The matters of sight continue this week. This is the ongoing teaching from Jesus this Easter season: to develop new sight.
We don’t fully appreciate it at the beginning, of course. What with it being Easter and all. Mary can be forgiven for mistaking Jesus for the gardener. Likewise, the scaredy cats in the upper room and the disciples walking along the way seem oblivious.
But then, we see the man who was born blind is given sight by Jesus. A thing he never had. And the good shepherd guides his flock by voice. It isn’t all about seeing after all.
Then the literalism of Thomas and Philip expand our own vision of sightedness.
And we’re reminded about belief—that it isn’t about things seen, but commitment when they can’t be seen.
Going Away
This week’s passage, following right after last week’s from John 14, lands differently in the Easter Season than it would in Holy Week. His talk of going away, so evident in those last days before the Passion, is being recast for us in light of the Ascension next week.
The warning that Jesus can’t always be with them is now a reminder for us that he can’t be with us. Not literally. Physically. We don’t get a 2,000 year-old man-god to follow around.
We get something/one else, instead.
An advocate we can’t see. But we may know is there. With us. And within us.
Within Us
This week’s gospel continues the seeing/comforting/future-casting of last week’s. But this new focus on the Advocate, the Holy Spirit is what everybody is really going to be looking at.
But I am more captivated by the suggestion that the Spirit abides within us. I’m not sure how relatively transgressive it was at the time, but it feels abundantly transgressive now. The rigidity of many of our traditional theological convictions, both Catholic and Evangelical, seem to fear an incarnational theology of humanity imbued with godliness.
The problems become readily obvious: authority, control, certainty, understanding. These are just the beginning.
And yet, this line of thinking is not even a small leap from Jesus’s teaching, but seem to be the natural direction of it.
In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus sends the disciples out as apostles to quite literally do the stuff that Jesus does. Inheritors of this relationship are smacked by the notion that we might be of the same substance as Jesus, to perform the same miraculous works ourselves.
Whether we do or not is less the question than that they do. And it marks a departure from the divine man-god Christology we most often utilize and forces us to contend with, at a minimum, the extension of Jesus powers to normal people.
Spirited
Jesus promising that the Holy Spirit will abide within the disciples is not the Bible telling us we should all have magic powers. But it does confound the inverse rejection: that mortality has no connection with divinity.
I suspect that the realists among us have no fear of being told yet again about the limits of our humanity. Nor will they bat an eyelash at a religious person arguing that God can help us do incredible things.
I’m inclined to simply reject the rejection. That there actually is something substantive and valuable to the idea that Jesus offers us here.
The Spirit, taking up residence inside us, is effective. It does something to us and for us. And seeing what that means for us—even as an unseen thing—is a benefit beyond measure.