“The Spirit will Lead you into all Truth”
Trinity Sunday: June 3, 2007 Church of the Good Shepherd
Text: John 16:12-15 The Rev. Ross M. Wright
Talk about the Trinity begins with worship. Before we speak, before we raise our questions or express our perplexity, we bow before the Triune God, saying: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts.” We worship God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Or to reverse the order, we worship God the Spirit, who suffuses all creation – from the galaxies seen through the Hubble Telescope down to the intricate order of human cells, mapped in the Human Genome Project. God the Spirit is the ground of our existence. In him, we live and move and have our being. We worship God the Son, Jesus of Nazareth, who became one of us, accepting all the limitations that come with being human. We worship God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
Belief in the Trinitarian God is at the heart of the Christian faith. The creed which we say every week has a Trinitarian structure. We confess: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty . . . I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord . . . We believe in the Holy Spirit the Lord and giver of life.” At your baptism, the minister poured water over you and baptized you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, so that your very identity is fundamentally shaped by the life of the Trinitarian God. Our reading from John’s Gospel testifies to the mutual relations between Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and the relation of both to the Father. Jesus says that it is for our good that he has ascended to the Father and no longer lives physically in this world. Why? During his earthly ministry, he submitted to all the limitations of bodily existence; therefore, he could be in only one place at a time. Now, although he is physically separated from us, his presence broods over the church throughout the world through his spirit, the Holy Spirit. And notice how he describes Sprit’s modus operandi: “He does not speak of himself,” Jesus says, “he listens to me, and what he hears, he then announces to you.” The Holy Spirit is the go-between, linking us to Jesus, just as Jesus is in the presence of the Father.
What are we saying when we confess that we believe in God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? It is important to point out that it is not the doctrine of the Trinity that we are invited to believe in. Rather, we believe in the living God, who is Trinitarian in nature. It is this God with whom we have a relationship. The doctrine of the Trinity has been conceived differently throughout history, and it will continue to be restated and reformulated. What does not change is our eternal relationship with the living God, who has this particular Trinitarian existence.
When we affirm God’s Trinitarian nature, we are saying that God exists fundamentally in relationship. In other words, it is God’s essential nature to be in communion with others. Long before God created us or anything else in this world, loving communion existed among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The three members of the Trinity have always existed for each other and interacted with each other as in a great cosmic dance. This loving communion radiates from them to us. Because God is by nature in communion, we are drawn into this loving interaction. The Spirit listens to the Son, is attentive to the Son, we might say, and conveys to us what he hears from Jesus. There are plenty of times when we are not listening to God, when we cannot listen or no longer want to listen. Even then, the Spirit dwelling among us is listening for the voice of the Son and announcing to us what he hears from the Son. Think of the Trinity not so much as a doctrine but as a relationship among the three persons of the godhead, a relationship which has the power to draw us in, much as you might be drawn into the life of a family in whose home you are visiting, because of the intense interaction among the various members of the family.
Of the three members of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is probably the one we are the least acquainted with. In part, this is because we have inherited a tradition of theology in the West that is largely Christ centered or oriented to God the Father. This lack of emphasis on the Holy Spirit has led some to conclude that we are in practice actually “binitarian” rather than Trinitarian in orientation, despite our allegiance to the doctrine of the Trinity. This is not true of all traditions. The Eastern Church, that is, the Eastern and Russian Orthodox traditions, place a greater emphasis on the distinct identity of each of the members of the Trinity and their particular job descriptions, so to speak. As a result, the person of Holy Spirit is not overshadowed by the Son, as he tends to be in the West.
Who is the Holy Spirit and What is he up to? In our reading from John’s Gospel, Jesus draws attention to the person and work of the Spirit, the advocate or paraclete. Central to the Spirit’s work, according to Jesus, is his role of leading the church into the truth. The Spirit of truth leads us into all truth:
But when he, the spirit of truth, comes, he will lead you into all truth, because he will not speak of himself, but he will say what he hears [from me] and will announce to you the things which are to come. He will glorify me, because he will receive from me and announce it to you. Everything which is the Father’s is mine; therefore I have told you that he receives from me and announces it to you.1
Jesus describes two different relationships here. The first is the relationship between the Son and the Spirit: the Spirit is constantly listening for what Jesus has to say. His ear is cocked, as it were, like the dog in the Motorola advertisement, listening for the master’s voice. The second is the Spirit’s relationship with us: the Spirit is present in the congregation of believers, telling them what he hears from Jesus and leading them into all truth.
