Sermon of the Month - May 2008
(18th May evening service)
Jesus said: “Receive the Holy Spirit!”
1. Introduction: Easter and Pentecost
John 20, verse 22: Jesus breathed on the disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit!” This is John’s take on Pentecost: Jesus’ gift of the Spirit, not just to the first disciples but for us, too. But before we go into what this means, and what this means for us, we have a question which will take us into a bit of Bible Study first. This is a bit technical. But there’s a real challenge with this particular text, and some people may struggle with the question, so we need to look at it properly.
The story in John 20 is the Easter story. It’s Easter Day in the evening, and yet Jesus breathes on the disciples giving them the Holy Spirit already. However, in Acts 2, the coming of the Holy Spirit only comes 50 days later on the day of Pentecost. When did the disciples receive the Holy Spirit? What’s actually going on during that Easter evening? What is John telling us about Jesus and the Spirit in this passage? And above all, what is the relation between this Easter episode and Pentecost?
And people have struggled to answer. And I am very appreciative that they have. Writers have come off the fence and told what they think we should make of this. So I don’t want you to think I’m critical of them for that. I think it’s very helpful that we have had all these answers to this question about the connexion of this gift of the Spirit in John 20 at Easter and the one on the Day of Pentecost.
1. There are those who say that there is no real connexion, that this is postively different to Pentecost. They point to a missing word, wrongly added in our translations. It’s the word, “the”. The text in the Greek doesn’t say, Receive the Holy Spirit – it says, Receive Holy Spirit. The text in John (so this interpretation goes) has nothing to do with Pentecost. Jesus is not giving the disciples the Holy Spirit. They press this further and say that Jesus was just giving them a gift of the Holy Spirit. William Temple, the great wartime Archbishop of Canterbury in his otherwise brilliant commentary on John goes down this misguided route. Some people try to butress this line by noting that in John 20, John does not use the word he used earlier of the Holy Spirit, Paraclete. He’s talking about something else.
No, I don’t think so. This is, symbolically at least, Jesus’ parting gift. Verses 21 and 23 make it abundantly clear that this event is not some one-off spiritual filip for the disciples, but Christ equipping them for world mission. Verse 21 explicitly pitches it this way: I am sending you; and verse 23 makes it clear that they go with Christ’s power to forgive sins, or even, extraordinary to say, to withhold that forgiveness. This is not a minor spiritual event. They are given the Spirit to go into all the world.
2. A second interepretation is given by some who see this as prophetic of Pentecost: Jesus is engaging in a prophetic parable. However, there is no indication in the text that Jesus is involved in pretence, however prophetic. The natural reading of the story is that Jesus really imparts the Spirit to them.
3. A third line take this not some as prophetic but proleptic of Pentecost. That’s a word which means it gives a foretaste. It is not the full gift of Pentecost, but it is the beginning of the taste of it. This is the approach of John Calvin, so we are in historic and august company here. But I think that this, no more than the last, is true to what John actually says and means. It tries to square Luke’s account in Acts with John’s here by a kind of two step theory. Calvin says that here the disciples were just “sprinkled” with the Spirit, while they were totally immersed at Pentecost – except that Calvin does not use such dangerously Baptist language! He talks of them being “saturated” at Pentecost. Other great commentators like Bengel in the 18th century followed this course. And F. F. Bruce the great Brethren commentator of the last generation had a distinctive take on this line: he saw the gift in John 20 at Easter as “empowerment for ministry” with the gift at Pentecost as the Spirit’s “gift of new life”. But it is to interpret the Bible words to fit what suits our existing theories and theologies, rather than letting the words disturb and be heard properly.
4. A fourth approach simply gives up the connexion. They are competing accounts of the gift of the Spirit. C. K. Barrett, the great Methodist commentator of the last generation concluded that it is impossible to harmonise what John says here with what Luke says in Acts 2. But that is to give up too easily and to draw too negative a conclusion.
