The Spirit of Truth
8 May 2018
The theology of the Spirit in John’s Gospel is amazing.
In yesterday’s Gospel, we heard that one of the Spirit’s principle activities is to witness to Jesus. Who does He witness Jesus to?
You.
To really ‘get’ the significance of Jesus; who He is and what He has done, you need the Spirit of Truth to move inside of you. And after He has testified to Jesus on the inside of you, He will inspire you to become a witness to Jesus for others. Indeed, carrying within you the presence of the Spirit of Truth, you will be empowered to have a genuine impact on the world around you.
In today’s Gospel, speaking of the Spirit, Jesus tells His disciples:
I will send him to you.
And when he comes,
he will show the world how wrong it was,
about sin,
and about who was in the right,
and about judgement
The ‘world’ here means humanity alienated from God, and worse still, under the direct influence of the evil one, the ‘prince of this world’ (John 16.11).
Jesus sends the Spirit, the Paraclete, to break into the ‘world’ and declare Truth; to cut through all the darkness and confusion and reveal how things actually really are: God is real and He loves you. Jesus lived, died and was raised so you could be free, forever.
The Spirit comes to convict the ‘world’ of the truth, but as scripture scholar Fr. Francis Martin used to say: “The problem is, there is a lot of ‘world’ inside of us!”
Today, invite the Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, to cut through darkness, confusion and ‘worldly’ thinking in your own mind, and lead you into the light of Truth.