Spirit of Truth
Acts 2.1–21; John 14.8–27
a sermon at the Eucharist in Durham Cathedral
on the Feast of Pentecost, 27 May 2007
by the Bishop of Durham, Dr N. T. Wright
Anoint and cheer our soilèd face
I love to think of Bishop John Cosin writing, and praying, that translation
of the ancient Veni Creator Spiritus, with all the turbulence of the
mid-seventeenth century to give plenty of substance to the urgent petitions.
Cosin is quite a presence in Auckland Castle, as he is about Palace Green if
you know where to look, and stands as a salutary reminder of a rich, rugged but
robust spirituality that somehow came through the middle of that terrible
century and planted again the flag of emerging Anglicanism here in Durham. And
we can read the confusion and danger, the sorrow and the turmoil, of those
years, in those lines about comfort, life and fire of love, and especially in
the clear recognition of the blinded sight, the soilèd face, the foes who are
to be kept far off and the peace which we long for at home.
Cosin thus folds the troubles and dangers of his day, both civil and
ecclesiastical, within the invocation of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who comes
to inspire and lighten, to anoint and to bless with the sevenfold gift. And we
his successors have need, three and a half centuries or so later, to pray in
the same way, beset as we are in church and state once more with many and great
dangers. Pentecost is regularly thought of as a time of great joy and
excitement, and rightly so. But any reading of Acts or John, two of the main
places in the New Testament where the Spirit plays a large part, will show that
Pentecost must also be a time of clear-eyed recognition of the challenges which
God’s people face both in the world and in their own internal life, and of the
urgent need for the inspiration, strengthening and guiding of the Holy Spirit
without whom we are simply a bunch of ignorant armies clashing by night.
Take Acts for a start. The great Pentecost scene, with the wind and fire
and the sudden rush of multilingual speech, has confused many in the last
generations because it has been set within the wrong story. It has been held up
as the archetype of a particular form of Christian experience, a filling and
empowering which transforms sleepy or backsliding Christians into lively and
zealous ones. Thank God that happens in many different ways, because the church
always needs waking up and shaking up, and the day we forget that or resist it
we might as well crawl away under a stone. But that isn’t the story which Luke
is telling at this point. There is nothing wrong with the disciples before
Pentecost; they are praying, worshipping, joyful followers of the risen and
ascended Jesus, simply awaiting further instructions and the power to carry
them out. And the story which Luke is telling doesn’t focus on them and their
spiritual experience, though it includes that. Luke’s story is about God and
God’s kingdom and about the sovereign lordship of the risen and ascended Jesus.
Because Pentecost, you see, goes very closely with the story of the
Ascension. Many western Christians have been embarrassed about the Ascension
over the years, because they have thought of heaven and earth in the wrong way.
We have supposed that the first-century Christians thought of ‘heaven’ as a
place up in the sky, within our space-time universe, and that they imagined
Jesus as a kind of primitive space-traveller heading upwards to sit beside God
somewhere a few miles away up in the sky. And we have told ourselves this story
about the early Christians within an implicit modernist framework in which God
and the world are in any case a long way away from one another, so that if
Jesus has gone to be with God – whatever that means – we understand that he has
left us behind, that he is now far away in another dimension altogether. And we
have then thought that the point of this story is that we, too, will one day go
off to this same place called ‘heaven’, leaving earth behind for good. But this
way of understanding the Ascension is, quite simply, wrong on all counts. The
early Christians, like their Jewish contemporaries, saw heaven and earth as the
overlapping and interlocking spheres of God’s good creation, with the point
being that heaven is the control room from which earth is run. To say that
Jesus is now in heaven is to say three things. First, that he is present with
his people everywhere, no longer confined to one space-time location within
earth, but certainly not absent. Second, that he is now the managing director
of this strange show called ‘earth’, though like many incoming chief executives
he has quite a lot to do to sort it out and turn it around. Third, that he will
one day bring heaven and earth together as one, becoming therefore personally
present to us once more within God’s new creation. The Bible doesn’t say much
about our going to heaven. It says a lot about heaven, and particularly
heaven’s chief inhabitant, coming back to earth.
That is the story of the opening of Acts; and Pentecost, in Acts 2, means
what it means within that story, not some other. Pentecost is therefore
to be seen as the moment when the personal presence of Jesus with the
disciples is translated into the personal power of Jesus in the
disciples; because Pentecost signals the mode and means by which the chief
executive is putting his new authority into operation. Our generation has
backed off from the idea of Jesus, let alone the church, as actually running
things in this world, because it sounds to us like triumphalism, like fundamentalism,
like the attempt to establish a direct theocracy which is of course an affront
to our wonderful western democratic ideals. But Pentecost, and the story of the
early church which follows from it, shows clearly that this isn’t so. The
disciples, filled with the Spirit, begin the work of Jesus’ sovereign and
saving rule over the world, whose Lord he now is, by their shared common life,
their works of healing, their proclamation of him as Lord and King, and their
bold witness against the authorities who try to stop them. And that just about
sums up the whole book, all the way to when Paul arrives in Rome and announces
God as King and Jesus as Lord right under Caesar’s nose, openly and unhindered.
