Wednesday
of the Sixth
Week
of Easter
May 20th
READING: John 16: 12-15
“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.”
~~~
New Revised Standard Version
Bible: Anglicised Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993, 1995 the Division
of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the
United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
REFLECTION
No
metaphor, no simile will work. I’ll stick with the Spirit makes known the Son
makes known the Creator-Father, and that can’t happen unless the three are
fundamentally one. But what I do get is that something called “truth” is very
important to John, as he tells the Jesus story, It emerges in his wonderful,
unforgettable Prologue, in which the great motifs of the Fourth Gospel are
previewed: truth and light are coupled at John 1:9, truth and grace at John
1:14, 1:17. Truth is a big issue for John: his final reference to truth in his gospel-account
is the penultimate verse, John 21:24. A critical contrast with Jesus represents
the low-point in the narrative, when Pilate asks “what is truth?” (John 18:38).
Which
is a fair question, really, and one to which I won’t provide a satisfactory
answer. To some extent that is John’s point. Credibility gaps are anti-truth.
Pilate, pawn of a powerful empire, toadies and prevaricates. Caiaphas sells out
to the powerful. The disciples, who John’s audience would realize end up as
bearers of truth, scarper. Only after the Paraclete-Spirit is breathed on them
(John 20:22) by the Crucified but Risen Lord do they finally get it and become
truth-bearers (and the Spirit glorifies the Son who glorifies the Father).
Later,
if we are allowed for a moment to glance at 1, 2 and 3 John, “untruth” becomes
a dire warning: “Those who say ‘I love God,’ and hate their siblings, are
liars.” Those who say “I love God” but create a congregational petri dish that endangers the most
vulnerable in the community, attempting to score anti-government points, then
there may be something of a credibility gap amongst my KPIs.[1]
To
be personal again, there’s plenty of blunders in my life, and there may be some
in yours, too. Thank God for grace. And for the Paraclete-Spirit. Truth is embodied
in Jesus because there is in him no credibility gap between word and action.
That’s why, profoundly, John drew on the title Logos, Word, for Jesus. The
perfect correlation of word and action is complete in Jesus … complete in a way
it can be only in pure holiness, the realm of absolute glory (John 1:14).
That’s why Pilate and Caiaphas and all human leaders who play games with power
crumble in the light of the Crucified but Risen One.
All this had to resonate with the experience of those listening to John’s
gospel-account or they would have locked him in the psych ward, thrown away the
key, and we wouldn’t be reading him today.
[1]
In case you have not had the dubious pleasure of exposure to the phrase, “key performance indicators” is a term from commercial activity
that normally should have no place in the witness and work of the Christian
community. “Die to self and be born to Christ” or “not I who live but Christ in
me” are rather difficult to quantify as KPIs.
No comments:
Post a Comment