There are a few Sundays each year when the gospel is not the more exciting text. Or it’s not so much that you are trying to avoid focusing on the gospel as it is that another reading is just that much more imposing a presence.
The Pentecost story in Acts is one of those. For me, the binding of Isaac is another. Or Moses and the burning bush. Stuff that is just too much not to focus on.
So, yeah. Focus on that.
But what if you want to focus on the gospel?
Well, we have two choices. Both from John. I outline a bit of the question in this week’s Between. And a bit of what’s at stake for approaching the second of the texts: John 7:37-39.
While I find this to be the more interesting of the options, it is problematic in one way. And I’ll take a minute to explain why; and why I don’t think it should be so easily taken up in such a conviction.
The Trinity problems
Let’s start with simple fact that we’re reading from these two passages because they’re the only times Jesus makes any reference to a Holy Spirit. And, because we have the doctrine of the Trinity, with its third person as “Spirit,” this naturally interests us.
The problem is that here, Jesus implies two problematic things:
- That the Spirit originates from him.
- It doesn’t exist yet.
Both of these statements are problematic. The first because of its entangling of how the Trinity operates. And the second because of its limiting of the Spirit.
But neither of these is quite so troubling in the end as the impact of the selective understanding this passage enables. Namely, that this endorses the filioque.
The clause of our problems
The filioque is the clause infamously added to the Nicene Creed which sparked the great divide between East and West. So, you know, it’s a thing.
The dispute itself is not so much about words or semantics. In a sense, it is about how we allow different visions of relationship within the Trinity to exist within Christianity. But really, it is about how we treat each other based on their beliefs.
In the West, a vision of the three persons of the Trinity developed in which both Jesus and the Holy Spirit “proceed from the Father.” But also, the Spirit proceeds from the Son as well.
The East, on the other hand, offered no such hierarchical relationship between the Son and Spirit. That such power inhibits the interactive relationship. And it ultimately undermines the principal character of coequal persons within the Godhead.
Rome, in inserting the filioque (and the Son) into the Nicene Creed outside of a great council, was not only imposing theology onto the Orthodox Communion. It was doing so outside the bonds of affection. Which is like writing a law when Congress isn’t in session. And then spending a millennium saying “What’s the big deal? It’s a law now.”
This doesn’t defend the filioque
We’re not here to debate the clause itself. Or even the moral standing of churches split for a thousand years.
The point is that this passage kind of sounds like Jesus is saying that he is responsible for the Spirit. Which, given Catholic doctrine, sounds like support.
It also sounds like he is calling himself the vehicle for the Spirit.
But these don’t square, either with the doctrine, or with how Jesus describes the nature of the Father. Even elsewhere in John.
These (quite literal) interpretations of Jesus’s words struggle to square, however, with the more direct statement that the Spirit doesn’t yet exist. Which is clearly far more direct in its challenge to doctrine. For, according to the same doctrine, all three of the persons were there from the beginning.
What there is to work with
There is an idea that is richer than all of this doctrinal tripe, however. And it is one that echoes some ancient teachings about the nature of Jesus’s work in the world.
We might choose, instead, to see the Spirit’s arrival in the Pentecost Event as a coming out party. That Jesus’s statement names, not the literal existence of the Spirit, but its necessary arrival after him. Not that it comes from him, but as the next order in the progression of the missio dei.
We might even see this as an echo of the Epiphany Event, in which Jesus’s ministry arrives from (through, or after) the Spirit, and then, after Jesus is taken up into heaven, the Spirit returns, anointing the people for ministry.
This vision, while less regimentally hierarchical, is far more evocative and beautiful.
It might also cast a vision of the Pentecost that is less dependent on the witness of the supernatural. And closer to the heart of our own calling.
Or, we just go with the tongues of fire and the many languages. It is the far more exciting passage, after all.