Sixth Sunday of Easter
“The Advocate” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Psalm 66:8-20/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (John 14:15-21/NRSVUE)
I encountered a lot of memorable personalities over the course of my twenty-five years in finance but one of the most memorable was Stan.
He was a big guy with a voice to match and came from the New York City borough of Queens (which was quite clear from his accent); he was brash, sometimes to the point of being abrasive; he was five years younger than me but looked five years older (once we actually talked Stan into showing us his driver’s license to prove his age because we were so sure he was lying about it); and he was one of the brightest and most capable coworkers I’ve ever had. Sadly, Stan passed away a few years ago (the Wall Street lifestyle has been known to take its toll).
The thing I treasured most about Stan was his ability to cut through all of posturing that often takes place in meetings in order to get to the heart of a matter. Despite the fact that he was generally the smartest person in any room he happened to be in, Stan would often play ignorant even though he wasn’t ignorant with the goal of moving things along and finding a solution.
When someone in a group was explaining a complex problem without success, Stan would take one for the team and hit the reset button. He’d raise his hand and shout, “I don’t get it” (even though he probably did get it). And then, as dependably as the sun comes up in the morning, he’d follow up his confessions of alleged ignorance by saying, “Now explain it to me like you were explaining it to my dog.”
When I stop and consider the many meetings I attended over the years in which Stan did this (not to mention the countless others I wasn’t part of), I can’t help but think that, had Stan’s dog actually been present and paying attention all of those times when people were asked to explain financial things to him, that dog could have been one of the most successful investors on Wall Street.
All kidding aside, I believe that Stan was really on to something with the way he approached complicated issues. Let’s be honest, sometimes us humans can be really daunted by challenging things, and sometimes we make them more difficult than they either are or need to be. Maybe, we’d be better served by just starting with the basics and seeing where they take us, which is exactly what I was thinking as I was pondering today’s reading from John’s Gospel (okay, I was also thinking about where was Stan’s dog was when I really needed him to explain something to me).
This short passage comes from the section of John’s Gospel known as the “Farewell Discourse,” which begins in the previous chapter. Over the span of about five chapters (all of which take place on the evening of the Last Supper, the evening before Jesus’s crucifixion), Jesus tells his disciples about his impending betrayal, death and resurrection; he also consoles them and tells them about what life will be like after he’s gone.
In the verses preceding today’s reading, Jesus informs his followers that he’s not going to be with them much longer. And he also tells them that he is “the way, and the truth, and the life” and that no one comes to God except through him. Now, these two things taken together probably freaked those disciples out a little bit; after all, if no one comes to God except through Jesus, and Jesus himself will soon be gone, then how are they (or anyone else for that matter) actually going to find their way to God? And that’s where this passage seems to get a little more complicated.
Jesus tells his disciples that God will send an Advocate to be with them forever: the Spirit of truth or, as Jesus will refer to it in the verses immediately following today’s reading, the Holy Spirit. And that Advocate, that Spirit will be the one to show them the way.
John’s Gospel and the first letter of John are the only places in the New Testament that use the term “Advocate” to refer to the Holy Spirit. Advocate is one translation of the original Greek word parákletōs, which can also be understood to mean “helper” or “comforter” or “supporter.”
To be clear, Jesus actually tells his disciples that God will give them another Advocate to be with them forever, which is important because the Advocate that Jesus speaks of here sounds an awful lot like Jesus himself — both are sent by God, both are misunderstood (and even rejected) by the world but known by Jesus’s followers, and both come here bearing the truth. And so what Jesus says here makes sense since this Advocate will the one to pick up where he leaves off.
But it probably didn’t make a whole lot of sense to those disciples. Just put yourself in their shoes for minute (which were probably sandals, so put yourself in their sandals for a minute): Jesus shows up out of nowhere; he teaches them a bunch of stuff about God, he enables them to witness all sorts of miracles; and he pretty much has them convinced by this point that he’s been sent by God, that he’s the Messiah, that he’s the one who’s going to save them (and everybody else, for that matter).
But then he suddenly tells them that he’s going away — before they’ve been liberated from their oppressors, before their enemies have been vanquished, before the world has been made right, before he’s done all of the things that the Messiah is supposed to do.
