John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15 Commentary

Well before Jesus ever preached his first sermon, there was John the Baptist.  Long before Jesus ever uttered a parable or healed a blind person, there was John.  John had come to prepare the way for his cousin Jesus.  And when John preached about this great and coming One, he talked a lot about the Holy Spirit.  Everybody who came out to see John knew that chief among the spectacles they would witness would be baptisms.  They hadn’t nicknamed John “the Baptist” for nothing, after all.  Baptizing was to John what making bread is to a baker.

But John always downplayed his baptism in favor of the vastly more powerful baptism Jesus would bring.  Hopping up and down with great verve, John said that the real fireworks would start as soon as Jesus showed up to baptize people not with water but with the Holy Spirit.  For all the publicity he had garnered, John’s self-assessment of his own ministry boiled down to “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

But then a funny thing happened: in his ministry Jesus hardly ever talked about the Holy Spirit.  Nor did he baptize anyone.  It wasn’t what John had anticipated at all, and so in a startling passage (cf. Matthew 11 and Luke 7), John at one point sends Jesus a message to ask, “Are you the One who was to come, or should we be on the lookout for somebody else?  You know, somebody better?”  John was looking for more Spirit, more fire.

But in this Pentecost Year B lection from John 16 we encounter what Dale Bruner calls “Jesus’ Spirit Sermon” and it is hands-down the longest single section about the Holy Spirit in all the gospels.  In all the Bible!  Here we discover that John the Baptist had been right, except for the timing of it all.  Jesus was going to send forth a powerful Holy Spirit.  But the surprise comes from the fact that before he would do this, Jesus himself would go away.  Call it a kind of Trinitarian tag-team approach.  The Father dispatched the Son to this world to teach, to suffer, to die, and to rise again.  Then the Son returned to the Father so that he could send the Holy Spirit to his followers on this earth.

Jesus makes clear that the Holy Spirit would become the conduit through which would flow all the energy and riches of God.  The Spirit would become the jumper cables to re-infuse us with the Father’s energy whenever the Church’s batteries ran down.  The Spirit would become the cosmic water main through which the cleansing tide of baptism would flow to wash away sin.  The Spirit would become the ultimate radio beacon who would broadcast the truths of Jesus, letting all of us who have been fitted with the right antennae learn on a constant basis the implications of the gospel for our lives.  Use whatever image you want, but it is clear that the Holy Spirit has been the Church’s living connection to God ever since the great day of Pentecost.

But this tends to be the limit of our thinking about the role of the Holy Spirit.  That is to say, we quietly restrict the Spirit’s primary work to the interior life of the Church and of its members.  That’s why John 16 is so arresting.  Because here when Jesus talked about the Spirit’s work, he focused as much on the Spirit’s work in the wider world as he did on the Spirit’s work in the church.  In fact, in verse 8 the very first thing Jesus says has to do with what the Spirit would reveal not to the church but to the world.

As Dale Bruner has noted, the Spirit, according to Jesus, would tell the world three related things:

What’s Wrong

What’s Right

Who Won

And please notice that any one of those teachings without the other two would be not just incomplete, it would be wrong.  Take away or forget about any one, and the other two dissolve into confusion.

First, the Spirit reveals what’s wrong.  The Spirit needs to convict the world of guilt with regard to sin, Jesus says.  Just talking about the fact that this world has problems is not enough.  In fact, it has never been too difficult to convince the world that something is fundamentally amiss.  The key is to underscore not just that something is awry with life but why that is so.  There’s something wrong with this world all right, and the reason is sin. The Holy Spirit of Pentecost reminds us of this.

But secondly Jesus says the Spirit comes to convict the world of something else: what’s right or righteousness.  At first glance, that seems like an odd thing to say.  These verses are a bit difficult to translate or understand, but it seems that Jesus is saying that he himself is the Righteous One, the source of all that is good and beautiful and proper.  The Spirit reveals this Christ to the world.

But that’s not to say that we never arrive at a conclusion of judgment, because that is the third thing Jesus says the Spirit must do: tell the world who won.  The Holy Spirit of Pentecost is here also to reveal to the world that the prince of darkness is done for.  It will be the goodness, grace, and beauty of the Righteous One that will rule the cosmic day in the end.  That’s the good news of the gospel.

So as people of Pentecost, we need to let the Spirit use us to tell the world what’s wrong but we do this ever and only with hope in our voices.  There is much that is wrong but because it is not random wrong but a systemic problem that can be traced back to sin, it is possible for a powerful God to fix that systemic wrongness, and in Christ Jesus the Lord God has already done so!

Textual Points:

The NIV of John 16:11 translates the Greek to say “prince of this world.”  I’m not certain why they used “prince” here because the Greek is archon, which quite straightforwardly means “ruler,” which is the translation in the NRSV.  But maybe for some people calling the devil the “ruler of the world” sounded too scary and so they made him a prince, which seems less threatening.  But John has Jesus saying that the evil one has been a ruler of this world, and the long, sordid run of history certainly lends credence to the idea that someone pretty awful has been calling some shots in this world.  But the really good news is that even if there is some sense in which the devil really has been a “ruler” of this world, he has even so gone down to defeat at the hands of God’s Christ!

Illustration Idea:

In a scene from the comedy movie When Harry Met Sally, we witness something that is at once somber and yet funny.  In the scene Harry and his best friend are seated in the stands at a New York Giants NFL football game (you know, back when we could sit packed close together!).  But they are not really watching the game because Harry is deeply sad since his wife had left him the day before.  With a crestfallen expression on his face, he tells his friend all about the events that had led up to this tragedy in his life.  It is a very serious, unhappy conversation.

The funny part of this otherwise somber scene is that while these two men are talking, “the wave” is sweeping through the stadium — this is the phenomenon that cropped up about twenty or so years ago whereby all the people in a stadium sequentially stand up, raise their arms, and give a yell, and then quickly sit back down so that as you look across the stadium, it looks like a human wave is rippling through the stands.  So in this scene, although the conversation between these two friends is so dark that they really are paying no attention to the people around them, nevertheless each time the wave reached their part of the stadium, both men stood up, raised their arms, and then sat back down, never missing a beat in their conversation about the one man’s sorrows!

Being in a crowd can make you do funny things–stuff you would not do or say otherwise.  Have you ever been to a basketball game only to find yourself screaming like a banshee?  (Or have you ever been to a game where you saw someone you know—someone who is ordinarily rather shy and retiring in nature—screaming like a banshee!!?)  There seems to be a certain spirit or power in many situations in life–an influence in which you can get “caught up” and so motivated to do things which are not called for in other situations.  On a darker note, some of the same dynamics that can make us jump up and down like everyone else at an exciting basketball game can also lead people to get carried away at post-game parties which turn into out-of-control riots.

There are influences on all of us which are not visible but which are very powerful nonetheless.  Parents have strong reasons for warning their children to stay away from “the wrong crowd.”  Most of us at one time or another have experienced what can happen when we get caught up in peer pressure.  On the other hand, there are good community spirits which can mold people in positive ways.  Just think of how the spirit of neighborliness draws the Amish together.  There are few spectacles as startling or as moving as an Amish “barn raising” when neighbors from a region come together to build a barn in just one day.

There are many different ways, both good and bad, to get carried away by something.  Interestingly, the New Testament tells us in many places that the Holy Spirit of God–the living fire that just is Pentecost–is also something in which believers need to get caught up.  The Spirit carries us away and so leads us to say things and to do things that we would not do were we not in the zone of the Spirit’s influence.