Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Easter

admin | 15 May 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.

But we do not read chapter sixteen in a linear fashion. Last Sunday we began in media res, in the midst of the chapter, with the idea of the transformation of sorrow into joy. Today we go to the near beginning of the chapter and then next Sunday to its conclusion. What we have before us today is the theme of our being grounded in the life and truth of God, the idea of our being fixed “where true joys are to be found” even in the midst of “the sundry and manifold changes of the world,” as the Collect puts it. We are being awakened to the love of truth itself, to “love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise.”

In other words, we are given a way to face the dark and difficult things of what is really a post-Christian culture and even a post-Christian Church, a way, perhaps to face the confusions and assertions of what some call ‘the religion of identity politics.’ God loves us in spite of ourselves and our differences not because of them. This is the radical meaning of all being one in Christ, as Paul puts it. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”(Gal. 3.28). This counters both a kind of bio-fundamentalism, on the one hand, and a kind of bio-libertarianism, on the other hand. The one is a form of material or biological determinism and the other a reactionary flight from nature, from the body, from life.

The Gospel is about transcending these binaries, these oppositions, to bring us to the truth of ourselves in Christ. To put it simply, we are more though not less than our bodies and, perhaps even more importantly, we are more though not less than our actions and more though not less than what happens to us; the strong counter to the culture of victimhood. The truth is not found in what we claim about ourselves for, in terms of this morning’s gospel, that turns out to be the opposite of what comforts or strengthens us. The Eastertide message is not about a flight from the world and the body as if they were evil, but about its redemption.

Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit first as the Comforter or Counselor, the actual word is Paraclete (ο παρακλητος), a word which also applies to himself. The Holy Spirit is another Paraclete, meaning intercessor, mediator, helper or advocate. But the term applies especially to the Holy Spirit whom Jesus says ”I will send him unto you” (Jn. 16.7) and equally the one that “the Father will send in my name” (Jn. 14.26). He “will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said unto you” (Jn. 14. 26) as we will hear in the Gospel for Pentecost (Jn. 14. 15-27). In every way we are being awakened to essential life, the essential life of God both in himself and for us. This is who we are in the sight of God, the counter to our self-obsessions, confusions and divisions.

The crisis of the Church in our times is about a profound misconception about religion. It assumes that religion should represent us and celebrate us in the endless diversity of our being; not in the unity of our humanity. Yet in the Passion and Resurrection we are meant to find ourselves in the madness of crowds, to confront ourselves as sinners who discover the radical need for grace.

The Paraclete or Comforter, Jesus says, will “reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” Reprove means putting us to the test, examining and arguing about our assumptions. The world is “reproved” or convicted of “sin,” that is to say, for acting as if there is no God, as if there is only ourselves in our worldliness, “because ye believe not on me.” Such is our denial of the truth and gift from above in the delusions of our self-completeness. When you think about it, this is really a kind of idolatry, the idolatry of ourselves. The world is “reproved” or convicted of “righteousness” which means that what is right and true is only found in the spiritual relation and identity of the Father and the Son, captured in the phrase “because I go to the Father,” which is the gathering of all things to God. The world is “reproved” or convicted of “judgment” because all that pretends to stand against God and his will is ultimately futile and empty; the devil, “the prince of this world is judged” and found wanting. The prince of this world is the prince of lies and lies have no power apart from the truth which they seek to pervert and twist but upon which it utterly depends.

“The Spirit of truth,” Jesus says, “will guide you into all truth,” the truth of God which embraces and redeems all the partial and incomplete forms of truth. Here is the grace of the Comforter, the one who strengthens us to walk in the paths of truth even in the self-contradictions of our post-truth world, where the ‘truth’ is that there is no truth. We are given a way to face this with compassion and commitment. It is our freedom, the freedom of our life in the Spirit.