They shouldn’t worry too much, though, because God is going to send them another Advocate (or helper or comforter or supporter) to accompany them through all of this, who’s kinda like Jesus but different, and, from the sound of it, is not even a flesh and blood human being but rather, a spirit of some sort. And somehow, through this mysterious Holy Spirit of God, Jesus will live and they will live too; and they will know that Jesus is in God, and they are in Jesus and Jesus is in them.
It all makes perfect sense, right? Of course it doesn’t make sense, but that hasn’t stopped us from trying to make it make sense for a few thousand years now. Since the earliest days of the church, folks have looked for ways to understand and explain the idea of one God being the strange and mysterious intertwining of Creator, Christ and Spirit — and how that kind of God relates to us.
Way back in the third century, a church father by the name of Tertullian first used the Latin word trinitas to describe this relationship — a word that in English becomes “trinity.” But this word isn’t used anywhere in the Bible and the concept of the Trinity isn’t explicitly mentioned in the Bible either. I’m afraid all we get there are ambiguous hints and incomplete descriptions that dance around the truth, as we see in today’s gospel reading.
In the fourth century, the church would convene two councils (one in Nicea and one in Constaninople) to come up with an official doctrine about all of this because ambiguous hints and incomplete descriptions that dance around the truth are never enough for us humans. And this doctrine would be formulated into concise creeds that believers could memorize and recite to show that they were on board with this doctrine, to demonstrate that they believed what the church said they should believe.
Yet, truth be told, there’s never been universal agreement within the church about exactly what the Trinity is, how it works or what it means. And while I, for one, often get drawn into reading about and reflecting upon the various arguments about it (it is part of my job, I suppose), the very fact that there are various arguments about it makes an already complicated idea seem even more complicated. Indeed, thinking about it too much is enough to make one’s head spin.
When I was looking at our gospel passage this week and my head began spinning, I found myself wishing that someone would explain it to me like they were explaining it to Stan’s dog; and thankfully that someone was Jesus. Because, while the nature of God is way more than we could ever understand completely in this lifetime, and while the language Jesus uses here (and elsewhere) to describe the ways in which God works may be complicated and strange, perhaps this is all not really as difficult as we’ve have made it out to be (at some level, anyway). The word Trinity might not appear anywhere the Bible, but there is a word that Jesus himself does say a couple of times in today’s reading that’s really helpful in figuring out where he might be going with all of this, and that word, as strange as it might seem, is: commandments.
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” he says at the start of our passage.
“They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them,” he says near the end of it.
And since Jesus doesn’t really give us much in the way of commandments throughout the Gospels, let’s consider for a moment what those commandments actually are.
In the previous chapter of John, right after Jesus tells his disciples that he’ll be leaving soon and that they cannot come with him, he says this: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Okay, I get it we should love one another; and when we do this, we live out the love that Jesus first showed us and we demonstrate the power of that love to the world. In other words, even though he is no longer physically among us, Jesus lives on through us in the Spirit of that love.
In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, he makes a related proclamation that’s also a bit different. In Luke’s version, for example, Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” In these three gospels, the commandments to love God and to love our neighbor are essentially melded into one — the point being that when we love our neighbor we show our love for God, and through the love we show our neighbor the Spirit of God lives in the world.
When you cut through all of the circular language in today’s reading about who loves whom, about who abides with whom and who lives in whom, about the Advocate and the Spirit of truth, the essential message here is pretty straightforward:
When we love one other, we demonstrate our love for God. Jesus himself showed us how to live in love, and the Holy Spirit is that love made manifest in the world.
The love that Creator, Christ and Spirit share with one another is the love God shares with us is the love we share with one another is the love we share with God.
And the language Jesus uses here is intertwined and circular because the love that it describes — the love that God calls us towards — is intertwined and circular.
The Trinity? I do this for a living and I’ll be the first person to put my hand up and say I don’t get it.
Love God. Love one another. Love your neighbor as yourself? That I can wrap my mind around — and I’m pretty sure you can too.
So what do you say we start there and see where it takes us.