So Pentecost is about the powerful presence of Jesus with his people; about the
implementation of Jesus’ healing, saving rule through his people; and thirdly
about the anticipation, in and through that work, of the final day when heaven
and earth shall be one. It isn’t just that the Spirit is the ‘down payment’ of
what is to come for us as his people; the Spirit is the advance sign of
what God is going to do for the whole earth, the entire created order.
Because, you see, at the heart of Pentecost, in Acts and actually in
John as well, the coming of the Spirit is all about the launching of the new
Temple. In Judaism, heaven and earth overlapped in the Temple; but now, says
Luke, Jesus is the one who has taken earth, in his own person, his own human
body, right into heaven; and the Spirit is the corollary of this, the life of
heaven becoming manifest and powerful here on earth. Heaven and earth are thus
locked together in a firm and unbreakable Trinitarian embrace, as God the
Father welcomes the human Son, the first-fruits of the new creation, into his
rightful seat as Lord of the World, and pours out his own Spirit upon Jesus’
followers so that they can both be and accomplish new creation in
themselves and in the world. This is the sold rock on which Christian mission
is built, and in consequence also the solid rock on which the church must live
in its own life of worship and mutual love. And this is why, on the day of
Pentecost, Peter’s sermon isn’t about how people can have a new spiritual
experience. It’s about the fact that God’s new day has dawned at last, the great
and glorious day of the Lord spoken of by the prophets, and about the fact that
the crucified Jesus has been exalted as King and Lord over Israel and the whole
world. And the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit are given not just to comfort,
inspire and enlighten us for our own private benefit, but to send us out as
heralds of this new dawn, as messengers of this new King.
And as we find ourselves thus commissioned and equipped, we discover
that, again to our embarrassment, we have to speak about truth; indeed, that we
have to speak truth, to a generation for whom that claim is instantly suspect,
automatically put through the shredder of deconstruction and irony. And I
suspect that the embarrassment of truth goes quite closely with the
embarrassment of the Ascension: because we still live within that implicit
split-level world where we know that we are upon earth, where we can’t be
certain of anything, and that claims to absolute truth are claims to a heavenly
perspective upon the world, a God’s-eye view which can quickly be exposed as
laughable arrogance. (I am reminded that in E. P. Sanders’ famous book, Paul
and Palestinian Judaism, the index has an entry which says ‘Truth,
ultimate’, with three page references, pages 30, 32 and 430; but when you turn
to those pages you find that each one is blank. Sanders is both ironically
declaring his epistemological humility and also cocking a snook at those
interpreters who believe that we can ever know the ultimate truth.) But,
unfortunately for our over-ironic age, we are offered and indeed given the
Spirit of Truth, and we have no choice but to follow where this Spirit leads
and to speak the truth to which we are thus led.
And John leaves us in no doubt where that will be. ‘Sanctify them in
the truth,’ prays Jesus in the upper room, ‘your word is truth.’ But this,
again, is not a private experience, such as the gnostic might wish for. It
leads directly, as in Acts, to confrontation with those who presume that they
own the truth, and back up their claim with violence. ‘My kingdom is not from
this world,’ says Jesus to Pilate in chapter 18. ‘So, you are a king, are you?’
asks Pilate, eagerly latching on to the words which might have Jesus condemn
himself out of his own mouth. ‘That word is your way of putting it,’ replies
Jesus. ‘My way is like this: I was born, I came into the world to testify to
the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ ‘Truth!’
answered Pilate. ‘What’s that?’ And John’s point, in the middle of the massive
irony, and the direct clash of the non-violent kingdom of God with the violent
and ignorant armies of Caesar, is crystal clear: truth is what happens when
heaven and earth come together as they were always meant to. Truth is therefore
what you find in Jesus, who is the point where that happens. And truth is
therefore what happens when the Spirit comes to fill, to guide, to commission,
to empower the followers of Jesus. ‘Teach us to know the Father, Son, and thee
of both to be but one’; truth is what happens when we are caught up in the
powerful, healing, transforming love of the Triune God, acted out on Calvary
and at Easter, poured out at Pentecost, given so that we, the followers of
Jesus, may be truth-tellers, truth-tasters here at the Eucharist, truth-livers
as we confront the lies in our own hearts and lives and communities,
truth-doers in our public and political life, in our ordering of our church at
this turbulent time when like John Cosin we are faced with scepticism on the
one hand and puritanism on the other. All we can do in such a time is pray the
Pentecost prayer, not as triumphalists trying to trump everyone else with our
spiritual superiority but as humble hearts seeking after holiness and hope, and
ready to find our minds and our manners remade by the truth, by the Truth
Incarnate, by the Spirit of Truth whom he sends from the Father.
Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,
And lighten with celestial fire.
That through the ages all along