JOHN 15:26-27 & 16: 4b-15

Jottings on John…Pentecost…Revised 2018 

To start on a negative, normally a no-no in preaching, the translation of Paraclete I like & trust least is ‘Comforter’. Dis-Comforter, yes; but it’s hard to see ‘Comforter’ - in the usual sense of that word - much help in approaching Pentecost! ‘Advocate’, or even better, ’Paraclete’, the ‘one called to our  side’, is the one to preach.

I’d just decided ‘Paraclete’ was to be the emphasis of this blog, when in one of those ‘God-incidences’, I finished Tim Winton’s great new novel, ‘the shepherd’s hut’¹ (that’s the way it’s printed on the cover!) That confirmed my choice. For almost at the end of the story, thrown together in outback Australia, Fintan, the old, failed priest says to young runaway Jaxie, “…I suspect that god is what you do, not what or who you believe in……when you do right, Jaxie, when you make good - well, then you are an instrument of God. Then you are joined to the the divine, to the life force, to life itself. That’s what I  believe. That’s what I hope for. And it’s what I have missed.” 

On the surface this may seem an odd slant on theology, but each of them has been led to the side of the other. To help get them both through vastly different & impossibly testing circumstances. To give each other a life. To bring each other back to life; newly resurrected with Christ, depending, maybe, on our theological ‘take’ on all this. The Paraclete is God in action. In you & me & others. Practical Theology indeed! 

What happens at that original Pentecost isn’t the fire of Religious enthusiasm, but the Fire of Love expressed in Servanthood. It’s not the wind that takes us where we will, but the Wind of God that blows us where it will; blows us to the side of some person as part of God’s purpose & provision for them. And for us, too! ‘Paraclete’ may often appear to be spelt with a very small ‘p’!  Tim Winton, a man of deep spirituality, expresses that in his Fintan & Jaxie characters.

So, let’s celebrate this Pentecost for those in the Good Book, by all means, but also in & for ourselves & others in our own book or books; the ones we’re co-writing with our own Fintan or Jaxie. And the Paraclete, of course!

¹ Penguin - Hamish Hamilton, Melbourne, 2018, p.233 (Don’t be put off by the ‘bad language’!)