Sixth Sunday of Easter: The Church, Scripture and the Holy Spirit

May 25, 2019

Turkish coffee is strong to drink and comes equipped with various traditions. One tradition is reading the coffee grounds after you finish the coffee. You finish the coffee, place the saucer over the top of the cup, turn it quickly towards yourself and let the liquid and the grounds settle down. Then, picking up the cup and turning it towards you, what is the first thing you see? A tree? Maybe that means that your family has strong roots. The point is, that you see in the grounds what you see. It is a reflection of you. That is not what scripture is.

The first quality of a good reader of anything, but most especially scripture, is the reader’s humility. We have to be willing to be open and vulnerable before a text. Open, because we should want to hear what scripture has to say, not what we want to make scripture say. Vulnerable, because what scripture says may not be what we want to hear. If we are not humble, if we are not willing to be open and vulnerable, scripture becomes like a box of Scrabble tiles that we use to make up the words and images that please us instead of an encounter with the presence of God. Scripture is an encounter with the King, not our own image that we impose on the coffee grounds scripture. We want to hear God not how we imagine that he should have spoken, but how he in his humility actually has spoken to us.

Jesus gives peace, not as the world gives peace
The night before he was betrayed and executed, Jesus said to his disciples,

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.” Jn. 14:23-29.

Within the next 24 hours they all betrayed him and ran away. Why did they run away? Because what comes to crush Jesus is the power of evil. Not just their own weakness, but the cynicism of Rome and the intention of religious authorities to silence him. He suffered intense physical pain and emotional torment. Evil in all its power to degrade the human person. George Orwell in his book 1984 the atheist’s view of the future.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” - George Orwell, 1984

Jesus bears the full weight of human sin and the weight of sin oppresses to this day. When Jesus speaks, he is looking through his passion and death to his resurrection. In John’s gospel the gift of the Holy Spirit is made when Jesus appears to his disciples in the upper room and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you hold bound are held bound, whose sins you forgive are forgiven.” John 20:22-23. In St. Paul, the Holy Spirit is the gift of the Risen Christ. Jesus does not leave his disciples. The role of the spirit is to teach and remind the disciples of what Jesus said and did. The Spirit does not convey new revelations but aids the Church as evil still presses heavily upon us. A crisis is a moment of decision.

Peace: The Apostles[i] and Crisis
The Church has faced crisis from the very beginning. The First Apostolic Council of Jerusalem [ii] set the tone for Church governance. The big issue decided at that council was who gets to speak for the Church on important issues. At that council the topic was whether gentiles were required to be circumcised as Jews before they could be baptized as Christians

“Some who had come down from Judea were instructing the brothers "Unless you are circumcised according to the Mosaic practice, you cannot be saved." Acts 15:1-2.

St. James, reflecting on the prophet Amos, remembered the mission of Israel,

After they had fallen silent, James responded, “My brothers, listen to me. Symeon has described how God first concerned himself with acquiring from among the Gentiles a people for his name. The words of the prophets agree with this, as is written:
‘After this I shall return and rebuild the fallen hut of David; from its ruins I shall rebuild it and raise it up again, so that the rest of humanity may seek out the Lord, even all the Gentiles on whom my name is invoked. Thus says the Lord who accomplishes these things, known from of old.’ It is my judgment, therefore, that we ought to stop troubling the Gentiles who turn to God, (Amos 9:11-12)

Imagine the conflict. Jewish male Christians were being asked to surrender the image of their identity as circumcised children of Abraham. Circumcision went back to Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, Elijah and all the heroes of the people of Israel. How do the apostles take the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to the gentiles by leaving what God commanded Abraham behind? This was the central issue involved in Paul’s struggle with grace. That was why his opponents were opposing him.

Reflecting on God’s plan for Israel and the exigencies of the then current situation, the council and the Holy Spirit decided that gentiles should only be baptized, but not necessarily circumcised. The Council imposed on gentile Christians the part of the Torah that required gentiles who lived among Jews to refrain from eating the meat of animals that were strangled, avoiding unlawful marriage to close relatives by blood and familial ties, and to refrain from idol worship. The council members mandated that Paul and Barnabas, accompanied by Judas and Silas, would deliver the news to the community at Antioch.

