  No one can control, domesticate, bind, or otherwise determine the work of the Spirit.  The Spirit is the continued presence of Jesus Christ in the gathering of the disciples, the church.

The Spirit, or the Advocate, will do two things.  First, the Spirit will “prove the world wrong,” or “convict the world.”  Remember from last time who Jesus is referring to when he says “the world.”  He means the powers and principalities that control the human social, political, economic, and religious orders.  He means human authorities, the people in charge: the wealthy, the privileged, the strong, and the famous.  He means the leaders, the owners, and the bosses.

The Spirit will prove them wrong sin because they do not trust in him, the Lamb who takes away sin.  Sin is about separation.  Jesus Christ is the reconciler; he reveals our essential unity with each other; he restores us to our right relationship with God as people created in God’s Image.  The rulers depend on people being divided against each other, in competition based on fear. Jesus shows we are all one in the Spirit, and fear is overcome by love.

The world is wrong about righteousness.  They executed Jesus for blasphemy and sedition, two things that define un-righteousness in the world’s eyes.  And yet Jesus will be vindicated by not staying dead, but by going to the Father who sends the Spirit to testify to him in the hearts of his people. 

And the world is wrong about judgment because, he says, “the ruler of this world has been condemned.”  The ruler of this world is the Father of Lies whose main agenda is to keep the human heart and mind in the darkness of ignorance, selfishness, and fear, by which we judge and condemn others.  But the Spirit emerges among us to condemn condemnation itself.  “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,” we read in chapter 3.  Christ comes to save the world, and the only ones who are condemned condemn themselves by their continued hanging on to a world built on lies.  The Spirit keeps the truth alive within us, freeing us from bondage to falsehood and condemnation.

III.

“When the Spirit of truth comes,” says Jesus, “He will guide you into all truth.”  The Spirit is the perfect conduit conveying God’s truth to us.  The truth is Jesus Christ, the Word and Wisdom of God, the true unity of God and humanity, the revelation of our essence and our participation in the divine nature.

So the Spirit, dwelling in our hearts directly, connects us directly, plugs us in, to Jesus Christ and therefore to God.  The difficulty here is that the Spirit cannot really be institutionalized or turned into a religious system.  So historically the church, even though the Spirit is its very life, has always mistrusted, downplayed, ignored, and tried to control the Spirit.  The church has always treated the Spirit as some radioactive entity that it is afraid to touch.  The Spirit is given lip-service and dutifully mentioned in creeds; but when it comes to guiding the church’s life?  We have tended to want something more concrete, tangible, definable, and controllable.  The Spirit is too wild.

For one thing, we haven’t learned to trust the Spirit.  “How do we know,” we ask, “When someone is speaking by the Spirit, or it is just their own ego, or mental illness, or even an evil demon speaking?”  “The Spirit is fine,” we say, “But people need more structure.  People need written texts, and doctrines, and creeds, and Sunday School curricula.  People need laws and liturgies, bishops, Books of Order, and presbytery executives, and Stated Clerks.  People can’t handle the Spirit raw and unprocessed.”

Jesus appears to have thought otherwise.  He says that once he gives the church the initial push, the energy of the Spirit will be there keeping them going.  He says the Spirit will be even better for the church than his physical presence is.  He says the Spirit is his continued life in the church.

Without the Spirit, the church collapses back into the same kind of legalistic religious institutions that opposed Jesus and had him killed!  Without the Spirit, we end up proving the world right.  We end up throwing the book at each other, or depending on some dominant self-authorized bureaucratic authority.

I get the impression that what Jesus intends is for his disciples to gather and prayerfully discern the Spirit.  The only criterion for validity is Jesus himself.  The Spirit always continues the work of Jesus Christ.  This whole gospel is written so that early communities following Jesus’ Way would remember what Jesus is about.  But I wonder if Jesus himself wanted anything written down at all!  He certainly doesn’t have a scribe following him around; he certainly never says to anyone, “Are you writing all this down?”   

IV.

What we do have written down is intended, I think, not to control or box-in the Spirit, but to make us more aware of the Spirit by giving us a way to see how the Spirit always leads us in the Way of Jesus.  Basically, if we feel led to do something that Jesus would never do, it’s probably not the Spirit leading us.  For the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus Christ.  “The Holy Spirit will glorify me,” says Jesus, “[The Spirit] will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

The Holy Spirit breaks down and shatters the influence of “the world” in our hearts.  Where the world is always jabbering on about sin, righteousness, and judgment, splitting hairs about who’s in and who’s out, maintaining its rules and systems and leaders… Jesus is always about God’s love being poured into the world to take away the sin of the world, to establish true righteousness, to condemn condemnation, and to give his life for the life of the world.  

That means that now, instead of the world’s counterfeit excuse for life, we have been given God’s life, God’s energy, even God’s very nature… in God’s Spirit, God’s breath, the same breath that created the world, now infusing and overflowing in God’s new community.

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