John 16:5-16 "So Loved the World" Scott Hoezee

Well before Jesus ever preached his first sermon, there was John the Baptist. Long before Jesus ever uttered a parable or healed a blind person, there was John. John had come to prepare the way for his cousin Jesus. And when John preached about this great and coming One, he talked a lot about the Holy Spirit. Everybody who came out to see John knew that chief among the spectacles they would witness would be baptisms. They hadn't nicknamed John "the Baptist" for nothing, after all. Baptizing was to John what making bread is to a baker: it was the most common thing he did each day when he went to work.

But John always downplayed his baptisms in favor of the vastly more powerful baptism Jesus would do. Hopping up and down with great verve, John said over and again that the real fireworks would start as soon as Jesus showed up to baptize people not with water but with the Holy Spirit. For all the publicity he had garnered, John's self-assessment of his own ministry boiled down to "You ain't seen nothin' yet!" And indeed, when one day Jesus showed up to be baptized, John saw the heavenly dove of the Holy Spirit land squarely on Jesus' head. Clearly, everything John had predicted about Jesus would come true.

But then a funny thing happened: in his ministry Jesus hardly ever talked about the Holy Spirit. Nor did he baptize anyone. Go through any one of the four gospels and you can count on one hand the number of times Jesus mentions the Holy Spirit. It wasn't what John had anticipated at all, and so in a startling passage we've looked at before, John at one point sends Jesus a message to ask, "Are you the One who was to come, or should we be on the lookout for somebody else?" John was looking for more Spirit, more fire.

But now this Pentecost morning we come to John 16, which is hands-down the longest single section about the Holy Spirit in all the gospels. Here we discover that John the Baptist had been right except for the timing of it all. Jesus was going to send forth a powerful Holy Spirit. But the surprise comes from the fact that before he would do this, Jesus himself would go away. Call it a kind of Trinitarian tag-team approach. The Father dispatched the Son to this world to teach, to suffer, to die, and to rise again. Then the Son returned to the Father so that he could send the Holy Spirit to his followers on this earth.

Sometimes in my Catechism classes we will talk about the Trinity, and I try to explain what is known as the economy of the Triune God by having students envision a kind of divine committee meeting. Once this creation ran off the rails due to sin, a salvage operation had to be launched. So the three Persons of God got together to divide up the responsibilities. Each volunteered for a specific area of work. The really big assignment was taken by the Son of God. He'd be the One who would be made human. The Father would superintend the whole project and would, above all, be the One whose almighty power would raise the Son back from the dead. But the Holy Spirit's primary job would come a bit later. And if in some ways it seemed less dramatic than the work of the Father and the Son, that fact would be more than compensated for by the fact that the Spirit's work would continue on and on and on for a long while--indeed, as of this morning, the Spirit's work in the Church has been going on without interruption for long about 1,970 years now!

All of this is captured for us in John 16. Jesus makes clear that the Holy Spirit would soon become the conduit through which would flow all the energy and riches of God. The Spirit would become the jumper cables to re-infuse us with the Father's energy whenever the Church's batteries ran down. The Spirit would become the cosmic watermain through which the cleansing tide of baptism would flow to wash away sin. The Spirit would become the ultimate radio beacon who would broadcast the truths of Jesus, letting all of us who have been fitted with the right antennae learn on a constant basis the implications of the gospel for our lives. Use whatever image you want, but it is clear that the Holy Spirit has been the Church's living connection to God ever since the great day of Pentecost.

But what I just said tends to be very often the limit of our thinking about the role of the Holy Spirit. That is to say, we quietly restrict the Spirit's primary work to the interior life of the Church and of its members. That's why John 16 is so arresting. As I said a moment ago, this is easily the most extended section specifically on the Holy Spirit in all of the gospels. So how remarkable that the time when Jesus talked the most about the Spirit's work, he focused as much on the Spirit's work in the wider world as he did on the Spirit's work in the church. In fact, in verse 8 the very first thing Jesus says has to do with what the Spirit would reveal not to the church but to the world.

The Spirit, Jesus says, would tell the world three related things: what's wrong, what's right, and who won. And please notice that any one of those teachings without the other two would be not just incomplete, it would be wrong. In a few minutes we'll return to that but as we unpack verses 8-10, keep active in the back of your minds the thought that these three areas of spiritual work are necessarily bound up with one another. Take away or forget about any one, and the other two dissolve into confusion.

