John 16:4b-15

07/18/10
John 16:4b-15
Hudson UMC

The previous chapter in the Gospel of John, chapter fifteen, is entirely concerned with the fact that we, as believers, are united to Christ as branches on the vine. As such, not only are we utterly bound up with the love, life and joy of Christ, but also with the persecution and suffering that He endures in this world. The question that might come to our minds is, “Why is Jesus going on about this?” We need to remember the context of these several chapters. Starting in chapter fourteen, Jesus began on an extended discourse, explaining to His disciples all the things that He needed to tell them. We are in the thick of this discussion and we will not be done with it until we finish chapter seventeen. The reason why this is so important, the reason why Jesus needs to say all these things to His disciples at this point is because He is going to be betrayed and die. Jesus and the apostles are at the Last Supper and Judas has already left to betray Christ to the authorities. This is His last chance to tell His disciples what they need to know in order to stay strong and endure through the trials to come.

In fact, Jesus even hints at this at the beginning of our passage. “I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. But now I am going to him who sent me; yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’” The point is that Jesus is going away. The leader of this group of people is going to be gone and they are going to be leaderless. Jesus leaving His disciples alone because He is going to be executed, and yet, we don’t get the sense that He thinks that they will be able to lead in His absence. After all, He has said to Peter not all that long ago that he was going to deny Him three times before that very night was over. The disciples were sad that Jesus was going to leave. “But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts.”

“Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away.” This must have completely blindsided the disciples. How in the world could it be to their advantage that Jesus was going away? If Peter, for example, who seemed to be so strong, would collapse into cowardice the very night that Jesus goes away, how could it be to their advantage that He leaves? And yet, Jesus assures them that this is absolutely true. “For if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”

I think that we need to reflect on this statement here, because, if we really think it out, it will strike us as odd. Why can’t the Advocate come to us unless Jesus goes? Why can’t the God who can do anything send the Spirit to the disciples, even while Jesus is on earth? There seems to be some intimate connection with Jesus leaving and the Spirit being given. We need to think about that for a minute.

The thought that God could have poured out the Spirit upon the disciples before Jesus had left them presupposes without any kind of proof, that it would be a good thing for that to happen. It might be argued, I suppose, that God’s presence is always a good thing, but I am not so sure. Remember when Isaiah encountered an image of the glory of the Lord in a vision. Even though there were several layers of separation between Isaiah and God at that point (he is having a vision, and it is not truly the direct presence of God he is encountering, but an image of the glory of God), his only response is to cry out and say, “Woe is me, for I am undone!” The only thing Isaiah could do is exclaim that he was about to die. All throughout the Old Testament, when people encountered an angel or a miracle, they were amazed that they had not been consumed by God’s presence.

If this is the case, if God really is the consuming fire, it might not be a great thing to have ordinary folks like you, me, and the disciples, indwelt by God the Holy Spirit. And yet, Jesus says that it is indeed a good thing, that it is to our advantage. And yet, it will not happen until Jesus goes away. As it turns out, if we allow ourselves to let the reality of God becoming a man to really impress itself upon us, we will come to realize that throughout His life, death, resurrection and ascension, Jesus is hard at work, redeeming and re-creating our humanity. When Jesus is baptized in the Jordan, He receives the Holy Spirit into our very humanity and lives with it, without being consumed. It is as if the Spirit, that would normally overwhelm us, has learned to compose Himself within our humanity in Christ.

I also want to remind you of what happens on the cross. Each of the four Gospels tells us something of what happened on the cross. Each has Jesus saying one or two things before He died. What they tell us is incredibly important. In John, the words we hear Jesus saying right before He dies are, “It is finished.” This is truly fitting, as John has made a point of speaking of the work of Christ being the work of the Father, that it is only when Christ has been put to death, when, as He has said, He leaves His disciples, that the work is “finished.” It is only when Jesus takes the curse that has rested upon humanity since the days of Adam and sin entered into the world and nails it to the cross with Him that He can say that His mission on earth, the reclaiming of humanity for God and the reconciling of the world to Himself, is finished. Then and only then, when Christ has provided the appropriate human response, throughout His life and even more so in His death, that the Spirit can come and not consume us but empower us for the trials that Jesus has just told us about.

But what will this Advocate, this Holy Spirit, do? Jesus says that, “When he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.” I must admit that for a long time, this statement confused me. I understood that the Spirit would prove the world wrong about sin because they did not believe in Him because this was indeed sin, but the other two statements baffled me. I can’t say that I understand them fully today, but I think I understand it a bit better than I used to.

The Spirit will prove the world wrong “about sin, because they do not believe in me.” Jesus is not just saying that the Spirit will prove the world wrong because they have sinned by not believing in Christ, but that the world will be proven wrong about sin. Jesus is saying that the Holy Spirit will show that the world does not even know what sin is and that God’s definition of sin is very different than ours often is. What do we say is sin? We think that murder, adultery, and violence is sin; we think that oppressing others is sinful, we think that when we work against the well-being of others or hate them, it is sin. Are those things destructive? Absolutely. Are they things that Christians are called to avoid? You bet. But Jesus is saying that our whole concept of sin needs to be redefined. The greatest sinner is not the one who has done a lot of things wrong, but the one who, in spite of the grace and love that Jesus has shown them, refuses to believe in Him.

