The Gospel reading for the Day of Pentecost

12I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. 14He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. 15All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.’

To Jesus the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, and the great work of the Spirit is to bring God's truth to us. This is what we call revelation and so it seems fitting to say a few things about this phenomenon with help from William Barclay.

i) Revelation is bound to be a progressive process. There must have been many things which Jesus knew but which he could not tell his disciples at that moment because they were not ready to receive them. I suppose it is only possible to tell a person as much as he or she can understand. The Maths teacher does not begin with the Binomal Theorem when s/he wants to teach a child Algebra; we work up to it. God's revelation to us is like that. It is a developing revelation.

Take an example from the Old Testament. There are many passages in the Old Testament which upset and distress us. Passages which call for the destruction of nations or cattle, men women and children when a city is taken. At that time the Jews had grasped that Israel must not be tainted or infected by foreign nations and so any foreign influence must be destroyed; when Jesus came, people came to see that the way to preserve that purity was to convert people and lead them to God. The people of Old Testament times had grasped a truth but they had only grasped a small part of it. Revelation has to be that way. God only reveals as much as we can understand.

ii) Next, we note that revelation is not a human discovery. It is God's gift. It is the truth of God that the Holy Spirit brings to us. Truth is not something we create by the processes of our minds; it is something already waiting to be discovered. Behind all truth there is God.

iii) Revelation is the taking of the things of Jesus and revealing their significance to us. The greatness of Jesus is his inexhausibileness. No-one has ever grasped all that Jesus came to say or worked out all the significance of the teaching of Jesus No-one knows all that it means for life and belief, for the individual and for the world. for society and for the nation. Revelation is the continual opening out of the meaning and the significance of Jesus Christ.

This is the crux of the matter. Revelation comes to us, not from any book, or creed or printed word. Revelation comes to us from a living person. The nearer we live to Jesus the better we know him. The more we become like him, the more he will be able to tell us.

Blessings from the Holy Spirit

Mark