First, the Spirit reveals what's wrong. The Spirit needs to convict the world of guilt with regard to sin, Jesus says. Just talking about the fact that this world has problems is not enough. In fact, it has never been too difficult to convince the world that something is fundamentally amiss. The key is to underscore not just that something is awry with life but why that is so. After all, it is sickeningly easy simply to note the horrors of this world.

For instance, last week I read a wrenching article about the global problem of hunger and the lengths to which people will go to fend off starvation. Go to various places in Haiti and you will see people eating what looks like a tasty cake. You might want to try a slice yourself until you learn that this cake is made with a little butter, some water, and then a lot of dirt. During a recent civil war in Liberia people survived by consuming every animal in the national zoo as well as just about every dog and cat in the capital city. In some places a mother may boil a pot of water, telling her children she is making soup. But she has nothing to put into the water and so she let's the water simmer on and on in the hope that the children will fall asleep before they realize there is again nothing for dinner.

It's not difficult to see what's wrong in this world. The underlying message that needs to be revealed by God's Spirit is that the source of all that wrongness is sin. There's a cause behind hunger and terrorism, behind corporate greed and pornography, behind drive-by shootings and cynicism and that cause stems from the fact that this world has fallen away from what God wanted. Even in the scenarios of hunger I just gave you, in almost every case it's not that there isn't food enough to go around but that in altogether too many countries corrupt or inept systems of government prevent certain social ills from being addressed. Civil wars fueled by ethnic hatred kill more people by preventing the just distribution of food than they do with knives and bullets and bombs.

There's something wrong with this world all right, and the reason is sin. The reason is an evil behind which stands the complete anti-God power in the universe. The Holy Spirit of Pentecost has a message for the wider world, and it's a message the Spirit uses us to proclaim: the message is not merely that the world is messed up but also why that is the case.

But secondly Jesus says the Spirit comes to convict the world of something else: righteousness. At first glance, that seems like an odd thing to say. These verses are a bit difficult to translate or understand, but it seems that Jesus is saying that he himself is the Righteous One, the source of all that is good and beautiful and proper. The Spirit reveals this Christ to the world. Jesus is going to return to the Father and so will not be on display, will not be visible, in the usual way a person can be seen. He's not going to be available for any interviews with Larry King and won't be making any guest appearances on the Hour of Power, either. But despite that physical unavailability, this Jesus must be taught to the world and also brought to the world through us. We are the Body of Christ. When filled with the Holy Spirit, we are the ongoing presence of Jesus on this earth.

That much we know, but here's what I take away from Jesus' close linking up of the Spirit's message about sin and the Spirit's subsequent message about righteousness: what I take away from this is that we dare never talk about what's wrong in this world unless we do so in a hope-filled context. It's altogether too easy to talk about what's wrong. Op-Ed writers in the newspapers and the talking heads on all those 24-hour cable TV news channels do this every single day. In fact, bad news is better for ratings than good news could ever be. In the television industry a so-called "slow news day" is any day when no disaster happens. Most of us don't watch CNN or MSNBC or Fox News on those days, but if you ever have turned to those channels on a quiet day, you soon realize they are crashingly boring. The news anchors cast about for things to say but they mostly dissolve into an inane blather that can make your skin crawl.

Anybody can talk about what's wrong with the world. Christians are good at it, too, and we do it a lot. But the key item to check is whether or not we do this with hope ever and always lurking behind even the worst and most difficult things we must say to the world. Are we just lamenting what's bad for the sake of lamenting it? Are we merely wringing our hands and shaking our heads and wagging our fingers in order, by contrast, to highlight our own moral integrity? Or are we letting the Holy Spirit inject even our critical words with a strong dose of the hope that comes through Jesus the Christ?

It's the difference between screaming at someone "That's wrong!" and then walking away in disgust and saying instead, "That's wrong but now let me come along side you to spend however much time it takes to introduce you to the Righteous Jesus who right this very minute loves you despite the mess you've made." It's the difference between saying only "You're a sinner!" and saying "You're a sinner, but it was while we were all still sinners that God in Christ loved us, so let's talk about that, too!" Sometimes convincing people of this may take a very long time indeed. But if we cannot find a way to present the gospel even at the same moment when we confront the world with its faults, then we're missing not just one piece of the Spirit's work in the world, we're missing the whole thing.