5. But perhaps this gives us a clue: they are not competing, but complimentary accounts of the gift of the Spirit. This is the way I see it. Some people may struggle a bit with this. That’s because we get more easily bothered about chronological exactitude than John’s gospel does. But John is notorious for the difficulties he makes for those who want their chronologies to be neat and tidy, and make sure that all four gospels fit together like a complex four-dimensional mortis-tennon or cross-halving joint, dovetailing exactly (if I can mix my carpentry metaphors!). I prefer instead to have us read the Bible and to listen to what it says, and let it speak its own words, rather than bend it to fit our theories. I believe it is characteristic of the Bible to grant us more than one angle on the great events of salvation. We can see this in the stories of creation in Genesis 1 and 2; in the liberation of Israel in both Exodus/Numbers and Deuteronomy; in the age of Kings in the books of Samuel and Kings on the one hand, and that other angle in the books of Chronicles. And above all, in that greatest story of salvation, the gospel of Jesus Christ, we have not even two but four complimentary angles. Let us not force these different angles to give us only one perspective. Let us listen instead to what God is giving us through these differing and complimentary takes.
Here with that momentous gift of the Spirit, we have two approaches in John and Acts. Actually there’s more than that, as we will see.
This has been a bit complex, but I hope you don’t mind if we spend a bit more time on this, because a lot of people struggle with this in one way or another. I said earlier on that John is notorious for the difficulties he makes for those who want their chronologies to be neat and tidy. One example is the turning of the tables in the temple. Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us that this arresting, dramatic event happened in the last week of Jesus’ life, shortly after he entered Jerusalem four or five days before he died. But John places it years earlier, right at the start of his ministry, in John 2. Some people are so upset by this difficulty that they urge us to believe that Jesus actually turned the tables twice. That’s a very good example of the desire to re-pitch what the words of the Bible say to make sure they fit our expectations of them. But you certainly can’t do that with the next one: the day Jesus died. Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us that the Last Supper was the day of Passover, and thus make Jesus death the day after the Passover. But John’s account does not have a Passover in the meal in John 13, and the priests have not yet eaten the Passover when they ask for Pilate to come out to them to crucify Jesus. So John has the slaying of the Passover lambs effectively at the same time as the slaying of the Lamb of God. Jesus did not die on the cross twice.
John is not as bothered as we are about chronology. He is keen to tell a story so as to express its meaning. Nor is this simply a matter of John versus Luke. In Acts 2, as we have seen, the gift of the Spirit comes 50 days at Pentecost. Meanwhile, in Acts 1, the Ascension of Jesus comes 40 days after Easter Day, and 10 days before Pentecost. But if we look carefully at Luke 24, we will see a different picture. This Luke’s account of Easter Day. It begins on Easter morning with the empty tomb; it continues with the two on the road to Emmaus and their seeing of the risen Jesus as he broke the bread; it continues as they rush back to Jerusalem only to hear that the Lord has appeared to Simon, and then they tell of their encounter; next, Jesus himself interrupts their conversation by appearing, and then eating some broiled fish; then he tells them to go into all the world; and finally, as if still on the same day, we get the story of the ascension. If we didn’t have the Acts, but only had Luke 24 to go on, we would presume the Ascension happened late on Easter Day.
The gospels are not as bothered as we are about the details on it being exactly ‘a quarter to four on the fourth of August’, or whatever, as we are. They are not writing Agatha Christie. And John is not telling us simply what happened over five minutes on Easter evening, any more than Luke is. As George Beasley-Murray puts it, “In briefest compass [John] summarizes the acts of the risen Lord, bringing together sayings and happenings uttered and performed within the Easter period” – and so does Luke of course.
I appreciate this has been a bit complex, but before we move on to the positive implications, we ask, What does all this mean for us?