The Church, Scripture and the Spirit
St. Paul is both the apostle who was part of the Council of Jerusalem and, later Antioch, but is also an author of scripture. Scripture and the Apostolic foundations of the Church flow from the same Divine source. Jesus is the paraclete in 1 John 2:1, and the Holy Spirit is the Paraclete in John 16:7. The Greek sourced word “ paraclete” means “advocate” or “counselor” in English. Yes, the Holy Spirit is like a lawyer who stands at the side of the defendant at the time of trial and gives him advice. But, in the New Testament, the Spirit does three things:

(1) The Spirit is the continued presence of Jesus on earth after his ascension. (Jn 14:12, 16).
(2) The Spirit is the truthteller (Jn 14:17; 16:13) and testifies on behalf of Jesus and in defense of him affirming that Jesus is not a shameful failure but, the beloved of God, a faithful and dutiful Son.
(3) It reminds the Church of things that Jesus said (Jn 14:26) and reveals things Jesus was unable to convey (Jn 16:1214).

Jesus is God the Father’s self-disclosure, his revelation to the world. He is spoken in the language of humanity. Jesus is God in human language. The Spirit is the continuing presence of Jesus expressed in Scripture and the Church.

Our Easter faith includes the remarkable belief that the Spirit of God continues to work through the flawed human processes in our Church. Luke reminds us to take seriously both our religious experience and our apostolic tradition. We should trust in the Spirit even through tedious synods, chronic slow meetings, and unimpressive leadership tend to discourage.

Reading Scripture with the Apostles
Why read the scripture with the Church? Why worry what the First Council of Jerusalem decided? When I buy a car, I don’t care about how the workers that manufactured it think I should drive. Can’t I make of scripture what I see in it? Scripture, is a work of the Holy Spirit through the human authors of scripture. Luke and Paul recount their understanding of the early time of crisis in the Church and how the Church interpreting Scripture resolves a crisis. Since the same one God gave us scripture and the Church, they are inseparable because the same Spirit is the source of their unity. We read scripture from within the whole of what the Spirit creates. Sentire cum Ecclesia – “read scripture with the Church.” God who spoke in Christ in the past, continues to speak to his spouse, the Church in the present.

Flannery O’Connor, in a letter to a correspondent, said,

“I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.” - The Habit of Being, Flannery O’Connor

[i] In John’s vision of the New Jerusalem the angel showed him a vision of a city descending down from heaven. In John’s vision, we don’t go up to heaven; heaven comes down to us. He sees that the city

… had a massive high wall, with twelve gates where twelve angels were stationed and on which names were inscribed, the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites. There were three gates facing the east, three north, three south, and three west. The wall of the city had twelve courses of stones as its foundation, on which were inscribed the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. Rev. 21.
The new city was built on the foundation of the apostles, but the way into the city lead through the twelve gates bearing the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. God’s creative work fulfilled.

[ii] St. Paul recounts first hand his version of events. Acts and Galatians recount the same events in two different, but essentially similar, ways. Read for yourself.
The Council of Jerusalem. Then after fourteen years I again went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along also. I went up in accord with a revelation, and I presented to them the gospel that I preach to the Gentiles—but privately to those of repute—so that I might not be running, or have run, in vain. Moreover, not even Titus, who was with me, although he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised, but because of the false brothers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, that they might enslave us— to them we did not submit even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might remain intact for you. But from those who were reputed to be important (what they once were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those of repute made me add nothing. On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter to the circumcised, for the one who worked in Peter for an apostolate to the circumcised worked also in me for the Gentiles , and when they recognized the grace bestowed upon me, James and Cephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave me and Barnabas their right hands in partnership, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. Only, we were to be mindful of the poor, which is the very thing I was eager to do. And when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he clearly was wrong. For, until some people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he began to draw back and separated himself, because he was afraid of the circumcised. And the rest of the Jews [also] acted hypocritically along with him, with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not on the right road in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of all, “If you, though a Jew, are living like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” Gal. 2:1-14.