Acts 8: 5-8, 14-17 (RM) or Acts 17: 22-31 (RCL); Psalm 66; 1 Peter 3: 15-18 (RM) or 13-22 (RCL); John 14: 15-21.

Today we’re going to extract just four key words from the Gospel reading for this Sunday, and noodle them around a bit to see where they take us:

The Spirit of Truth.

Some years ago I was asked to plan an Evening Prayer for a meeting of European women theologians. I decided to use Psalm 139 because it was commonly part of Evening Prayer, but also because it’s breathtakingly intimate, intense, and just profoundly mystical. A friend read through the program and asked if I was aware that women who had survived domestic or partner abuse, or who had been stalked, had rejected the use of Psalm 139 because it strongly triggered them.

I didn’t know that. Then I re-read it:

O [Lord], you have searched me and you know me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up.
You discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down. …
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. …
Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? …
If I say, “Surely the darkness will cover me, and the light around me be night
Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day.

Read the whole Psalm up to verse 18 through the lens of a terrified victim of a stalker, and see what it does to you. It chilled me to the core.

So what is the “truth” of the meaning of this psalm? One, or the other, or both, or any number of meanings depending on the life circumstances of the person reading and trying to pray it? Can you pray one meaning while still being shocked and horrified by another meaning to the same words? Who is this God?

In our Gospel Jesus speaks of sending the Paraclete, the Comforter, or Advocate. This Gospel uses the term in several ways, sometimes referring to the risen Christ himself, and in other places to the Holy Spirit. In our text Christ speaks of the Spirit of Truth as “another” Advocate who will remain with them when he is no longer to be seen. But the idea of the Spirit of Truth has parallels in other ancient literature. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, the Spirit of Truth could refer to an angelic being, or an “angel of light,” or one of two “spirits” struggling within a person. At Qumran, members believed the Spirit of Truth belonged to them and not to those led astray by the “Angel of Darkness.” It’s all very dualistic, and that’s characteristic of the Gospel of John

Most of the readers of this Reflection have long since lost patience with the type of ancient Greek dualism that seeped into the New Testament: “body = bad, spirit = good, law = bad…” you get the idea. But in this case I’m not so sure.

Once in my life I was in crisis, struggling in a situation not of my own making, that could have cost me my reputation and potentially my career. I did a good deal of what I recognized later as magical thinking. I turned painful events around in my own mind without being aware of what I was doing, so I could believe that the reality was something less painful – that what happened didn’t really happen, or that others did not see what they undoubtedly saw. Eventually I found the courage, and the right support groups, to strengthen me to see reality as it was and not to automatically flinch and scramble to “correct” it in my own mind. The split began to fade. I was strong enough to deal with the reality, even the pain, because only then was healing possible. I wanted the Spirit of Truth to remain.

The gift that emerged from that crisis comes back to me to this day when I pray Psalm 51:

“Behold, you love truth in the heart. Then in the secret of my heart teach me wisdom”

(in the Somerville psalm), or

“You desire truth in the inward being. Therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart”

in the NRSV.

Best of all the Spirit of Truth is not something abstract, but a living, dynamic Truth. Embodied Truth. Resurrected-from-the-dead Truth. A Holy Spirit of Truth. It’s not just to come in the future. It was there all the time.

© Susan K. Roll