The biggest lesson is that we should not separate or divide Easter and Pentecost, anymore than we should separate Christmas and Good Friday. As modern people, we like to catalogue, define, label and analyse. But that can mislead us. The meaning of Christmas – that God became man in Christ – is shown in its fulness, when he is crucified: God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. And the meaning of Easter is shown in its fulness at Ascension and Pentecost. Putting it the other way round, Pentecost and Ascension Day express what is achieved at Easter: Christ is risen from the dead; he is risen to glory; he is risen to full authority in heaven and Earth. And so in the Spirit and in his gift of the Spirit he is with us to the end of time.
Easter, Ascension and Pentecost are not neat little separate packages. Both John and Luke show us that in their different ways. They are different aspects of the same reality: Christ who died, has risen, not simply to mortal life as we know it, but to eternal life, has risen to the right hand of glory, and so gives his Spirit.
So what is John telling us, by telling his story this way?
That Jesus himself is the giver of the gift of the Holy Spirit.
There is something else hidden in the exact use of words. Actually the literal translation of the phrase is, he breathed into them. And it deliberately takes up the story of Adam in Genesis 2:7 and the story of the resurrection of Israel in Ezekiel 37. There’s another echo also in the Apocrypha, in Wisdom 15:14, which really just repeats the verse in Genesis.
So what do these verses say? Genesis 2:7: God breathed into Adam the breath of life. Breath, spirit, it’s the same word. Hebrew has Ruach for both breath and spirit; Greek has pneuma (from which we get the word pneumatic), meaning both breath and spirit. Genesis 2:7 includes the same unusual term, God breathes into Adam, he breathes the breath of life, the spirit of life. Jesus does the same, or rather, far more. For the disciples are already alive with the breath of life. But Jesus’ gift of the Spirit is far more. The words of John 20:22 also pick up the same language from Ezekiel 37:9-10, where God calls the prophet to prophesy to the Ruach, to the breath, to the Spirit: breathe into these slain. Then the ‘very dead’ corpses are raised from the dead, as a parable for Ezekiel that Israel, a nation that thinks itself extinct, in exile, is to be raised from its death by the power of the Lord. Jesus breathes into a similarly demoralised ‘corps’, his defeated disciples. But it is Easter, the day of resurrection. Jesus breathes into these slain not simply the breath of life, but the breath of resurrection life.
But Jesus gives us more than the breath of life even more than the breath of resurrection life. He gives us the breath of God. It is God himself who breathes into us. He breathes life, he breathes life from after death. But above all he breathes himself into us.
Jesus gives a command, and it is not just for the disciples. The context is the context of universal mission. It is the context of Easter (as John Clark reminded us this morning), for in Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts, and here in John, it is Jesus’ call to the disciples into world mission and through them to us: As the Father has sent me, so I send you. And therefore he breathes into them, and says: Receive the Holy Spirit.
What is the purpose of this gift? God gives us himself. Jesus gives us himself. We receive the very presence of God in us. Verse 23 immediately places this in the context of forgiveness. Luke 24:47 makes the same point: forgiveness of sins is to be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. John’s gospel, earlier, expounds what this means. We have another Comforter, Strengthener, Paraclete. God in us, with us, through us. He is the Spirit of truth. he is with us forever. He is the one who speaks and testifies on Christ’s behalf. God within us helps us hear God; Christ inside us, helps us hear Christ. The Spirit convicts us of sin, righteousness and judgment, challenging our departure from Christ, realigning us towards Christ, the truth, and judging and condemning the Prince of evil.
And Jesus’ command is to receive the Spirit. Jesus does not ask for disciples who follow him without the Spirit. He commands them and us to receive the Spirit. We cannot be of Christ without being in Christ, without Christ being in us. Christ is not an external ideal; he is inwardly real. He changes us from the inside, not from a safe distance outside. And this is the common challenge and opportunity of the New Testament. It’s in all four gospels in their different ways. And it’s also in Paul. Paul makes the same appeal, as we see from our other reading: Ephesians 5:18 encourages us: be filled with the Spirit. As Christians, let us have Christ in us, let him fill us with his own Spirit.
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