True Vision
John 14:15-21
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”
So—it’s Mother’s Day, and our passage that Elise just read for us is full of paternalistic and masculine language. Between the Fathers, the hims, and the hes, we’ve got about nine different references to God and the Holy Spirit as male in this relatively short passage. I often have trouble with John, as he uses Father for God a lot. I don’t know if he does it more than the other gospels, but maybe it’s just the repetitive nature of his writing that makes it seem like he does. But the thing I’m really struggling with in this sermon is the fact that the “Advocate” the “Spirit of Truth,” which is to say, the Holy Spirit, is personified as masculine. Traditionally, this spirit of wisdom is personified as female; it’s one of the only things in ancient literature women seem to get, so it was extra frustrating for me to see that John chose to even make the Holy Spirit masculine.
But you know what? It doesn’t matter. We could dig into the reasons for John’s patriarchal tendencies, we could go about trying to prove him wrong with all the myriad examples of Wisdom, this spirit of Truth being personified female elsewhere; we could look at all the times in the art, in visions of saints, that Jesus was portrayed as both masculine and feminine… but if this points to anything at all, it’s simply that God, nor the Holy Spirit, nor even Jesus can be reduced to some kind of human-made binary.
And for that reason, in spite of all the masculine language, this passage is actually kind of a perfect Mother’s Day sermon. Because motherhood, mothering, being mothered, cannot be reduced to a single gender or sex, cannot be reduced to masculine or feminine; it can’t even be reduced to those who have or don’t have children. Mother’s Day is a day in which we celebrate or even grieve all forms of motherhood— biological mothers, step-mothers, grandmothers, queer families, blended families, mothers who have lost children, nurturing and loving mothers who want to be mothers so badly, but struggle with infertility, complicated relationships with mothers… the list goes on and on and on.
To be a mother, to be a parent, to be a protector of any kind, is to be unconditionally loving. It is to shelter and guide, to love and support with all your heart; it is to be strong and able when it doesn’t feel possible, to be strong and able for those who aren’t; it is to trust and believe that in spite of it all, that there is hope in the future and its generations, and making that hope known to anyone who will listen… and there are so many—both those who do and do not have biological children who do all of this and more.
The poet Maggie Smith has a beautiful and heart-wrenching poem called What I Carried. I won’t read the whole thing, but I will read excerpts:
I carried the fear of the world / to my children, but they refused it…
I carried my fear of the world / and it became my teacher.
I carried it, and it repaid me / by teaching me how to carry it.
I carried my fear of the world / and my love for the world. / I carried my terrible awe.
I carried my fear of the world / and it taught me I had been right. / I carried it and loved it / for making me right.
I carried my fear of the world / and it taught me how to carry it.
I carried my fear of the world / to my children and laid it down /
at their feet, a kill, a gift. / Or I was laid at their feet.
This is a poem that I related to deeply… it’s a poem about allowing our fears and our anxieties that we hold and carry to affect our innocent children, to get in the way of our nurturing, and guidance of them. But it is also a poem, in my reading, about realizing that our children will not give into these fears so easily— “I carried the fear of the world / to my children, but they refused it.” It is a poem that in spite of all our fears, we must still protect the next generation. We must raise a generation that will not give into that fear. And we too, can work refuse this fear. We can carry the fear, can be aware of the fear, but we can also hold it at bay. With our faith. With our love. With the Spirit.
That poem also really spoke to me in terms of today’s passage, because in his gospel, John emphasizes sacrificial love above all else. And for better and for worse, that seems to be what motherhood, parenthood, guardianship, is all about. We sacrifice by giving into the fear, or holding it back, sometimes at the expense of our own well-being. Jesus, of course, is the ultimate example of this. He carries the fear, the sins, the anxieties, the despair of and for all of humanity. Jesus lays himself at the feet of the disciples, at our feet, our wounded savior who carries so much for us, if only we let him… if we only we accept the truth of all he carries, and what it all means. Because we are not made to do this. We are fully human, fully fallible; and we need help. We can’t carry our fears in a way that burns us out, or in a way that it negatively affects those around us, whether those people be children, or anyone in our orbit. And so we need that nurturing, sacrificial love and guidance just as anyone else does, just as children do… but where do we find it?
Jesus made it clear last week, as he began his farewell discourse to the disciples, that they would be okay, better even, if, and when, he wasn’t there physically with them; that they must “not let [their] hearts be troubled,” and they would do even “greater works than these.” And this week, he tells us how that will be possible— that in his stead, we have the Advocate. We have the Spirit of Truth. We have the Holy Spirit to nurture and guide.
