Psalm 149
OT Reading: Nehemiah 8.9-end
NT Reading: John 16.1-11
Title: The world as God sees it.
Text: When [the Advocate] comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment (John 16.8).
Of all the Gospel writers, St John is perhaps the most divisive. On the one hand it is he who most memorably assures us of the love of God. If we know by heart only one verse of scripture it is probably John 3.16 – God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life. The Johanine epistles, which come from the same community, declare that God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them (1 John 4.16). At the same time, perhaps reflecting the embattled ethos of a persecuted community, he draws the sharpest distinction between believers and unbelievers. Already in his prologue, he declares that the world was made by God, and yet the world knew him not (John 1.10). Just a few verses back from tonight’s passage, we read: Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world – therefore the world hates you. Strong language. We might expect the world to politely ignore our ideas about God, but no, John insists that we shall be hated for our beliefs, just as Jesus himself was hated by his world, by the religious establishment of the Jews as well as the civil and military power of Rome. The Johanine community had seen exactly what this meant as they were excluded from the Jewish synagogues and persecuted by the Roman authorities, whose emperors they refused to recognise as gods.
So far we can sit quite comfortably in our pews. All that was a long time ago. Even if we might no longer be so confident as an earlier generation in asserting that we live in a Christian country, we do at least live under a government that tolerates Christianity, even to the point of allowing some of our bishops to continue to sit in the House of Lords. We are not at odds with a pagan religious establishment, as his community evidently was. Indeed we worry that the virulence of his antagonism may have been at least partially responsible for justifying the appalling anti-Semitism that has characterised the Christian church and Christian governments for much of the past 2000 years. We are wary of his divisiveness. We would prefer to be less judgmental, to live and let live. Yet John would reject such wishy-washy liberalism.
When the Advocate comes – that is the Holy Spirit – he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment. The issue as he sees it is not one of sectarian disputes or officially sanctioned persecution. It goes much deeper than that. When it comes to a proper understanding of how we should order our lives – how we relate to these fundamental notions of sin and righteousness and judgment, the world out there simply does not get it. They are just not on the right wavelength. They are wrong about sin, Jesus says, ‘because they do not believe in me’ (v 9). They are wrong about righteousness, ‘because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer’ (v 10). They are wrong about judgment, ‘because the ruler of this world has been condemned’ (v 11). It is hard to make sense of these statements. We need to unpack each of them in turn, if we are to understand what St John is saying to us about the world.
First then, the world is wrong about sin, because they do not believe in Jesus. Do we really have to believe in Jesus in order to know about sin, to know whether something is right or wrong. There are plenty of decent folk out there, maybe even in here, who will tell you, if you ever have that sort of conversation with them, that they can’t or don’t believe in Jesus, but setting that aside, they do try or they have tried to lead a good life. The patients who talk to me in the Royal Free quite often say something like that. And every so often you will hear a Government Minister insisting that children can and should be taught the difference between right and wrong without reference to any particular faith. Even as Christians, if we were to sit down this evening with a list of the seven deadly sins – Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride – marking ourselves out of ten, we would probably score pretty well. We might need to tighten up on this and that, but most of the time our consciences keep us pretty well in line, don’t they? Well yes, and so they should, John might say, but he’d go on to say that measuring ourselves against any such implicit or explicit standard of decent behaviour is to miss the point utterly and completely. From the crucifixion through the Crusades and wave after wave of civil and religious warfare, right down to modern times, there have been hundreds and thousands of decent respectable people who have imprisoned, tortured and killed, believing sincerely that they were behaving honourably. How many more of us have failed to see the world through his eyes, and failed to give ourselves to others in need, as he gave. If we really believed in Jesus, opening our hearts to allow his Spirit to dictate our behaviour, we might find ourselves in all kinds of trouble, as He did. Jesus is right. It’s only when we really believe in Him, that we can get it right about sin.
Next, the world is wrong about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, and you will see me no longer. At first sight, this statement is a complete non sequitur. What has the world’s view of righteousness got to do with Jesus going to His Father? Righteousness is itself a difficult concept to pin down, but it has to do with how we are seen by ourselves, by others and ultimately by God. The world measures righteousness by respectability, success, status, power, wealth, and rewards it with esteem, deference, honours and awards, celebrity. Jesus could have gone that way. He had already made quite a name for himself as a popular preacher and healer. He was on the brink of commanding a mass following that even the Romans would have to take seriously. But he turned his back on all that. He was going to His Father, and his disciples would see Him no more – in plain language He was turning away from popularity and success to choose the path that led to crucifixion and death. That’s why his disciples would see Him no more. But this was for their advantage, because only then would his physical presence be replaced with that of the Advocate, the Spirit who would empower them as never before, and not only them, but every succeeding generation of his disciples, from the little gathering around him in the Upper Room to this little gathering here in Hampstead. So the world is wrong about righteousness too. The way of righteousness is not the path to fortune and celebrity as the world sees it, but the Way of the Cross, the way that leads to our Father in heaven.
And then finally, the world is wrong about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned. Here we have another surprising lurch. Over the next few days the world would think that their rulers had condemned Jesus to death. Yet it was Jesus who would triumph on the Cross in the battle against evil that really mattered, whilst Pontius Pilate and the Jewish leaders who thought they had cornered him into crucifying their rival – they were the ones whom history would forever condemn.
What an uncomfortable companion this Advocate is, this Spirit of Truth. We turn to Him hoping to be told that we haven’t behaved too badly, and he shows us just how far we have fallen short. We hold our pathetic scraps of righteousness before him, our decent respectability, hoping to receive some degree of affirmation, and he reminds us that we have to discount such worldly measures of righteousness and respectability if we are to follow his path of obedience and sacrifice. We hope for a favourable judgment, and He tells us that we are judged already by the way we have aligned ourselves with the prevailing standards of this world.
The indictment is so formidable, because we have allowed ourselves to be subtly seduced by the culture all around us, which is so utterly at variance with the way of life which Jesus himself followed. The world is wrong about sin, about righteousness, and about judgment. And all too often the world is us. We have embraced the world’s standards rather than following his Way. Yet still His love reaches out to us as He invites us to follow Him.
You will remember how the people wept when Nehemiah read the Book of the Law to them, and explained what it meant. As the Spirit of Truth shows us how far we have fallen short of the life we should lead in Jesus’ name, we despair of ourselves just as they did. Yet, like them, our repentance should be seen as the occasion for joyful thanksgiving, since it is the first step towards the new life which we are invited to live in the power of the Spirit, the Advocate, who comes to dwell in our hearts by the grace of God.