“Of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth”
The Resurrection makes visible the essential life of God as Trinity, the source and end of all life. The burden or purpose of these Eastertide Sundays is to bring that essential life more fully before us. The Resurrection is neither an add-on, a kind of holy extra, nor just one more detail, one thing after another in an endless list of things. It opens us out to the truth and life of God by gathering everything together. It looks back to the Passion and ahead to the Ascension but even more it opens out to us the Holy Spirit as the guiding principle of our lives.
The reading from the Epistle of James complements the Gospel passage, once again from the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus is speaking to the disciples prior to his Passion and Resurrection about himself and his mission; it is nothing less than a making known of the radical nature of the divine life which is the source and end of all life. It is a gift, something given, but given as that upon which all life depends; the truth and end of creation itself is found in the life of God. “Of his own will,” James says, “he brought us to birth by the word of truth,” highlighting our vocation to be “a kind of first-fruits of all his creation.” Wow. You are not nothing, at least not in the eyes of God. And what else matters?
In other words, the Resurrection makes visible the real truth and purpose of creation and of our humanity. It signals the restoration of the truth of our being as made in the image of God and of our humanity as “the abridgement of the world” (Andrewes). Our humanity is a microcosm of the world; there is a kind of recapitulation of all that belongs to creation in our humanity. But only as grounded in the total self-giving life of God as love. In Christ there is an abridgement of heaven and earth, of God and our humanity.
Today’s Gospel focuses on the motions of God himself and in relation to us. There is the paradox of the comings and goings of God which reveals the truth and presence of God with us. “I go my way to him that sent me,” Jesus tells the disciples, fully knowing their incomprehension and puzzlement but actually preparing them (and us) for what will be made clear in his Resurrection. Its radical meaning is precisely about his relation to the Father and to the Holy Spirit; the revealing to us of the all-sufficient life and love of God as the principle of reality and our lives. These ‘Eastertide’ passages from John’s Gospel, the so-called “farewell discourse” of Jesus, portends his Passion and Death and his Resurrection and Ascension as well as teaching us most fully about the Holy Spirit, the bond or “love-knot” of the Father and the Son (Andrewes).
Theologically, we are being lifted up into the mystery of God as Trinity through the comings and goings of God to and from the world and us. We are meant to learn about the abiding presence of God revealed in Christ’s sacrifice and its meaning for us as new birth and life. The emphasis on the coming of the Comforter, or Paraclete, meaning counsellor, as John alone uses the term in chapters 14, 15, and 16 of his Gospel, grounds all of the activities of God towards us in the life of God himself, the spiritual reality of God which is the ground of all life.
These Eastertide readings counter the various forms of deterministic and reductionist thinking that fall far short of the wonder and mystery of God and of the true meaning of our humanity as gathered into that mystery. What Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel makes wonderfully clear the meaning of God’s engagement with our humanity through the coming of the Holy Spirit. There is an explication of the meaning of Christ’s comings and goings with us. The Holy Spirit “reproves” or confutes “the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgement,” Jesus tells us. We are given a comprehensive and concise explanation of the redemptive restoration of our humanity.
We are being taught, first, about the meaning of sin as unbelief, of our thoughts and actions which negate the truth of God; secondly, about true righteousness, the justitia dei which is made visible to us “because I go to my Father,” as Jesus says, and; thirdly, about the divine judgement on all sin and evil “because the prince of this world is judged.” This is the radical overcoming of all that opposes in our vanity and folly the truth of God. Thus Jesus here recapitulates the whole of salvation history. But it is not just about the past but also the future; everything is brought into God’s eternal knowing and loving of our humanity. There is no truth that falls outside God.
All the incomplete forms of human reasoning – our default to the various forms of material determinism, Darwinism and Marxism, to name but two which underlie a number of later forms, all of which reduce the understanding of our humanity either to the genetic and the biological or to the cultural and sociological – are gathered up into the principle of spiritual reality which redeems them. They are not so much negated as simply as corrected as partial and incomplete by being gathered into a larger understanding. On the other hand, the utter concreteness of Christ’s comings and goings confirm the embodied reality of our lives and counter the temptations in our culture to various gnostic flights from the world and our embodied being.
Yet the deeper point has to do with the desire for truth that is found in the Spirit of truth understood as self-giving love. That is made visible in the Resurrection but here Jesus points to the person of the Holy Spirit who, in that same spirit of self-giving love, “shall not speak of himself” – it is not self-referential – but of the things of the Father and the Son. “He shall receive of mine and shall show it to you,” Jesus says, and elaborates that those things belong to the Trinity. “All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he [meaning the Holy Spirit] shall take of mine, and shall show it unto you.” Such is the wonderful reciprocity of the divine life of God as Trinity, the endless reciprocity of love.
All of this belongs to the lessons of the Resurrection that make visible the wonder and the mystery of the life of God upon which all our life, our good, and truth depend. The teaching, concentrated in the Collect, reminds us of the “unruly wills and affections” of our sinful lives which God “alone can order,” on the one hand, and the restoration of our humanity to “love that which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise,” on the other hand; thus signalling the truth and direction of our lives Godward. And for what end? “That so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found.”
This picks up on the epistle reading about the unchangeableness of God in contrast to the changing features of our hearts and world. How wonderful that in the comings and goings of God, we find our abiding in his eternal life! We are being lifted up into an understanding of our spiritual lives through the coming down of “every good and perfect gift from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” We are constantly being brought to birth by the word of truth, brought to the truth of our life with God.
“Of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth.”
Fr. David Curry
Easter 4, 2025