Today we celebrate the Lord and Giver of Life who made Jesus alive again from the grave on Easter morn, revealing him the Christ, the Son of God. So also on the day of the Jewish festival of Pentecost, the very same Spirit fell upon the witnesses of the resurrection in Jerusalem. This is God the Holy Spirit who likewise makes Jesus alive to us, making us by faith brothers and sisters of Christ, thus the new born children of God. Today we worship and glorify the Holy Spirit, together with the Father and Son, who brings the Father’s delight to rest upon the Son and brings the beloved Son to live in self-giving love to the Father, the same Holy Spirit who makes us beloved children in whom God delights so that freely and joyfully we offer to God our times, talents and possessions in return.
Today, then, we turn attention not to God who speaks, the Almighty Father; nor to God who is spoken, the Word of the Father who appeared in the flesh, Jesus Christ the Son; but to God who is heard in our midst, the Holy Spirit who hears the Father’s love in Jesus Christ spreading in our ears, into our hearts, into our minds, bearing witness to our spirits that we are indeed the children of God. So we may courageously live this Jesus way as we patiently await the redemption of our bodies. Today is our Pentecost, the festival of the Holy Spirit.
Apart from the Holy Spirit there is no Pentecost birthday of the church, no living faith in Jesus Christ for you and me, no Word nor sacraments, no caring community of Christian people, no new members or faithful old ones, no works of love and mission, no remembrance of Jesus in the holy communion as we proclaim his death until he comes again, nor testimony to him nor prophetic criticism of this blind and sinful world, no truth to trust in at all. In all these works the Holy Spirit, who came upon the apostles at the first Pentecost, continues to come upon the church to make us who were dead to God alive, lost to God found, far from God near. For also my faith and yours is God’s Word heard and obeyed in God, by God, through God the Holy Spirit. Our new life in Christ is God’s Word doing what is says, performing what it tells, effecting what it declares – by the Holy Spirit. For the Triune God does not merely demand but gives what he demands. The Triune God does not merely ask but supplies what he asks. The Triune God does not merely wish but works what he wills. This effective accomplishment in us of what the Father wills and what the Son has done for us is the blessed work of the Holy Spirit who fights for our faith and wins our hearts and pries open our minds by telling the truth to the world about Jesus.
Jesus in today’s gospel compares the Holy Spirit to a prosecuting attorney; this is what the word Advocate means. Notice how legal the language sounds, like being summoned to the witness stand and swearing before God to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 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. Dou you not hear it? God is conducting a great trial with the world and the disciples are called to the stand in daily circumstances: You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning… What they are to tell is simply the truth about Jesus, he who befriended us when we were friendless, who healed us when no one else would touch us, who brought God near to us who had wandered and were off afar. Yet the world refuses this truth. It will not hear. And so it cannot believe. Thus the world disputes this truth. But when the Holy Spirit comes, Jesus says, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment. As prosecuting attorney, the Holy Spirit makes God’s case in his trial with the world: the love of Jesus for sinners is God’s own saving righteousness which condemns the unholy sprit and triumphs over it. The Holy Spirit convinces us of this by convicting us of our sin and convincing us nevertheless of God’s loving mercy. So the prosecuting attorney becomes the defense attorney of those who hear the gospel with faith.
How else does anyone become persuaded of Jesus Christ, the Son of God? It is not an ordinary conviction, but a heavenly one. To human wisdom, the man ended on the cross, abandoned by all, his life’s work refuted. To human wisdom, the dead do not rise nor can what is done be undone. To human wisdom, Jesus who lived in love for sinners in the end got what he deserved, the same fate that sinners get. To human wisdom, that’s the way things are. Heavenly wisdom says otherwise. It says that our heavenly Father looked upon Jesus’ completed act of total love for us and thundered through the sealed tomb bursting its walls, “That’s my Son indeed, my beloved Son.” Heavenly wisdom says that the holy law which condemns sin got all that it deserves and more, and so was satisfied when innocent Jesus once and for all died, the righteous in the place of the unrighteous. Heavenly wisdom says that with God nothing is impossible. The voice of this heavenly wisdom is the Holy Spirit who convinces us to believe in Jesus Christ by convicting us that we are that very sinner for whom lived, died and rose again, therefore also with him a beloved child of God. So God’s word is heard.
When we talk about the Holy Spirit we are not talking about some manic impersonal force making us act like fools, but about the Lord and Giver of life, a Person as are the Father and the Son, who deals with us personally to attest, convince and persuade -- not impersonally like electricity zapping us or a wave of water sweeping us away in araging flood or a mind altering hallucinogenic. Paul says that love, joy and peace are the fruits of the Spirit who identifies us with the groaning of the oppressed creation to inspire the patient work of healing love in the suffering world. He says that the Holy Spirit manifests many gifts, but his work is one and the same in any and all gifts as he is one and the same Spirit of the Father and the Son: to make us children of God in principle and power, not by forcing us, but by persuading us to repentance and faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God.
Why is the Holy Spirit necessary? Jesus is and remains controversial. He has been so from the beginning. Remembering Jesus and telling the truth about him can get very uncomfortable in this world of spin and lies. It is, humanly speaking, easier to forget him and be done with it – to leave him dead and buried in the tomb. Jesus comes by the Holy Spirit to ask us to give up our sin to him and take in its place his righteousness. He asks us to believe in him, that by right of his innocent death he has condemned the devil and ascended to the Father and holds us all in his powerful hands. This was controversial even for the first disciples: But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts. Or again: I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. Who can ever bear this? Who can ever believe this? Who can ever trust this? -- No one can apart from the Holy Spirit! Thus Jesus promises the disciples Pentecost, not only that God’s Word will be spoken to them but also that God’s Word will be heard, trusted and obeyed in them. Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you… When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
It is to our advantage not to be couch potato Christians and passive spectators but doers of the Word, not hearers only, but Holy Spirit hearers, active participants in the great contest with the world about the truth of Jesus’ love. What is the truth of Jesus to which we are led? All that the Father has is mine. Because Jesus truly is the Son of this Father, his life was lived for all, his death was died for all, his resurrection is life for all. What a strange and marvelous contest the Holy Spirit conducts with the unbelieving world, which hates the God of love, which excludes the act of inclusion at the cross, which refuses the Easter offer of mercy for one and for all. However it is that we finally come to terms with this painful riddle, it is surely a fact of Christian experience that one believes and another does not. The unbelieving world refuses the love of God and we who believe, who receive and do not refuse the love of God, we see in ourselves no difference to merit such grace from others who do not receive by hearing with faith. But in us the Holy Spirit has seen to it that God’s Word is not only spoken to us but heard in us. Why we should so be chosen to hear and to believe is a marvel we cannot fathom but only worship and adore.
But this we can fathom. The Holy Spirit is joy in all sorrows, peace in all strife, love amid all the apathy and malice of the world. The Holy Spirit is the love of God in Jesus Christ poured out in our hearts causing us to cry in union with Jesus, Abba Father! The Holy Spirit is God’s down payment, as it were, on our future in his victorious kingdom at the last. The Holy Spirit is freedom now from the tyranny of all other opinions, the royal freedom of the children of God. The Holy Spirit is power to do what God wills and love what God commands. The Holy Spirit leads us to the truth who is Jesus in all the confusion of life and leads us to each other, to form the body of Christ on the earth, the witnesses of Jesus in God’s great trial with the world. Come Holy Spirit, God and Lord!