Sunday’s gospel invites us to reflect on the Holy Spirit, the Third Person and often neglected person of the Trinity, the three in one divine love at the heart of all that is. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus, who will continue to teach us as Jesus has. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father, from whom Jesus receives all he teaches.
The four verses of Sunday’s gospel come from Jesus’ four-chapter farewell address to his disciples just after their last supper together and just before his passion and death (John 14-17). In these chapters Jesus is readying his friends for a radical change in their relationship.
With his death Jesus’ physical, face-to-face presence with them will cease. The questions Jesus’ friends ask are basic and profound: Where are you going? Can we go, too? Will you have a place for us? How do we find the way?
At the beginning of Sunday’s gospel passage, Jesus recognizes he has much more to say than his friends can hear or bear. He cannot ready his friends fully for the future. They are going to have to live into the mystery of his death, resurrection, and return to God. He insists their friendship with him will last through the radical transformation ahead.
People who face blindness report that learning to use the white walking cane is difficult until eyesight is finally gone. As long as one can see, one continues to depend on the eyes. Perhaps similarly, Jesus’ friends can discover his Spirit guiding them only as they face problems and conflicts in his absence. In Sunday’s gospel Jesus promises his Spirit will live in us.
- Whose spirit has arisen in you to guide you at key points in your life?
Jesus’ disciples face an experience similar to losing a parent or moving out of a close relationship with a mentor. When a parent dies or we leave a mentor, the relationship both changes and persists.
What we could not see or bear to hear as a son or daughter we find out for ourselves. What didn’t yet make sense as an inexperienced professional we live into understanding as our experience accumulates and discloses truth a mentor knew.
As we struggle on our own, parents and mentors still speak in our memories. We may try handling a conflict as we experienced them doing it. This is an experience of their spirits guiding ours.
- How do you experience the Spirit guiding you in your present life?
- What do you imagine the transition was like from knowing Jesus face to face to knowing Jesus in Spirit?
The Spirit is no newcomer to salvation history. The Spirit is the wind of God rippling the waters of the deep at creation (Genesis 1.2). From that first appearance, the Spirit has a reputation for creatively stirring things up.
Jesus’ words remind us that the Spirit is the Spirit of God. The Spirit does not speak independently of the Son’s message any more than Jesus speaks independently of his Father’s word.
The same Spirit who is at work in Jesus will be at work in his followers after Jesus returns to the Father. Jesus’ followers will experience and share the abiding, dynamic inter-relationship of Creator, Son, and Spirit.
Most Christians grasp an image of God as creator and God as incarnate Son more easily than an image of God as Spirit and guide. We see the creator in parents and grandparents, the one giving birth to all. We see in Jesus God become human, revealing as one of us what God is like.
The Spirit in whom we live, move, and have our beings may elude us, until perhaps we lose a parent, grandparent, or friend and experience their spirit and voice arising within us. The Spirit is the love or relatedness between Creator, Son, and all that lives.
Jesus shows us God is triune, a community of loving interrelationships that is both one and many. In our human experience three is the beginning of a social threshold. Two people in I-Thou relationship make room for one more and one more to form families and communities. God’s love is always opening out to hold more in communion.
God is not only the Creator of old or the Savior of 2,000 years ago but the Spirit of our daily breath and deepest present desires, conflicts, and challenges. The Spirit breathes in us today.
- Breathe in deeply, pushing your diaphragm down with the air you inhale; then exhale. Do this five times together in your group. Then share your understanding of how the Holy Spirit is like breath.