Robert Barron - The Holy Spirit Will Teach You Everything
Peace be with you, friends. We come to the sixth Sunday of Easter, so we are nearing the end of the Easter season. This means the readings start speaking about the Holy Spirit. The Church is preparing us for the great feast of Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit. There is a really interesting juxtaposition between the Gospel and the first reading, which I want to explore. Before I conclude this homily, I also want to glance at the second reading from the book of Revelation, as I think they are related in a fascinating way.
We return to the high priestly prayer of Jesus, who, the night before He dies, is talking to His disciples. He says, «Whoever loves me will keep my word. My Father will love him, and we will come and make our dwelling in him.» This expresses one of the great truths of Christianity: the indwelling of the Trinitarian persons, which is beautiful. However, I want to focus on what comes next. He says, «I’ve told you this while I’m with you, but the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of what I told you.»
Karl Barth, the great Protestant theologian from the last century, said, «The claim that God has spoken implies the Trinity.» What he meant was that if you say God has spoken—which is a basic biblical intuition—that means there must be in God a speaker, whom we call the Father. There must also be a word spoken, which we call the Son. Barth states that there must be an interpreter of the word. Why? Because the divine word is too much for our limited minds to comprehend. Thus, we need not a human interpreter, as He won’t suffice; we need a divine interpreter of the divine word.
Well, that is what is happening here. I have told you all this because the Father has spoken His word in Jesus, but the Father and I are going to send an Advocate. It says in English that the Greek term is «paracletos.» «Para» means to call over, and «kletos» signifies someone brought in. The idea here is similar to that of a lawyer or someone who will assist you during a trial; you call them to give you advice. This is why «paracletos» becomes «advocatus.» «Vocatus» means called, and «ad» means to come over and help me; hence, «Advocate» refers to the Holy Spirit. And what will He do? He will teach you everything.
Now this is a really important point. We can’t think about divine revelation as this football that was just delivered and then passed on unchanged from one person to another. That’s way too undynamic an understanding of this process. My go-to person here is John Henry Newman when he talked about the development of doctrine. Now please, I forbid you to read that in a relativistic way. Newman said ideas don’t exist statically on the page; rather, they exist, he said, in the play of lively minds. I have an idea, I consider it, I turn it over, I look at it from different angles, I muse, I wonder. Then you come along and I toss the idea to you and tell you what I think about it. Now you take it in and you turn it over, muse, and look at different aspects and angles, and then we pass it on to someone else and have a lively conversation about the idea. What’s happening in that process is that idea is growing, developing, unfolding—not becoming something different but becoming, in the process, more fully itself.
Now a lot of other examples come to mind. The way Newman describes a river unfolds, beginning in a tiny source, but then across space and time, it broadens and deepens, takes in tributaries, and becomes a mighty river. Think of the source of a river like the Mississippi and then the mouth of that river, and how different they are. The Mississippi, you might say, has become more itself. In a similar way, a little acorn breaks open, unfolds, takes in nutrients, mixes with the environment, grows, develops, and sends off branches, twigs, leaves, and everything else. It’s changing, yet becoming more fully itself. That’s the paradox: living things change in order to remain the same.
Think again; if a living thing has died, that means it has stopped changing. Well, in very short order, it’s no longer itself. A tree has died; it stops being the tree, turning into something else. An animal has died; it’s no longer an animal. Before you know it, it’s just part of the environment again. Living things are marked by change and development. So Newman’s famous line, «To live is to change; to be perfect is to have changed often.» Again, I forbid you to read that as some sort of 1960s-era relativism; that’s not what it means.
Hey man, things are always changing. You know it means changing to remain themselves, unfolding, becoming more authentically themselves. That’s why Chesterton, with a great image, always comes back to my mind here. He says, «If there’s this perfectly white fence post and your job is to keep it the way it is, what do you have to do?» Well, you have to paint it all the time, right? If you just leave it alone, don’t touch it—it’s perfect the way it is—then it’ll be black before you know it. No, you have to paint that thing over and over again to keep it what it is. Well, something similar applies here: ideas have to develop in order to remain themselves.