John is the only of the four gospels that uses words like Advocate and Spirit of Truth for Holy Spirit. Advocate can also be translated to helper or comforter or supporter. It’s something we can look to in times of uncertainty and crisis, a guiding presence in the absence of Jesus, or the in the perceived absence of any kind of order or justice in this cruel world. But there’s one catch.
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask [God], and [God] will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.” Christ’s love in unconditional, yes. But the Holy Spirit will only be able to be felt if we’re keeping the commandments. And remember… in the gospel of John, just before our passage today, in 13:34: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
The Holy Spirit is always there… but if we’re not right with the world, if we’re not right with each other, if we’re not holding true to that ultimate commandment, to love one another as Christ loves us, the Spirit will feel absent. The Spirit will seem unreachable. And if we give into the fear we carry as mothers, as protectors, as parents, as guardians, as friends, if we fully sacrifice ourselves, what good will we be? Yes, we are called to aspire to that all-encompassing sacrificial love that Christ exemplifies… but we can’t give into it so much that we lose ourselves. That is precisely why Christ left us with the Spirit. That is precisely why Christ promises that he “will not leave [us] orphaned.” He is coming to us. In fact, he is with us.
John is the more esoteric, almost mystical of the four gospels— while Jesus does not speak in parables like he does in the other three gospels, he still speaks in metaphor, the language is often cryptic; and one of the examples of this is when he talks about “seeing.” A few weeks ago, I mentioned the story of the blind man in John 9—the story in which Jesus gives him sight by performing a miracle on the sabbath, and the Pharisees, the supposedly faithful and educated high priests, are angry. Jesus says, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” In Jesus’ telling, the blind man, thanks to his faith, could always see; the Pharisees, in their arrogance and fear, were, and still are blind to what really matters, blind to the truth. And of course, this happens in John’s story of doubting Thomas, emphasizing faith over literal sight; it happened just before this, as we talked about last week— Philip requesting to see the face of God to know that Jesus and God are indeed one in the same. And now this week: “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.” Jesus won’t be physically seen, when he is gone, but he will be seen. Jesus will live, thought he will not be present on this world. Jesus will live on in the Spirit.
There’s a passage from 1 Peter that I often use for memorial services, that I find to be so profound and beautiful that I think really encapsulates much of what we’ve been talking about today, 1 Peter 1:7-8:
the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Although you have not seen him, you love him, and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy…
This is what Jesus wants to leave his disciples with—this “indescribable and glorious joy,” in spite of the fact that they will no longer see him. They will continue to believe and spread this joy by following the ultimate commandment of love. They will be tested, they will face trials, there will be sacrifices, but they will not give into fear… because unlike Jesus, our faith is perishable. We are human. We are fallible. But with the faith in Christ and the guidance of the Spirit, we will believe and we will love in spite of it all.
Just as God cannot be shoved into small, binary ideas of male or female, God, and therefore Christ, cannot be forced into binary notions of seeing vs. blindness. Just because we no longer see him, does not mean he’s not there. And just because we are able to physically see in the world, does not mean we can truly see and know the truth, if we are not following the commandment to love one another. To really see, we need to practice the sacrificial love of Jesus by giving up, in our case, not our lives, but our ego, our selfishness; by not giving into fears of the unknown, by not letting our anxieties take over. And we will then be guided by the Advocate—our comforter, our supporter, the truth.
Because of my own history, the losses I had before Frankie, I have complicated feelings about Mother’s Day. It’s a hard day for a lot of people, a fraught day, a confusing day. For some it’s a day of mourning, even. But also because of my history, I think about how it doesn’t have to be just one thing. It doesn’t have to be a Hallmark holiday with flowers or cards. And in fact, Mother’s Day in America actually originated in women’s peace and anti-war groups in the 19th century, and mothers who had lost sons in the Civil War gathering together, a far cry from what it is today.
Nothing is just one thing or the other. Some who are blind can see better than those blessed with vision; some who have 20-15 vision are blind to what really matters in this world. There are people who live, who walk the earth, but are not really living. There are people who have lived and died, and because of the legacy they’ve left, still live on in ways we cannot comprehend. And God is not just a father or mother. Christ is not just human and divine. God, Christ, the Spirit are all those things and everything in between.
And so here we are, on this incomprehensibly complicated and chaotic planet spinning through space, grasping at straws to find meaning and truth… if only we let go a little bit… let go of our fears, our anxieties; if we only we let go of our small, binary notions of right and wrong, of black and white, and trust in what Christ has left behind for us… the Holy Spirit, the ultimate maternal, gentle guidance and comforter. And as long as we hold true to the new commandment, that we love one another, the Spirit will always be present, guiding us with vision and truth. Amen.
