It will not be until the last Sunday in June that we return to green vestments and our regular cycle of readings from St Luke’s Gospel. The Sunday before that we will celebrate Corpus Christi, although the reading is from Luke, but in this article I want to look at the readings for the first two Sundays in June, which are Pentecost and Trinity Sunday.
The Gospels on those days continue to be from St John’s Gospel, and quite naturally both deal with the Holy Spirit. Pentecost is one of the few days in the Church’s year when it is very common to hear a sermon on the First Reading instead of the Gospel, because of course the reading from Acts actually recounts the events that the feast commemorates, but it is certainly worth looking at the Gospel, and what strikes us immediately is St John’s unique use of the word parakletos. This comes into our lectionary translation as “Advocate”, though elsewhere we might see “Comforter” or “Counsellor” or simply “Paraclete”. The Holy Spirit does feature elsewhere in St John’s Gospel, but in Christ’s words to his disciples at the Last Supper, which make up Chapters 14-16, he receives this unusual title several times, and our Pentecost Gospel gives us the first and second occurrences of the word.
The first thing to notice is that Christ is speaking of his forthcoming departure, and tells his disciples that the Holy Spirit will act as “another Advocate” for them. In some sense, then, the Spirit seems to be a substitute for Jesus, or at least he takes over some of the role that Jesus has been playing in the lives of the Apostles thus far. Indeed, Jesus goes on to say that the Advocate will “teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”; the Holy Spirit’s presence among the Apostles, guiding them (and their successors) into the fullness of truth is indeed the continuation of the teaching ministry of Christ 2,000 years ago.
This notion of the Holy Spirit is very much the theme of the Gospel for Trinity Sunday this year also, which is taken from the same section of John: “When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will lead you to the complete truth.” Although here Christ does not refer to the Spirit as the Advocate, a few verses earlier he says “When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf” (John 15:26). These two “Spirit of Truth” passages come perhaps as close as anywhere in the New Testament to an explicit statement of the doctrine of the Trinity – notice how Jesus tells us that it is he, the Son, who sends the Spirit from the Father.
One consequence of this, I suggest, is that we should see the teaching mission of the Church, seeking to lead all of humanity to the fullness of truth, as thoroughly Trinitarian. That is, it is the mission of the Church to draw people into the very life of God which is the Trinity. St John begins his Gospel by telling us that “in him is life” (John 1:4) and that the mission of the Word is a life-giving mission – indeed, specifically a divine-life-giving mission. In the two Gospel passages for Pentecost and Trinity Sunday we learn that a key aspect of that mission is the sending of the Spirit to the Apostles to make them teachers of truth.
We can say, then, that the Apostles – and therefore the Apostolic Church to which we belong – participate in the teaching mission of the Word, which is seen first of all in Christ’s earthly ministry. But a central question remains: why “Advocate”? Why not stick to “Spirit of Truth”? Perhaps the answer lies in the passage quoted above from John 15: “…he will testify on my be-half.” Because, just like the English noun “advocate”, parakletos evokes the notion of a trial, of a courtroom: your parakletos was your defence counsel. In his own trial before Pilate (who, remember, asked cynically “What is truth?”), Jesus turned the tables and put Pilate, Rome and the whole world on trial. So now, with the Spirit of Truth as our advocate, we are empowered to bear witness to Christian truth in the face of a hostile world. When the Church speaks the truth, she is not just teaching, but testifying, bearing witness against the falsehoods sown by the father of lies.
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