Holy Ghost, Holy Person [Easter 5]

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READINGS:
     Isaiah 12:1-16
     James 1:16-21
     St. John 16:5-15

Alleluia!  Christ is Risen!

To you all, baptized into the death and resurrection of the true Son of God:  Grace, Mercy, and Peace are yours from God our Father, through our risen LORD and Savior, Jesus the Christ!

Who speaks to us today, saying,

“But now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’”

As we begin to move towards the end of the Easter season, God will focus our attention upon the Helper and Spirit of Truth, through our Gospel readings. Helper because we approach the long season of waiting between today and when Jesus returns. Spirit of Truth because we will need constant reminders of our Lord’s Resurrection in those days in between, which He will bring us.

You may think that we don’t talk about the Holy Ghost as often as we should, but that is not completely true. It is true that we live life under the assumption of the Holy ghost. that is, that we can go about our lives under the grace and justification of Christ only if the Holy ghost is present. If He is not present, then not only our lives, but faith and forgiveness disappear as well.

So it is that our Holy ghost is both essential and humble, content with acting “behind the scenes” as it were, or as a breath of wind, as His Name suggests. This is how He is first introduced to us in Moses’ book of Genesis. In the second verse of the entire Bible, the Lord tells us that “…the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

Interestingly, He is only called the Holy Spirit 3 times in the OT. The first is in Psalm 51:11, which we are very familiar with, “Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.” And the second and third are in the 63 chapter of Isaiah, coming right after a prophesy about Jesus, saying, “But they rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit; therefore he turned to be their enemy, and himself fought against them” (v.10) and “Where is he who brought them up out of the sea with the shepherds of his flock? Where is he who put in the midst of them his Holy Spirit” (v.11).

In the rest of the Old Testament its one or another iteration of names with the word “spirit” in it. The Spirit of the Lord, spirit of God, spirit of justice, or just the Spirit. In all cases, the Holy Spirit has been around since the beginning and is God, just as the Son and the Father are God, also.

We call Him God, not on our own, but because this is how the Word of God presents Him to us. We hear that the Holy Spirit has divine names, or is called God, in Acts 5: “Peter said, ‘Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit…You have not lied to man but to God.’”

And 1 Cor. 3:16 asks us, “Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?”

He also has attributes that are unique to God alone. The Spirit is omnipresent as Psalm 139 says, “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me” (v.7-10)

He is also omnipotent as Jesus says in Acts 1: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:8). He is Omniscient, “The Spirit searches all things” (1 Cor. 2:10) and Eternal, “…Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God” (Heb. 9:14).

He also creates all things (Gen. 1:2), even us, and sanctifies us (Titus 3:5). So it is that we call Him God and thank God He is God, because it is in the Name of the Holy Spirit that Jesus commands us to be baptized into (Matt. 28:19). If we did not baptize in the Name of God, then Baptism would be just as useless as everyone wants us to believe it is.

Again, all this God-talk about spirits is fine and dandy for the philosopher and the theologian, but what does it all mean, especially when Jesus tells us today in the Gospel that The Spirit will guide us into all truth. The hard part is that He is a spirit. I can’t see spirits. I’m pretty sure you can’t see spirits. So how do you find someone you can’t see? You listen.

In Luke 4 (v.14-21), Jesus gives us a pretty big hint. It is there that Jesus is back in Nazareth and He is once again doing good works, teaching, and preaching in the Synagogue, as He will declare to His false accusers on Good Friday (John 18:20). He is reading God’s Word spoken through Isaiah. God is reading His own words to people. Please let that stick in your memories.

It is there that the Lord says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” (Is 61:1) or the Spirit of the Lord is “in” me. Jesus then goes on to double down His assertion that the Spirit is with Him saying, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk. 4:21). Now, since the people of Israel have been waiting so long for God to come and act and they have spent millions of hours trying to figure out how the Spirit of God was going to come to them, they rejoiced, right?

Yes, indeed. They rejoiced by being filled with wrath, rising up, and driving Him out of the town in order to bring Him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw Him down that cliff (Lk. 4:28-29).

Repent. The Holy Spirit presents Himself in such obvious ways and in your sin you reject Him. As we talked about Gideon last week, he too witnessed the Holy Spirit when he called down dew from heaven to wet a fleece, so that he would see and believe the Word. “I will be like the dew to Israel” says the Lord in Hosea 14:5. 

“Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain down righteousness; let the earth open, that salvation and righteousness may bear fruit; let the earth cause them both to sprout; I the Lord have created it” (Is 45:8). Jesus is God’s righteousness for us (1 /cor. 1:30). 

“In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will dwell in safety; and this is the name by which He will be called: the Lord is our righteousness” (Jer 33:16). Just as the rain falls, so is the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Helper, the Spirit of Truth and it is our sin that blinds us to this fact.

We can not see spirits, but we can see Jesus. Jesus says that the Holy Ghost will glorify Him and speak what He spoke. Just as Jesus spoke His own words to His own people at Nazareth, so too is the Holy Spirit going to speak the same words as Jesus. 

the Spirit of Truth is the Spirit of Jesus, Who is the Truth. There is no question that, if you seek the Spirit, you must first find Jesus, and if you seek Jesus, He must first find you. God the Holy Spirit is inextricably attached to God the Father and God the Son. The Spirit is in no other place than where the Father and the Son are, as He proceeds from the Father and the Son.

The Spirit does not speak on His own. The Spirit does not act on His own. Whatever Jesus has said and accomplished is what the Holy Spirit will be preaching and teaching. This is why we can say that the preached Gospel of Christ produces Faith and saves a sinner from his own sin, death, and the devil, because the Spirit is working and He works through means.

The Spirit is God. He reveals the Father and the Son with the same means that the Son reveals the Father and Himself: through the suffering, death, and resurrection of the Christ. The dew that rains down from heaven is the Holy Spirit conceiving Jesus, our Righteousness. The dew that is made flesh then dwells among us.

By that same power, we are made into the dew of God, being baptized into water (dew) and the Word. Mich 5:7 says, “Then the remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many peoples like dew from the Lord, like showers on the grass, which delay not for a man nor wait for the children of man” (Micah 5:7).

And Isaiah prophesying about the Day of the Lord saying, “Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead” (Is. 26:19).

The Holy Spirit comes even without our prayers, just as Jesus came at the time and place of His choosing, which was the fullness of time (Gal. 4:4). He is God, as the Son is, so He chooses to work through means, just as He fed Israel in the wilderness, “And when the dew had gone up, there was on the face of the wilderness a fine, flake-like thing, fine as frost on the ground” (Ex. 16:14), so does He today feed us Righteousness in Bread and Wine in Church.

St. Peter tells us that “you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you” (1 Pet 4:14). Not only does the Spirit receive the honor and glory due to God alone, but in Christ, you also are a recipient of this honor. Indeed, the length Jesus went to redeem you and sanctify you makes Jesus comment that “you are gods”. He goes on: “If He (God) called them gods to whom the Word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— do you say of Him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?” (Jn 10:34-36)

In these last days, we are in the Age of the Church. The Age of the Spirit is the age of the Church where the Gospel preached in its purity and the Sacraments administered according to it are the true marks of the Holy Spirit’s presence and He does not work outside these things that are the Father’s and the Son’s.