This is an offensive idea, one that Paul says that is “foolishness” to the world, but is in fact the very wisdom of God. To give an example of how offensive this idea is, I want to reflect a bit on Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Paul had preached among the Galatians a gospel where Jesus has taken their place, where He has done what they could not do and lives in and through them, making them more who they were created to be than ever before. It is in this letter that Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.”

The Galatians had forgotten this message and had begun to listen to other teachers who told them that, once God showed them grace, they needed to work really hard and finish their salvation themselves, that, now that God had done something, it was their turn to work and bring what God had started by grace to completion by works. Paul’s message was that God will finish the work He has begun. What this means is that Christian faith is not simply an ethical lifestyle where we human beings are the judge of right and wrong. Instead, it means that, in spite of our best efforts, only the response that Christ has made on our behalf and in our place is worthy of God. Because it is Christ’s response and not our response that is pleasing to God, we must renounce ourselves, our own way of doing things, and follow Christ, pleading only the name of Christ for our acceptance by God. This is a very different way to think about sin. It is not a matter of getting your act together, but of letting Christ be your righteousness.

The next point, that the Spirit will prove the world wrong “about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer” is deeply related. When we read the book of Acts and we see the apostles taking the good news into the world, what do they do? They do the things that Jesus was doing, they say the things that Jesus was saying, and they were persecuted in the ways Jesus was persecuted. Real righteousness is not the self-discipline and dedication of human beings, but the very empowerment of God. The Holy Spirit shows that real righteousness is the righteousness of Christ, who once walked the earth and is now present in the lives of Christians through the power of the Holy Spirit. We become righteous, not because we do many good deeds, nor because we avoid evil ones, but because we are becoming ever more closely joined to Christ in every aspect of life.

Finally, the Spirit, we are told, will prove the world wrong “about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.” Our way of thinking about judgment is where someone or something is declared bad and then action is taken immediately to remove that person or thing from society so they can’t hurt anyone anymore. Jesus is saying that judgment is something that is declared long before the sentence is carried out. Christians do not live with hope and joy because the world is doing well, nor because we think that the world is going to get better by human strength and creativity. Instead, we have hope and joy because we know the end of the story. We know that, in spite of the evil that we see all around us, the source of this evil, the ruler of this world, stands condemned. We do not say that Christ is Lord over sin and death because sin and death are no longer present in our world of space and time, but that they have been defeated and their days are numbered.

What I think is perhaps the most amazing thing that Jesus says here is not his radical redefinition of sin, righteousness and judgment, but what the Spirit will do for believers. “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 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.” Earlier, in chapter fourteen, Jesus has promised that He will not leave His disciples as orphans, but will send the Holy Spirit to be with them. Here, he clarifies what He means when He promises the Spirit. It is not as though the Spirit, this Advocate that Jesus is promising is some stranger, even though they have not received Him yet.

The Spirit is not someone who can be separated from Christ as if the ministry of the Holy Spirit is separate from the ministry of Christ. What can the apostles expect when the Spirit arrives? The do not need to worry that they will miss the Spirit or that they will confuse it with their own spirit because the Spirit is not some random Spirit but the very Spirit of Christ taking up residence in themselves. The things of Christ will be imparted to them through the Spirit.

This is truly an amazing miracle. If we were not overwhelmed by the idea that the God of the universe, who created everything that exists out of nothing, who has manifested Himself throughout history in mighty miracles, signs and wonders, has entered into our brokenness and taken our limitation upon Himself in order to redeem it, this idea, that this very same God would enter into, not just the one man Jesus of Nazareth, but into absolutely every single person who comes to believe in Christ, should knock us over. Did you know that being a believer in Christ is not an agreement to live according to a list of “dos” and “don’ts,” it is not a matter of believing all the right things in just the right way, it is not even a matter of being at church every Sunday of your life and helping on all the committees, though all those things might happen. Instead, believing in Christ is a radical transformation where you are given the very Spirit of God, who is the fullness of God so that you might be made to live more like Christ day after day.

Think about what this means. It means that God has not abandoned you, even during the times when it might feel like it, but has taken up residence so that God is even closer to you than you are to yourself. It means that you have not been forgotten, but bound to Christ with the very power and presence of God. It means that you are not left to your own devices to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work really hard in order for God to love you, but rather that Christ has already offered that perfect sacrifice that you are searching for and offered it to God on your behalf and in your place.

Brothers and sisters, we have not been left as orphans; instead, we have been given a family that will never end, that will never be broken, and will never cast us out. We have been adopted into the family of God and God has given His very self as our pledge that He will not turn His back on us. Everything that belongs to the Father also belongs to Christ and the Holy Spirit takes those things and gives them to us. As those who have received the great things of God, let us go out and let Christ live His life in and through us, that the world might know the transforming power of God manifest in our lives and in the lives of others. Let us pray.

AMEN