Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, amen.
If I’m being honest, I have often felt a bit confused by the words of our dear Lord in this portion of St. John’s Gospel. How can it be better for the disciples for Jesus to leave them and send His Holy Spirit? Wouldn’t it be much better for Jesus to simply, stick around? Wouldn’t that make all the wrong of this world right again? Wouldn’t the disciples no longer have to worry about the evildoers seeking their lives?
But as I studied for this morning’s service I came to the realization that, in our Lord’s words, we see the ultimate purpose of the Easter season, and it might be a bit different than you think. Yes, Easter is about the victory of our Lord over sin, death, and the power of the devil, but just how that becomes each of our realities is what we are continuing to look forward to in the season of Pentecost. If we understand this nuance about the Easter season and find its fulfillment in the giving of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, Jesus’ words in our Gospel lesson make much more sense to us this morning.
For just a moment let’s think back to Jesus’ passion as He stood trial. At that time, He told Pilate that His kingdom was “not of this world”. This morning He tells His disciples that “the ruler of this world is judged”, which makes sense when we understand that the ruler of which He speaks is none other than Satan. That is the point of Jesus’ death, isn’t it, to redeem that which was lost to sin and corruption and handed over to Satan in the fall of Adam and Eve to his temptation? St. James describes the world in his epistle this morning when he tells the Church to “put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness”. Now, I say that James is describing the world here because “to put it away” means that it is present and prevalent. To “put it away” means that these are things that are knocking at the door, creeping around outside the windows, and seeking to overtake our bodies and lives. So when St. James calls the people of God to put away such things he is doing nothing other than calling us not to live in and for this kingdom, which is ruled by the one who is judged already, but for the kingdom that is yet to come. That kingdom is the one that no sin will ever corrupt, in which there will be no separation between God and man, where we will know Him even as we are fully known. And that is the purpose of Easter, that our dear Lord might win and preserve our place in that eternal and everlasting kingdom.
But, until that kingdom comes, we live in this filthy and rampantly wicked world. Malice, hatred, sexual immorality, and numerous other perversions have become routine parts of our everyday lives. Husbands sin against wives and wives against husbands, children fail to honor their parents and parents fail to guard and protect their children from the satanic influences that pervade the world and seek to invade their minds. We have been sinned against by those who are close to us; friends, family, spouses, and other loved ones, and we ourselves have sinned against those whom we ought to love even as we love ourselves.
That is the nature of the satanic kingdom; it kills and destroys. There is no life to be found therein, only death. No reconciliation with the God and Father of all mankind, only destruction and eternal condemnation for those who live in and of this kingdom. Jesus Himself makes this perfectly clear in today’s Gospel lesson when He says; “[The Holy Spirit] will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness…concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer”. As we have considered already, sin rules in this world, and because it does righteousness is nowhere to be found. For none of us can achieve the righteousness demanded by the will of the Father as laid down in His commands. For we, too, are sinners corrupted by sin to our very core and unable to please our God and Father with any of our works because they are all tainted and stained with the guilt of sin. We do not love our neighbors as ourselves because, when push comes to shove, we would all rather save our own skin than that of someone else. We do not love our neighbors fully and completely because we fail to give them exactly what they need in their times of desperation, always assuming that “someone else” will do it in our stead. We do not love those in our own lives perfectly when we mutter under our breath and foster anger and malice in our hearts against those who have wronged us, rather than forgiving them as we have been forgiven.
Simply put, where there is no Christ, there is no righteousness. So how, then, is it to the disciples’ advantage, and to ours as well, that our Lord Jesus should leave His Church to live on in this sin filled and fallen world without Him? I can think of no better person to explain it than Martin Luther in one of his sermons on this text wherein he says this; “For these words: ‘because I go to the Father,’ embraces the whole work of our redemption and salvation, for which God’s Son was sent from heaven, and which He performed for us and still performs until the end; namely, his passion, death and resurrection, and his whole reign in the church.” It is to the advantage of the Lord’s disciples, and His Church, that He goes to the Father because that is an important part of His work of redemption; to intercede for we who have faith in His work and Name, even as we live in this sin filled and fallen world. As Luther goes on to describe, “[Jesus] intercedes for those, who believe, with the Father as an eternal mediator and high priest, because they still have weaknesses and sins remaining in them, and gives them the power and strength of the Holy Spirit to overcome sin, the devil, and death.”
So you see, we are not left alone, bereft of any help and aid in this world and life. For our Lord’s promise to send the Helper to His disciples is His promise to each of us as well. This Helper, His Holy Spirit, serves to remind us constantly that the things of this world are not the things in which we should place our hope and trust. The false gods and hollow idols of this world will only ever disappoint. They cannot, and will not, bring us any closer to our God and Father and will, in fact, only lure us further and further away from the One who truly loves us and gives Himself up for our redemption. The Holy Spirit reminds us that our Father’s kingdom is not this world, because His kingdom is far greater than this world, and it is in that kingdom where our hearts are to be set. For when His kingdom comes, there will be no more violence, no more hatred and malice, no more sin and corruption. When His kingdom comes the will of God will be our will, and everything will be in perfect harmony. And that will only happen because our dear Savior has left His Church to sit at the right hand of the Father to intercede for us night and day, and stand before the judgment throne of the Father as the very atonement made on our behalf.
And the Holy Spirit is given not only to remind us that we will not inherit this kingdom, but to serve also, as our Lord calls Him, as a Helper. He helps us in our times of greatest trial and temptation by bringing to our memory the truth that, no matter how lonely we may feel, we have a God who has not forgotten nor forsaken us. He helps us in our time of great distress by bringing the calming peace of Jesus into our hearts as He brings to our recollection all of the promises that Jesus gives to us in His Word and Sacraments; that we have been bought back from the enemies that seek our overthrow and destruction, that He alone is our Good Shepherd who has laid down His life for ours, and that none will ever snatch us from His nail scarred hands. He is your Helper in times when you have been sinned against and find it hard to forgive by reminding you of the boundless forgiveness won for you by your Lord Jesus Christ and His bloody death on the cross for all of your sins. And because Christ has died for your sins, you stand as forgiven children before your Father who is in heaven. In short, you can forgive because you have been forgiven!
The Holy Spirit leads and guides us to the means of grace in which we find the help and comfort that we so desperately need in this life and world. For when we are beset on all sides by the enemies that seek our downfall and destruction, He reminds us that in these precious gifts we have nothing less than Christ really and truly present for and with us! His words forgive your sins in the Holy Absolution, His death is made your own through the waters of your Holy Baptism, and His flesh and blood are given you here to eat and to drink in order that you might be united with Him and He with you in His feast of victory over the enemies of this world that rule our lives.
And while His Holy Spirit comforts and helps us here, our dear Lord intercedes for us in heaven; pointing to His spear pierced side, His nail scarred hands and feet, and His brow pierced by the crown of thorns as reminders to the Judge of all creation that His blood was shed for you for the forgiveness of all of your sins. That is why it is to our advantage that He leave us here, as we heard last week, “for a little while”. Because He will return to set right all that has been skewed by sin, to destroy the power of death once and for all time, and to bring us into His perfect creation once more where sin, death, and the power of the devil will have no foothold, and neither will we want for anything. For then we will have all we will ever need in knowing God in full, even as we are fully known. So let us sing to the Lord a new song for He has done, and continues to do, marvelous things!
Amen.