The Spirit in the Gospels, Part II

We’re still in the midst of an extensive survey of how ideas about the Holy Spirit developed over time. In the most recent post, we saw how the birth narratives of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, especially in Luke’s Gospel, show the Spirit moving in a big way. Not only is the Spirit behind the conception of Jesus, but all sorts of people, young and old, male and female, have dreams, see angelic visions, and prophesy, proclaiming the coming of Israel’s national salvation. If belief in Second Temple Judaism looked forward to a day when God would act decisively through the Spirit, these birth narratives are saying that this day is at hand. Today we’ll see how these ideas play out throughout the rest of the Gospel story.

One thing that’s often jarring for us as Christians when we take the time to revisit the Gospels is just how much John the Baptist content there is. But in the earliest Church, John’s ministry was seen as instrumental in preparing for Jesus’. And we see as the story goes on, the role of the Spirit in the passing of the baton between them. At the very end of his birth narrative, Luke adds this line about John: “The child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel” (Luke 1.80). This could equally be translated ‘strong in the Spirit’, but as we’ve seen, in the Old Testament and Second Temple Judaism, being strong in spirit meant having one’s spirit live in alignment and continuity with God’s Spirit, so it amounts to much the same idea.

John the Baptist’s public ministry involved “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1.4), preaching “Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” (Matthew 3.2). In one particularly combative conversation with the Pharisees and Sadducees, John says, full of apocalyptic zeal:

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance .…. I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I, and I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” (Matthew 3.7-8, 11-12; cf. Mark 1.8, Luke 3.16)

When Jesus is himself baptized, “suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3.13-17; cf. Luke 3.22; John 1.29-32). This marks the narrative transition between John’s ministry and Jesus’. After centuries of growing expectation that God would send an exalted, anointed figure to save Israel, and in the midst of John’s own public proclamation that that time was at and, we have Jesus receiving a public anointing with the Spirit. We can argue what exactly this meant for Jesus (and people have for millennia), but it seems pretty clear what it meant within the context of the Biblical narrative: ‘The one who is coming’ has arrived.

The first thing the Spirit does is compel Jesus into the wilderness, where he is tempted by the devil (Matthew 4.1 & Luke 4.1). Jesus passes the test with flying colours, rejecting the devil’s twisted logic of self-preservation and personal gain. He then starts his public ministry of healing (physical, psychological, and spiritual), and teaching. His first recorded appearance is back home in Galilee, where he makes waves by referring to himself in the terms of one of Isaiah’s oracles about the Holy Spirit and God’s Anointed:

Then Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding region. … He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4.14-21, reading from Isaiah 61)

At the start of his career, Jesus selects this as a kind of manifesto for what he’s all about. The Spirit is within him, empowering him to serve the poor, free those in bondage, and restore the injured and ill. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’ ministry is also described through an extended reference to Isaiah:

Many followed him, and he cured all of them, and he ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah:

“Here is my servant, whom I have chosen,
my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased.
I will put my Spirit upon him,
and he will proclaim justice to the gentiles.
He will not wrangle or cry aloud,
nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.
He will not break a bruised reed
or quench a smoldering wick until he brings justice to victory.
And in his name the gentiles will hope.” (Matthew 12.15-21, quoting from Isaiah 42)

But not everyone is convinced that Jesus’ ministry is powered by the Holy Spirit. Some religious leaders start to claim that the reason he is able to exorcise evil spirits from people is because he is actually empowered by the devil itself. Jesus retorts:

Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself; how, then, will his kingdom stand? … But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. (Matthew 12.25-28)

He then utters a teaching that has long confused interpreters. Implicitly accusing these religious authorities of spiritual blindness, he says:

Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. (Matthew 12.30-32; cf. Mark 3.28-29; Luke 12.10)

Basically, he’s saying that not to see when, where, and how God is at work in the world — to criticize those who bring in the lost, to call helping and healing people evil — is the one thing that is unforgivable.

