Day: May 15, 2022

“He will guide you into all truth”

The opening sentence in the Epistle reading from St. James, however eloquently expressed, is really a religious and philosophical commonplace, even a cliché. But like all clichés there is something profoundly true in it. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” It highlights the idea that every good gift, indeed, every perfect gift comes to us from above, from God, who is constant and eternal in contrast to what is always changing, in contrast to the shadows of what is real.

This recalls Plato’s great dynamic image of the Cave where we are turned around by a process of education from our fixation on the shadows or images of things flickering on a wall to the physical things themselves, and then to the mathematical things that are conceptual and mental, and then to the pure forms of things without which we cannot say what anything really is, and, ultimately, to the realization of the Good which goes beyond both the different forms of knowing and being. The good is above or beyond. And as such it cannot be possessed by us as a thing; instead, it possesses us.

This association with Plato is not something accidental. It belongs to the dynamic of the emergence and crystallization of the Christian Faith out of the conflicts and convergences of Jewish religion, Greek philosophy, and Roman rule. The second sentence of the Epistle brings the opening commonplace to its focus for us. God “has brought us to birth by the word of truth.” That is the gift, the perfect gift, which comes down from above. It is about the idea of truth, the truth which governs our actions as grounded in God and not in the vagaries of our emotions and feelings. “The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” Truth does not lie in our self-righteous affirmations of ourselves which are invariably judgments of others. What comes to us from God is the word implanted in us which can only be received in a spirit of gentleness, in mansuetudine Christi, the gentleness of Christ, we might say.

The Gospel readings for the last three Sundays of Eastertide are taken from the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus is at pains to teach us through his Passion and Resurrection about God as essential life, the life of the Spirit which embraces and redeems the world and our humanity. The emphasis today is on the Holy Spirit, “the Spirit of truth,” who “will guide you into all truth,” the Holy Spirit who is the love knot or bond of the Father and the Son. It is Jesus who teaches us not only about the Resurrection but about God as Trinity. He teaches us about God the Father, about the Son, and about the Holy Spirit, the mysterium divinum of God himself.

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