The presence of the Holy Spirit is the answer to God’s apparent absence. You and I have staked our lives on a relationship with a God whom we cannot see and who does not appear to us as he did to the apostles and prophets. We have their testimony of the living God in the form of the Bible. We have the institution of the church, and worship. But how are we to have a real encounter with the living Christ here and now? In academic parlance, this is the problem of “Lessing’s ugly ditch.” The phrase alludes to a famous observation by G. E. Lessing, the German philosopher and historian who claimed that the contingent events of history cannot verify eternal reality for us.2 In other words, we have staked our lives on a relationship with someone whom we cannot see. If God exists and is active, why isn’t this obvious to everyone? Plenty of people seem to get along quite happily without recourse to God or Jesus. We have been trained in the empirical method and in the historical method, so we interact with the world on the basis of a series of basic assumptions that are presupposed by our Enlightenment oriented education. But Scripture testifies to reality which does not conform to these rules. As believers in the risen Christ, therefore, we are out of sync with our intellectual environment, a phenomenon which sociologists call “cognitive dissonance.”
In this situation, the Spirit of God, and only his Spirit, can bring us into a living encounter with the living God. The Spirit of truth, the paraclete, leads us into all truth. If we have come to trust that Jesus of Nazareth lives among us and is personally involved in our lives, this is because the Spirit of God is at work in us. If we have ever cried out, “My God . . . help me!” or come to the place where we know that we are beloved by God, then we have evidence of the Holy Spirit’s presence among us. “The [Holy] Spirit bears witness with our spirit that that we are children of God.”3
Imagine that you want to describe someone whom you know well to a group of people who have never met this person. How do you go about it? Suppose I want to describe to you my father, who died about seven years ago. I can describe him; I can show you a video and let you hear his voice. I can tell you stories about him. And you can observe something of him in me – certain physical traits and mannerisms. But you will still not know the essence of the man, because all of these media are subject to certain distortions and misinterpretations. To really know him, he would have to be present and introduce himself.
God faces a similar problem. How can he convey his reality to us? He has left records of his mighty acts in the Bible, footprints or traces of his existence. We have heard “a rumor of angels,” to use Peter Berger’s provocative phrase. He has acted consistently enough over the centuries that there is a certain pattern to his behavior. But we can know him only as he personally discloses himself to us. And so he has come to our turf and lived among us, as Jesus of Nazareth. And he lives among us still, through the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit of truth leads us into all truth. There are two concrete areas of our Christian life where the Spirit’s presence makes a decisive difference.
First, the presence of the Holy Spirit means that there is hope for the church, which is so terribly divided over different interpretations of the Bible. On the really hot button issues, I do not have much hope that one group will convince the other of its position. Do you? Appeal to an external authority alone, even the Bible or Christian theology, rarely changes our thinking. Such an appeal might have worked in previous generations, but no longer. We want truth that connects with our experience. Objective truth is not enough – there must be a personal, subjective dimension as well. The Holy Spirit of truth is personal and subjective, because he is a person and he lives in us. We can trust God that the Spirit will lead us to a deeper understanding of the mind of Christ. We will discover the truth about human sexuality, for example, as we listen for the mind of Christ through the leading of the Holy Spirit. I am not arguing for theological liberalism which looks patronizingly at the Bible and concludes: We know better. I am simply pointing out that in the current climate, appeal to objective sources of truth alone rarely persuades anybody. God’s truth is self-authenticating when the Spirit of truth is at work. This is risky business, to be sure. But if there is no risk in our faith, then we are not dealing with the living God. Moreover, the Spirit will not lead the church in ways that contradict Holy Scripture, because the Spirit is the author of Scripture.
Second, the Spirit gives us hope as we face questions about God and our own Christian existence. Where is God in Darfur? Why doesn’t he show up in Ramadi and Sadr City? As physics and biology unravel more and more of the world’s processes, where do we find the living God? And what about the question marks hanging over our daily lives? Have you trusted him with everything only to discover that he didn’t show up? Are our lives just a random series of events? Life is hard, and then you die? Is there any order? Does God see? Does he guide? Does he answer prayer? God does not answer these existential questions with timeless truths or static propositions. The truth of God is not something that is discovered once, and then from then on, you find the answer in the book. Even the Holy Spirit knows the truth only as he listens continually for Jesus’ voice. We cannot simply repeat what Calvin said, or Bonheoffer, or C. S. Lewis, or John Stott, or Rick Warren. We can be guided by what they learned in their search, but we must rediscover the mind of Christ in our own time and in our own situation. The truth is disclosed to us through the Spirit of truth. We discover the mind of Christ in relationship – in relationship with the living God and with each other in the congregation.
This sermon and this liturgy bear witness, not to speculative doctrine, but to God as three persons in communion. To the Father, Son, and the Spirit, who live together in love and invite us into a loving, cosmic dance in which we know God as we are fully known.
1 John 16:13; my translation. In Greek, the Holy Spirit is normally referred to with the neuter article, literally, “when it, the Spirit of truth, comes, it will lead you into all truth.” This grammatical detail should caution us from thinking of the Trinity in exclusively male terms. That said, the Holy Spirit is emphatically a person, and the English neuter article is impersonal; therefore, “he” is preferable to “it.”
2 Lessing coined the phrase, the “ugly broad ditch” (der garstige breite Graben) to express his conviction that the “accidental truths of history can never become the proof for necessary truths of reason.” He says, “This, then, is the ugly broad ditch which I cannot get across.” “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. H. Chadwick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 55.
3 Romans 8:16.