Now, the great revelation given to us in Jesus. Yes, He’s the divine logos. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. And this Word becomes flesh, dwells among us, and preaches and proclaims. The Father spoke His Word. Yes, absolutely. But He spoke that Word into human minds that take it in, mull it over, muse about it, wonder about it, look at it from different angles, discuss it, and then toss it to other people who do the same. Now, watch this process unfolding across space as the idea goes out to the wider world in different cities and places, now extended across time. One theologian thinking about Jesus passes his thoughts on to the next generation, who pass them on to another generation, and to another, until finally they’re received by someone that first person had no contact with. Yet the idea has continued to develop and unfold.
Okay, if that’s true, what we need is an interpreter of the Word. You can’t just say, «Oh yeah, I got it. I received the logos. I got it.» No, ideas are unfolding appropriately to remain themselves. And so we require indeed the advocatus, the paracletos, the advocate, the Holy Spirit, who is going to guide the Church into all truth. Again, he’ll teach you everything. It’s not just given; it’s now unfolding over space and time. All right, with all that in mind, that’s the gospel. Look at this extraordinary passage we have. It’s from the Acts of the Apostles, that marvelous text telling us about the earliest days of the Church—what they were up to. Well, what’s being described here is the first council, or synod, if you want, in the Church: the Council of Jerusalem, very early on.
What was the issue? It was a very important one. It might not strike us that way, but it was very important because Christianity emerged out of classical Judaism. You know, the first Christians were all Jews; Jesus is a Jew, and out of Judaism emerges Christianity. So the question became: to what degree do we have to remain Jewish, and to what degree is this a whole brand-new thing? What’s the relationship between our Judaism and this Jesus movement? Okay, you can see it reflected clearly in the letters of Paul. Paul’s preaching a doctrine of justification by grace through faith and not through the law. Well, I mean, right away, it’s going to cause a problem for these Jewish Christians.
Well, what do you mean, the law? The law is everything, isn’t it? Well, a problem. They bring people together, including Paul himself and Barnabas, and they talk it out. What do they do? Well, they’ve received these ideas from Jesus; they’ve received the revelation, and now they’ve got this question. And so they muse, and they mull it over, and they think, and they wonder, and they discuss, and they argue, tossing the idea back and forth until they come to a resolution. And the resolution is indeed the one that we see reflected in Paul. Of course, Christianity remains a deeply Jewish movement. You can’t understand Christianity without Judaism. At the same time, they realized there’s something so new in Jesus that we’re not tied to the old dietary and judicial precepts of the law.
Okay, they made a distinction, a determination. And then there’s this marvelous line where they say, «Listen, at the end of this whole process, it is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us not to place on you any burden beyond these necessities,» and so on. So they announce their resolution. But I love that little line: «It appeared correct to the Holy Spirit and to us.» In other words, to this community guided by the advocate, we’ve been led into a deeper truth. All right, everybody. Within a few decades of the dying and rising of Jesus, we have this first council. There have been 20 councils, including the Second Vatican Council, which happened in my own lifetime.
About once a century, on average, the Church faces a crisis as it thinks through what it believes and practices, arguing with itself, uh-huh, tossing ideas back and forth, things developing and unfolding over time and space. Uh-huh. At certain crisis points, the Church has to come together as a synod or a council, at the end of which they say some version of this: «It has appeared good to the Holy Spirit and to us.» Everybody, it’s the beauty of Church history. That’s why we study Church history, not just as an antiquarian discipline. We study it as a study of the Holy Spirit—of what the Holy Spirit has been doing, guiding the Church into all truth.
Now, I promised a glance as I end at the second reading, which is from the Book of Revelation. We’re right toward the end, and we see here the culmination of biblical revelation. It’s the arrival of the New Jerusalem, and we get that marvelous description: «He showed me the holy city coming down out of heaven from God. It gleamed with the splendor of God. Its radiance was like that of a precious stone, like jasper, clear as crystal; it had a massive high wall; the 12 gates were of pearl.» Here’s this beautiful, beautiful, complete, finished city.
What’s that represent? It represents the fullness of life in Christ, the end of all development, where the idea of the Incarnation now has reached its complete perfection. Here’s the point: We’re not there yet. We’re not there yet. That’s at the culmination of the age, at the end of time. We live now in the era of the Church. The great revelation given to us by Jesus is now developing and unfolding like a river, like a tree, like a plant, like ideas in the play of lively minds. And it’s happening. I know it can be kind of a messy process, but it’s happening. We trust under the guidance of the Advocate, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And God bless you.