“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you (John 16:12-15).
Truth and Anxiety
Anxiety charges the upper room. The disciples’ eyes dart about: Which of us will betray him? It couldn’t be me could it? Jesus is giving us his farewell address, telling us he is going away to the Father. Where is the map? He says we cannot come? Why doesn’t he show us the map and the vehicle and let us determine for ourselves whether we can manage the trip? He says that here we have a future and a life to live and a crucial job to do without him. Where is the job description? What is eternal life like anyway?
Every morning I face in the mirror a worry wart named Marshall. All too often the nightmares and stress dreams of the night still spin in his mind as he tries to get the mobility back in his joints. He has a couple of hours to settle his mind and catch his stride. Then he puts in a day’s work as a therapist looking at other anxious faces, hearing their questions: Where is my map? What hope do I have in the face of death? What am I supposed to do until then? Where is God anyway?
In our anxiety, we want the truth, truth about our direction, how to get desired outcomes, how to find peace. We want to find truth that rests on solid ground and operates by predictable, sensible laws. Even in very active lives, we want truth in which to rest. Unless, of course, we have enough power to dare attempt securing our lives without the help of truth.
Power As a False Alternative To Truth
“What is truth?” Pilate, the governor of Judea, asks Jesus a couple of chapters later. He asks sardonically, scoffing at this bruised and eerily reticent dreamer in front of him who speaks of truth and a kingdom that is not of this world. Pilate opted to manage his stress with power, not truth. He had plenty of cause for anxiety: Half-Jewish, his fully Jewish subjects did not trust him. So he pandered to the Roman powers who expected him to keep peace among wary subjects. He depended on Roman military might but needed to avoid pestering the powers for it. On such a quest, truth proves a pesky inconvenience, especially if one hears it with a conscience.
Meanwhile, the disciples and the rest of Pilate’s subjects do not have a shot at such wealth and authority. They cannot dismiss truth in a play for power. So it is too with me as I see my disheveled white hair and CPAP lines in the mirror every morning. So it is with my patients who want to lower their blood pressure. We seek more solid ground for navigating our lives according to the way things really are.
Yet, truth weathers hard times in our world as it did when Jesus stood before Pilate. The competition between political parties and media outlets combine in a dark synergy that divides us. We divide not based merely on differing visions of the common good (if we have such vision at all). Rife with propaganda on social media and some high-flying news outlets, we divide on the nature of reality itself, on the facts and more than the facts, on the truth. Dependent for information and perspective on people who can afford to prioritize power over truth, we are all deceived to varying degrees. And they know how to make us feel good about ourselves for believing them.
Holy Spirit: Advocate and Wind
They give us a fake map and a meaningless job description. Meanwhile, Jesus tells us he is going away. Moreover, he tells us that the whole truth is more than we can bear right yet. Is it too terrible, more terrible than the chaos of truth and lies we bear now? Or is it too beautiful, too wonderful like the face of God that Moses asked to see, the overwhelming beauty God spared him? Jesus, with his human face of God, tells us he is going away.
And we should be glad, he says. For then he will send an Advocate, an attorney to defend us in a world of lies, a counselor to guide us in a lonely world with deceptive maps. He does not lay it all out in black and white. Rather, he tells us about love, the love between him and his Father to whom he returns, the love he has for us, his friends. By this love we become united to his Father in love. As we love him, love God, and love one another, the Advocate will impart Truth that sets us free.
Love unites Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with us in Truth that liberates and empowers us to serve and glorify God. That is the work of the Trinity, quiet, hidden, and shocking as the electricity that turns on the lights.
“Disciple” literally means, “a person who learns from another,” a student. To anxious learners desperate for maps and instructions at the very least to calm their nerves, Jesus gave something else: love and a promise of an adventure, an endless quest to learn him whose face they will see for only a few hours more. They will learn and follow the faceless Advocate, the Holy Spirit.
Our scripture first introduces the Holy Spirit with another metaphor: wind. This wind formed all things from chaotic waters and later formed the church out of people of diverse tongues and tendencies. Earlier in John, Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit as the wind that blows where it will, unseen but known only in the way it cools the brow or makes trees sway.
Disciples study how the air moves and follow its course. That requires prayer, scripture reading, listening to one another, waiting for God in our everyday lives as we chop cabbage or pay bills or listen to worried grieving souls. It requires turning off the TV and putting down the phone and being awake in the silence with a loving heart.
A Relationship and a Life
I remember a good man at a small church I used to attend who sat in the parking lot reading the newspaper while his granddaughters attended Sunday School. A loyal church member, even a leader, he knew the logistics and details of church operations. But he figured he learned enough about God and the life of faith to take a pass on formation from now on.
I believe he missed something in his Christian education from which he deemed himself a graduate: Discipleship is a relationship and a life. When really lived, that life will always raise questions and fresh mysteries along with challenges and fresh ministries. Meanwhile, the Spirit cultivates enough loving community to bear whatever truth for which the Spirit deems us ready. We never graduate, thank God.
With relationships, uncertainties, changes, and challenges comes anxiety. Many preachers and Christian writers package faith as a program to feel good with be-happy-attitudes. But that is just conformity to a secular culture that promotes the lie that if you are not content and happy there is something wrong with you.
To the contrary, if you find yourself perplexed by Christ’s commandments and the frustrations of loving as he loved, if you pray for guidance and find the Spirit leading you down an uncharted and frightening road, you may be on the right track. If you feed his sheep and return to his call like a sheep yourself whenever you wander, the Spirit of Christ, the wind he sent will guide you. And you will find the Truth and with it peace he gives, not as the world gives, but with the only solid assurance that you need not let your heart be troubled. You need not be afraid (cf. John 14:27).
For God answers our anxious prayers, more often than not, with a more helpful kind of truth than the one we have in mind. The truth God offers differs from AI that gives consensus answers to our requests for information. It differs from a map with cued guidance like our navigation apps.
Rather, the truth God gives is love itself, Christ’s gift of right relationship with God, the Holy Spirit’s mysterious leading back home to the Divine Parent, whose face we seek usually unawares but above all else. By the Trinity’s power, we move forward on the journey for which God made us, a life of maturing in love for God. In loving God, we recover the image of God in which God formed us. Only by loving God and God’s children daily, in whatever our circumstances, can we grow into that. Then in the end we find the peace that answers all anxiety, the peace of being who we truly are.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled (Matthew 5:6).
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The Peace Of Christ: A Sermon On John 14:23-29
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