The Spirit also features in Jesus’ teaching, but we see an interesting distinction between how it’s discussed in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (the so-called ‘Synoptic Gospels’) and John. In the Synoptics, the teaching about a particular gift of the Spirit is broader than it was in the Old Testament, but still fairly narrow in scope and in keeping with those earlier traditions, where the Spirit empowers specific people with practical wisdom, especially in speech, for leading the people of God. For example, when Jesus sends seventy of his followers to minister in his name, he says:

When they hand you over [to the authorities], do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you (Matthew 10.19-20; cf. Mark 13.11; Luke 12.12)

A similar teaching is found in John 16, which may be John repurposing the same sermon from Jesus, or relating a different message on a similar theme:

When 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. He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. (John 16.13-14)

Notably, this passage from John, which has a similar message of the Spirit as a source of divine wisdom and truth in times of need, removes the immediate context of the ministry of the Seventy, thereby making it a broader teaching. And this is a consistent theme in John; there, the focus of Jesus’ teaching about the Holy Spirit is as a source of empowerment for all of the faithful, for the whole people of God and not just its leaders. While Luke’s birth narratives certainly expand the scope of that beyond kings and prophets, it’s still only a nascent expansion of these gifts for everyone. We see such an application only once in the synoptics, in Luke 11.13, where Jesus says: If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Luke 11.13).

Let’s turn now specifically to John. John’s Gospel is the most unique of the four, and comes at the story of Jesus from a more reflective and even philosophical perspective. There, Jesus plays with the concept of the Holy Spirit and its relationship to the human spirit that is both rooted in and shifts the creation-based understanding we saw in the Old Testament and Second Temple Wisdom traditions.

In his interaction with Nicodemus, Jesus says:

Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3.5-8)

There’s a new nuance here to the older Wisdom teaching. There, the Spirit was the breath of life, present in and through all things. Here, Jesus insists that there is also a Spiritual birth distinct from this underlying presence, one that has a habit of turning things on their head. In just the next chapter, in his encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus says:

But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4.22-24)

Here we run into a problem with the English convention of capitalizing proper nouns: It’s impossible to know whether Jesus is saying that God is identical to the Holy Spirit, or whether he’s saying that God is a spiritual entity (for lack of a better way of expressing that). The good news is that it doesn’t really matter. For as we’ve seen, to a large degree, Spirit and spirit were understood to exist in continuity in the Wisdom tradition. The idea here seems to be that he’s calling for the faithful to worship with their human spirit in alignment with the Holy Spirit, which is very much in keeping with the Wisdom sensibility. And just to reinforce that Jesus’ insistence on the need for a spiritual rebirth does not deny the reality of the Spirit as the breath of life, he later says: “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6.63).

Finally, in looking at Jesus’ teaching about the Spirit in John, we have two passages in which he talks about the promise of what this looks like:

On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ ” Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive, for as yet there was no Spirit because Jesus was not yet glorified. (John 7.37-39)

And

“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. …  But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you. (John 14.15-17, 26; cf. John 15:26)

We’re coming to a place of promise here, in which this special new gift of the Holy Spirit — historically reserved for kings and prophets and temples — will be given to all of the faithful. This is nothing other than the same expectation from the Prophets that we saw fulfilled in part surrounding the birth narratives of Jesus and John the Baptist in the previous post. But in John, it isn’t only or even primarily about ecstatic speech, but about transformed ways of living and acting in the world. If in Luke’s birth narratives, we get proclamations of the impending salvation of God’s people, here in John we start to see that this salvation will be of a rather different kind than expected.

This is as good a place to leave off as any. In the next post, we’ll turn to the narrative fulfillment of these promises, the so-called ‘Little Pentecost’ of John’s Gospel and, especially the great feast of Pentecost itself. For today, we’ll end on the cliffhanger from the end of Luke:

“And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised, so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” (Luke 24.49)