Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Easter
He brought us to birth by the word of truth
Another birthing image, another image of new life in Christ. Eastertide grounds us in the life of the risen Christ. That is not something static but dynamic. We are set in motion, caught up in the motions of God towards us and with us, drawn into the motions of the Son to the Father. And all through the Spirit of truth whom Christ and the Father send to us. “He will guide you into all truth,” Jesus says. The Spirit of truth is also known as the Paraclete, the Comforter, the one who strengthens us in our life with God.
The Easter season abounds with this sense of an orientation and a direction. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God.” And in the last three Sundays of the Easter Season, everything that belongs to human experience and human hopes and expectations is gathered into the motion of the Son to the Father captured in the phrase “because I go to my Father.” Again, it is entirely dynamic.
We live in the motions of the Son’s love for the Father through the Spirit, the bond of their love and power. What is being opened out to us is the reality of the life of the Spirit. The resurrection appearances are not just some sort of show and tell. They reveal the greater and more radical truth of our humanity as found in and with God. That is captured for us in the image of the Son’s going to the Father. In today’s Gospel, that fundamental sense of orientation and direction is understood in terms of righteousness.
The Spirit, Christ says, “reprove[s] the world of righteousness.” What does that mean? It signals the contrast between the world of human sin and folly, our unrighteousness, on the one hand, and God’s absolute justice, the divine righteousness, on the other hand. That is found in the Son’s relation to the Father in the Spirit. True justice or righteousness is not found in ourselves but in our relation to God. In these lessons from John’s Gospel, Jesus is teaching us about the Holy Spirit, about the nature of the divine life of God as Trinity. The Resurrection points us to the Ascension, to the homeland of the Spirit. It is all about a kind of orientation of our hearts and minds in the going forth and return of the Son to the Father.
