It is better for you that I go away. How many times has someone said that to you, I wonder? Perhaps not so often. How many times have you thought it of someone else? Perhaps very often. But when that someone else is Our Lord, it is a very curious thing to say, indeed. Here is (as was understood) a rabbi who has gathered to Himself a group of disciples. They are hanging on His every word, and then He tells them: it is better for you that I go away. He talks of sending the Spirit as an Advocate, the Spirit of God in a flash revealed without any ambiguity to be a person; someone who can advocate for them, like in a courtroom.

Imagine the ‘pre-Pentecost’ mindset receiving all of this information from the Lord. You and I live in the ‘post-Pentecost’ world: we now know that His Spirit comes to dwell within each one of us; but for the Apostles, this data must have been very strange to hear.

• It is better that I go away,
• the Spirit of God is a person
• this person will come and reveal truth to you.

That sort of understanding of the Spirit was never previously revealed as clearly.  Looking at the Old Testament, the Scriptures indeed reference the Spirit of God many times from the very beginning in Genesis 1 with the Spirit brooding over the waters. But nevertheless, He had not been definitively and concretely revealed as a person.  This is one of the very earliest revelations of God as a Trinity: Three Persons in one God. No wonder theologians have been wrestling with this enigmatic phrase ever since it was first uttered!

But why would it be better for us that the Lord should go away? Since the Lord conquers death after the Resurrection, why couldn’t He just stay around?  If He does not need to die anymore, wouldn’t it have been better for Him simply to stay on the Earth until everyone started to believe in Him? Wouldn’t it be a better way of eliciting Faith if He just remained among us? Why must He go away? And why is it better?

The answer to these questions comes from the fact of the Incarnation itself. The Incarnation is the Word, who is by nature pure spirit, taking flesh: entering matter. The Incarnation, if you like, ‘fixes’ the Word in a certain time and in a certain place. So, the Word taking flesh and dwelling among us means that in some way God accepts the logical limitations of time and space (for the most part).

Once He has taken our flesh, He will not be in two places at once, because, to do so would be almost to cast a magic show and to unpick the meaning of taking our nature. The Incarnation, and our experience of it: the Lord walking the very Earth amongst us, could only ever be temporary. As our Lord said Himself in the Gospel from last week, for a little while He is with His disciples. The Word cannot be fixed in a time and place forever. It is universal and eternal. It needs to spread everywhere.

In Theology, we describe the work of the incarnate Word (our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ) and the Holy Spirit as a joint mission to reveal the Father. The joint mission of the Word and Spirit is the response of God to sin. (I know we do not like thinking of the word ‘sin’. It is important that we let go of some of our very deeply held and rather childish notions of what that word means. Sin does not equivocate to being naughty. Sin is opposition to God; that is true. Sin is losing God’s friendship; that is also true. But God is not like some kind of schoolteacher in the sky, waiting to give us a black mark).

Sin is the loss of everything, because everything comes from God. When we sin, we put in jeopardy all of what is good, not just some of it. Take a moment to consider the world that He has made: the beautiful sun is out, it is not too humid, our gardens are freshly planted, the birds are chirping. In a beautiful world like ours, perhaps we might imagine God looking at us and asking: ‘Why would they sin at all? Haven’t I made the world beautiful? Haven’t I made it such a world that they must respond to it? I have made it in my image. Aren’t they going to look at it and see how beautiful it is?” And that beauty points to Him.

But we do sin, don’t we? We have everything we need, but we always feel like we do not have everything we want. And the truth is happiness does not come from having what we want; it comes from wanting what we have. That is a movement of the will, to want what we have. It requires a childlike simplicity (not a childish simplicity, a childlike simplicity) looking at the world around us in awe and wonder, not in cynical calculations, wondering how to ‘cream off’ what is good and take it all for ourselves. Instead, we should just delight in the fact that it is good, it is beautiful – and we can respond to it.

I am going to pivot to give you a business anecdote. During the short period of time when I co-owned a restaurant, I was terrified of being in debt, or of getting loans from the bank; absolutely terrified of it. Aversion ran very deep. I preferred to have money in the bank which I thought was the sign of a successful business. My accountant had to explain to me that, in business, one should never be scared of debt, because debt permits leverage. Money in the bank is fundamentally an action of fear. Taking on debt in order to invest in your business is reaching out, going out into the world, and seeing how it will respond. Money in the bank is being fearful of a what will happen in a future yet unknown.

As we see all too clearly in our current world, even money in the bank is not something that is all that secure: a better way to grow a business is often to spend. In my case, my business partner and I did not agree on whether we should refurbish the dining room. My instinct was it needed to happen, but it would have cost a lot of money, and we would have to have taken on more debt. I felt we needed it, to create an ‘edge’, a unique ‘vibe’ to the eatery. Taking on the debt, doing something which seems risky, is often a way to get a better reward. That works on a purely worldly analysis, but the same is alsp true spiritually.

Having the Lord incarnate amongst us is the spiritual equivalent of money in the bank. Savior? Check. He’s right here with us. I don’t need any more. He is ‘in the bank.’ I am protected against the future.

