The Witness of the Spirit

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

The speaker in our text is Jesus but the agent is the Holy Spirit, whose coming upon the disciples we celebrate today. His function is to draw attention not to himself but to Jesus Christ, and thus to God the Father. Next Sunday we celebrate the final revelation of the doctrine God the Holy Trinity, but already we are deep in its mystery. The Spirit brings the Son to us and the Son brings the Father, while the Father gives us the Son whom the Holy Spirit brings to us. So we see already one of the basic tenets of our understanding of God, namely that He is always only one and the same God, giving Himself to us as Jesus Christ whom the Spirit enables us to remember, believe and receive.

You remember that last Sunday we saw how Luke gives the story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven while John tells us what it means. Today again we have a narrative of Luke’s in the background of our passage from John, and John’s interpretation of what the events mean. In Acts 2:1-21 Luke tells how the Spirit came upon the disciples like a rushing wind and hovered over them like tongues of fire, and how they burst out speaking in many different languages, and that all this took place on the day of Pentecost. What does Luke want us to get from this narrative, other than the thrill of seeing God in action? I think he wants us to understand that the Spirit replaces the Law of Moses in the life of God’s people. Pentecost in the Jewish calendar celebrates the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai, which happened to the accompaniment of a mighty wind, and flames of fire, and was spoken in many different languages. So Luke’s account might plausibly be read as a deliberate correction of the Mosaic account, making wind, fire, and diverse tongues herald the coming not of the Law but of the Spirit. Luke is telling us through narrative what the Apostle Paul declares when he says that Christ is the end of the Law for all who have faith (Romans 10:1-3). As my teacher WD Davies used to say, Jesus Christ took the place of the Law in the life of the law observing Pharisee Saul. John, in turn, tells us what this event means for our Christian lives.

Currently in my Bible study group we are wrestling with the question of the role of the Mosaic Law in Paul’s thought and therefore in the Christian life. Are we to be controlled by Law in our living of the faith or are we to accompanied by the Spirit? I believe that the latter is clearly correct, Spirit not Law. To use images that Paul uses, the companionship of Christ through the Spirit is the freedom for which Christ has set us free (Galatians 5:1), the spiritual and moral adulthood we receive through faith (Galatians 4:1-7), and the adoption as adult children and heirs rather than continuance as the slaves of God (Romans 8:15-17).

If we accept this version of the faith, which I believe is the true one, we sail into dangerous waters, where many have gotten lost or shipwrecked. Too far into the freedom of the Spirit, history shows, is where madness lies, and before madness an awful lot of damage and distress. The fragmentation of the sects and cults attests the danger of these waters, and one can understand why the church in all its institutional branches curbs the Spirit by means of the letter, if not of the Law then of the rules and regulations.  These rules attest the frailty of the human spirit when issues of power are at stake, for what power is more glorious than the power to apply God’s Spirit to the lives of others? What temptation more seductive than the temptation to believe that one is uniquely endowed with the Spirit and thus able to do marvelous things and teach the hitherto hidden truths of God.

The fastest growing form of Christianity today is Pentecostalism, I believe. It exalts the gift of tongues above all other gifts and in a simple and direct way claims all the gifts of the Spirit for the believer. My own attitude to this phenomenon is skeptical, based on my experience of such people. I have never met one of them who has not turned out to be spiritually destructive, and if I have to say why I think that is the case, my short answer would be that they do not understand the witness of the Spirit. They mistake the Spirit’s humble, self-effacing work for a vibrant self-enhancing personal power for themselves, as if the Spirit exists to glorify them rather than to glorify Christ.

The true work of the Spirit is to point to Christ and to make Christ real and present to us. In that sense he is the founder of the church, in the sense that he makes Christ present, that he is the presence of Christ. He takes the things of Christ, which are the things of God and gives them to us. He never witnesses to himself. He is like the light that shows everything excepting itself.  This reminds me of an old joke: The wise men of (supply your own choice of group) were debating which was more important, the sun or the moon. They concluded that the moon was more important because it shines at night when it is dark while the sun shines during the day when we don’t need it. The Spirit is like the sun, we don’t see him because he shines his light on Jesus, and thus lights up the way we must take if we wish to arrive at the Truth and Life.

The Spirit is the presence of Christ in our lives, and in the light of this fact let us look again at the point Luke is making about the Law of Moses. To live by the Law is like traveling by map rather than being guided by a traveling companion. Imagine, we are on the Way looking for Truth and Life, and we are navigating by means of maps, which happen also to be now out of date. Christ as the Spirit offers to get into the car with us and take us there, and we say no thanks, because we do not want to have a relationship with this guide. The Law cannot take us to Truth and Life but it can deliver us from having to enter into a relationship with Christ who not only is the Truth and the Life, but is also the Way. The Spirit points always to Christ because Christ is not only the way he is also the destination. The relationship with Christ is the important thing, and the Law can be a way of avoiding the relationship. “Please don’t come with me, just tell me how to get there and I can do it myself,” we say. To which the Spirit replies, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

So the Holy Spirit is the presence of Christ in his church and in our lives in so far as we are part of his church, as a relation of intimacy with the risen Jesus. The Spirit displaces the Law as a guide to Life, and so there can be no avoiding intimacy with God in Jesus Christ. Intimacy with God, that is the work of the Spirit, as he takes the things of Christ, which are the things of God and plants them in us, like a vine is planted by a farmer, but in this case the planting is done by the word. He takes the things of Christ and tells us of them and in hearing we internalize Christ and begin to live in Him as He lives in us. This is the intimacy with God that the Spirit achieves in us and it is the treasure of all God’s blessing and the gift of Life with a capital L.

The word most used in our passage, however, to name the Spirit is Paraclete, and it is a fitting word for what I have just said about the Spirit’s intimate work. Literally the Paraclete is  “the one called to our side” and has the sense of helper, supporter, comforter and defender – the one who stands by us and supports us.  Christ is that one. Only He has been through all that we could conceivably go through, including death and hell, and only He could have healed and restored our life by so doing. So the Spirit is the presence of the victory of the resurrected Christ in our lives, as well as the one who goes with us through all life’s darkest times of defeat. That is why the life of the Spirit in us is eternal Life with a capital L.

Our greatest comfort is to hear in the Spirit the Word of God and so in conclusion I pray again as I did at the beginning of this sermon, “May these human words become for us the Word of God this day,” and that miracle is what our text talks of, when it refers to the announcement of the things of Christ; “…He shall glorify me,” says Jesus of the Spirit, “because he shall take from me and announce it to you,” that is, “transfer it to you by means of words.” May it be so, and may the Church be renewed by the presence of Christ our God in our midst as the Holy Spirit, whom we honor this day.

Amen.