But that's not to say that we never arrive at a conclusion of judgment, because that is the third thing Jesus says the Spirit must do. The Holy Spirit of Pentecost is here also to reveal to the world that the prince of darkness is done for. Interestingly, the NIV in verse 11 translates the Greek to say "prince of this world." I'm not certain why they used "prince" here because the Greek is archon, which quite straightforwardly means "ruler." Maybe calling the devil the "ruler of the world" sounded too scary and so they made him a prince, which seems less threatening. But John has Jesus saying that the evil one has been a ruler of this world, and the long, sordid run of history certainly lends credence to the idea that someone pretty awful has been calling some shots in this world.

But the message of the gospel is that he's been dethroned, defeated, condemned. He's still having his share of kicks, as the daily news testifies, but he's on a short leash now and his time is just about up. It will be the goodness, grace, and beauty of the Righteous One that will rule the cosmic day in the end. That's the good news of the gospel. The bad news, however, is that if any person refuses to be on the side of that Holy One named Jesus, then that person will forever be on the wrong side of history.

So as people of Pentecost, we need to let the Spirit use us to tell the world what's wrong but we do this ever and only with hope in our voices. There is much that is wrong but because it is not random wrong but a systemic problem that can be traced back to sin, it is possible for a powerful God to fix that systemic wrongness, and in Christ Jesus the Lord God has already done so!

It doesn't matter what we're talking about, be it war, hunger, corruption, rape, greed, pollution--if in God's sight it all has a common cause, then God can cure our world of it by his grace and power. God's grace is more than a match for sin and so can forgive us. God's power over life and now, in Christ, over also death, is more than a match for evil's fatal power to corrupt creation. We don't talk about what's wrong with this world because it's more interesting than the blather of a "slow news day." We talk about what's wrong for one reason only: God has a solution. We bring up the topic of sin not for its own sake but because it gives us a chance to sing about grace all over again!

At the end of this passage, Jesus paradoxically says, "In a little while you will not see me, and then after a little while, you will see me." There are a couple ways to understand these words, and probably a mixture of each is correct. In one sense this is a reference to Jesus' death and resurrection. But considering that he has been talking about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in this passage, it seems probable that Jesus means also that by the Holy Spirit in our hearts, we and the entire world will be able to "see" Jesus even after he returns to the Father.

That's the Pentecostal challenge for us today yet. After all, when Jesus was on this earth, sinners and stragglers, the outcast and the shunned were all drawn to him. As the perfect Son of God, there was never any doubt that Jesus stood for all that is moral and holy and so stood against all that is sinful. Jesus exuded the perfection of God and so, by virtue of that perfection, stood in sharp, judging contrast to all that is imperfect. Oddly, though, he didn't put people off. His grace and compassion drew people to him.

If we in the church today are to be filled with the Holy Spirit Jesus sent, then we also should find that people are willing to be with us despite the obvious fact that we must be up front about sin. The question of Pentecost is whether or not that happens. Do we present to the world the same Jesus who attracted people mired in sin or do we obscure that Jesus in ways that put people off?

When the world looks at Calvin Church, and at each of us as individual members of this Body, do they see Jesus? Does the Spirit of Pentecost in us make us enough like Jesus that we become what he was and is: an attractive doorway to life and joy? For nearly two millennia now the Spirit has been busy taking the lead in his part of God's salvation project by energizing, strengthening, and bringing gifts and fruit to the Church of Jesus Christ. But the Spirit's interest extends beyond just the Church.

Like God the Father who so loved the world he sent his only begotten Son, so the Spirit so loves the world that he wants us to display that Son. After all, Jesus is the One and Only who came from the Father, full of grace and truth--the very same grace and truth this world needs today as much as ever. Being a people of Pentecost means many things, but if by the Spirit we do not display Jesus to the world, then nothing else we do will in the end much matter. Jesus said that it was for our good that he went away. What remains is that we now live like Jesus so that we can do the world some good, too. Amen.