When I was visiting a nursing home a week ago I went to see a lady I’ve known for the last ten years who is now too frail to come down to our communion services. I asked her how she was and she replied that she had a lot of worries on her mind and wasn’t feeling too well. I asked her if she would like me to give her a blessing. She paused and said, ‘Does it have any side effects?’
It is I suppose not unnatural to confuse a blessing with a form of medication for both are in their different ways meant to make us feel better. In the hymn ‘Veni Creator’ the Holy Spirit is seen as a ‘blessed unction’ which gives comfort and life. For Paul the gift of healing is one of the services of the Holy Spirit. But is that the essential gift of the Holy Spirit to make us better, or is it one of its side effects, albeit a beneficial one?
What is the main role, purpose or benefit of the Holy Spirit by which we know the spirit is present? We might of course want to avoid being too specific. We might want to say that the Spirit is the creative power of God abroad in the world. The spirit is what keeps the world in existence and what therefore keeps us alive – the spirit is the spirit of life, like the air we inhale, the breath we breathe. And we might want to go on and say that the spirit is active wherever we see the fruits of beauty, truth and goodness. The Spirit is evidenced in the inspiration of great musicians and artists, great thinkers and wise men and women; the spirit inspires all works of courage, generosity, self sacrifice, kindness, humility, patience, joy and peace. Some Christians have suggested that such works only count before God in the Christian community. Outside that community all such goodness is a sham and not a sign of some kind of relationship with the Spirit. But we would probably say that the Spirit is more generous than that – that any goodness cannot but be evidence of the activity of the God of all goodness.
But if that is so one crucial question has to emerge. What is the point of Christianity* if the Spirit can work for good in human beings as it were independently of Jesus Christ and the Church? Now if we believe in God the Holy Trinity there must be some essential or substantial connection between Jesus and the Spirit because they are related in the closest possible way in God. First and foremost the spirit must be the revealer of Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ must be the shape or template of the Spirit. So Paul tells the Corinthians, ‘No-one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.’ The Spirit may be the source of all true goodness but his chief role is to enable in people a recognition of the supreme significance of Jesus Christ. And I suppose we might then say that all works of goodness that don’t in someway find their fulfillment in a recognition of Jesus, remain in some way unfulfilled.
But what does it mean to ‘recognise’ Jesus through the Spirit as the fulfillment of any act of goodness? One way into answering that question might be through Luke’s Guide to the Roman Empire – the Baedeker or Blue Guide of the New Testament. Many people from an early age come to treasure that passage which we heard from Acts. I certainly tried to learn it when I was quite young and to remember off by heart the Parthians, Medes, Elamites and dwellers of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phyrgia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, visitors from Rome, Cretans and Arabs. I didn’t know where half those places were but I liked the sound of them, they sounded mysterious and exciting, and I have still only managed to get to just less than half of them. Why does Luke list all these places? Perhaps because they cover all points of the compass though they leave out some important centres of early Christian mission, notably Greece, and include some very odd places which we never hear about in the church’s mission. We should note of course that all these people could already understand each other, because it is likely they all spoke Greek; they didn’t need a new universal language. Perhaps the point of including them is that they all represent some very different and even odd local languages. They represent some of the remoter parts of the Empire and point therefore to the ambition of the Christian witness – to go to all points of the compass – to include remote and mysterious places and speak directly to the people there about Jesus.
And that points to what it might mean to acknowledge Jesus through the Spirit; it is to see the vision and dream the dream of his universal significance; Jesus is neighbour to the whole world and therefore the spiritual and moral truths of the spirit are to be for the whole world. If you believe something to be right, it cannot be right just for a certain section or group of people, it must be right for the whole world, your values must have universal scope. The answer to the question, ‘Who is my neighbour’ is ‘everyone’.
I asked at the start how we know the presence of the spirit, and identify the purpose of the Spirit. The answer would seem to be that we know its presence when we hold the goodness which Jesus represents to be good not just for ourselves but for everyone. And that raises some very difficult questions; if we care for our own children we must somehow also express that care for our neighbours’ children and actively will the well being of children everywhere; if we want healing for ourselves and those we love we must want it for all our neighbours equally. And that of course has implications for our international aid budget even when our own economic well being has suffered. We shall know the presence of the Spirit at work in us when these issues become in us a real hunger and thirst that right shall prevail. And so it is not surprising that the gift of the spirit which Jesus gives to the disciples in the Upper Room is the power of forgiveness – for that is something we all need when our hunger for what is right fails to extend beyond the borders of our own immediate circle. When we are blessed by the Spirit the side effects must be for everyone. Amen.
* Of course a crucial point of Christianity has to do not with being good, but with our inability to be good and how we acknowledge and receive forgiveness for our sinfulness but that is another sermon.