The Spirit disagrees.

The Spirit says, ‘you must be empowered to be Christ to someone else, not to keep Christ in the bank.’ I am not saying that you have all of the authority of Christ, but by being incorporated into His life through Baptism, you have the responsibility to be Christ to others. And not a different Christ, either, but the same Christ. The indwelling Spirit encourages you to spend that Christ on someone else, because that Christ was prepared to spend Himself on all men.

The Gospel today is really quite lawyerly. It is concerned with justice and judgment. It has a certain air of the courtroom. The Holy Spirit is described as the Paraclete.  In Greek, Paraclete means one who is called to my side. The one who speaks for me in court is someone who is called to my side; an advocate. ‘Paraclete,’ you see, comes from the verb kalo; to call; the very same is also used in the word for Church. Here the Spirit is called to my side, but the Church called out (of the world).

The Holy Spirit as Paraclete, who advocates for you and for me before the Throne of Grace, is also the prosecutor. In this translation, He is also the one that will convict the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment He has two roles: defence counsel and prosecutor at the very same, because God does indeed sit as judge.

In the Gospel for today, I substituted more accurate translation of the word usually translated as condemned as judged, because judged is close to the Greek kriseos. The ruler of this world has been judged already by God. The ruler of this world is a way of describing Evil and its forces. God sits as judge but not a judge that we should fear. We fear earthly judges, because they do not have the full picture, all of the information – and, in many ways, they bring with them their own prejudices. And when we go before an earthly judge, he doesn’t know all of our secrets in our heart. God does.

We should never fear the just judge, because He knows all of the evidence, including that evidence that you and I have never put breath to. The Spirit convicts, exposes, and prosecutes sin, righteousness, and judgment. And if you were to put those together, sin and righteousness are the opposites of each other; judgment is the discernment of God between the two, which has been given to the Son.

Instead of sin, if we have Faith, we believe in Him. The Lord gives us the explanation of sin.  Sin occurs because men do not believe in him. What’s the antidote to that? Faith.

This judgment of God is not just the final judgement at the end of the world. It is what God is always doing, not judging in the sense of causing us anxiety, but instead, discerning between what is good and what is not good. We are constantly in that process of being judged by God. It does not sound like a very positive thing, but in fact it is, because God is, at the very same time, our judge, the prosecutor, and also the defense counsel. Quite literally, a juridical Trinity. (God’s desire is no one should be lost, but that all should be saved. Not just some, not a tiny clique, but that all should be saved. He made you and me, and the fact of our life is all the evidence that you need of his passionate love for each one of you. He desires that all will be saved. Even the ones that you and I do not like, He wants them to be saved, too).

It is the Spirit, sent when the incarnate Word returns to heaven, who works all things out in our time and space. We live in the age of the Spirit (more to come on that as we approach Pentecost). But at this stage we can foresee the Spirit working amongst us by two distinct ‘calling cards’. When the Spirit is hard at work amongst us in our community, you will see (1.) extraordinary growth; growth that you really cannot control; growth that is quite overwhelming.  It requires each of us to buckle up and go along for the ride. But if the Spirit is at work, not only will there be extraordinary growth, there will be (2.) attacks by Satan. If you are not being attacked by Satan, you are not doing the work of God. If you are not being attacked by Satan, the Spirit is not working amongst you. Satan only attacks those who are doing the work of God. Therefore, if you want evidence that God is at work: look to the fact that you are tempted. Satan does not tempt sinners who have no desire of repentance. There is no point. They are already his. Satan only tempts those who are either (a.) saints or (b.) want to be saints. He does not care about those who do not want to be saints, because they are already doing his work.

The Spirit of God, who is entirely God, is not some kind of distillation of God or ‘God in a gas’ but very God.  Through His presence, all of the authority and the wisdom of God is working in our extraordinary community right here in Georgetown! The Spirit is working amongst us.

Have we not seen extraordinary growth? We have indeed.

Have we not seen attacks from the evil one? We have indeed.

What is the medicine, then?

First of all, we must work hard, in all humility and patience, to manage that growth: not to control it, not to stop it, but to manage it and to recognize that if God is working, He has an answer that we cannot even know or think about. We must have to allow Him to lead.

Second, the way to deal with an attack from the evil one is to manage despair. The evil one wants for you to despair, to lose hope.  To lose hope is really a sin against the Holy Spirit (the ‘unforgiveable’ sin  because there is no way back if you not only refuse to open the door, but also take the hinges and handle away). If God himself, who is your advocate, is excluded by your despair, then how can He touch your heart? We must manage despair. Recognize that, if we are being attacked, it is not because we are wicked or not doing God’s will. It is actually the opposite. Rather than signs that things are going wrong, they are in fact signs of God calling you to do some specific work that is very important. That is the reason the devil hates you: he wants to get after you when and if you are doing the work of God. This is fundamentally the reason that it is good that the incarnate Word should go away, because when the incarnate Word goes away, He sends to us the Holy Spirit as defence counsel. We know God for who He is, because His Spirit is given to us, and dwells in our souls in Baptism. That is why it is good for us that He should go.