Easter 6, year C - 13th May 2007
John 14.23-29
Advocate

49 years ago a brand new young curate began his ministry in a parish in Sussex.  He was given the date on which he was to preach his first sermon.  The beginning of the week before the big day his vicar asked him how he was getting on with it and the curate, whose name was John, said that he hadn’t started it yet because the Holy Spirit hadn’t yet told him what to say.  The vicar asked him again as the week wore on and the answer was the same.  Again at the end of the week still the same.  Saturday came and Saturday went and John still couldn’t be certain what he was going to say and still hadn’t committed a word to paper.
On the Sunday morning the vicar watched with sinking heart as his brand new young curate went up the pulpit steps for the first time with no notes at all and he feared what might be going to happen next.  The vicar, who is now a bishop, says he can’t remember now what the curate’s sermon was about because he was so overwhelmed with relief that it was about anything.  He only remembers how good it was and how enormously glad he was that the curate had received the words he’d waited for in time.
From that day my friend John, from that first sermon, always preached like that, always excellently, always movingly, with no notes and very little formal preparation.  And I always wondered how he did it and I always marvelled at his confidence and his faith.
I’ve told that story today because it is one small example of the Holy Spirit at work in the kind of way in which Jesus was talking about it in our Gospel reading just now.  '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'.
Now the word advocate is not a particularly helpful translation.  Various versions of the Bible offer other words in place of advocate.  Counsellor, Helper, Paraclete.  None of these are particularly helpful either and none of them really hit the nail completely on the head.  The old Authorised Version offers the word Comforter which sounds very nice but it is rather limiting in the image it conjures up.  Archbishop Temple came up with the best one, at least in my own personal experience – Strengthener.  To him the advocate is one who makes us brave and strong by being brave and strong beside us, bringing us a bracing consolation rather than just a gentle sympathy.  There will always be times when we need the gentle sympathy most.  For example when we have perhaps just started having a particularly bad time.  But there should also come a time when we have to stand up again and receive the bracing consolation we need to face life and the world again and to take new heart.
Taking new heart calls to mind the old Hans Christian Andersen tale of the teapot.  Once the proud porcelain teapot was the most important thing on the table and its only flaw was a crack in its lid.  It was used every day and then, one day, it got dropped on the floor and its spout broke off and it was chucked out.  But then a transformation took place because somebody took it and filled it with earth and planted a flower bulb in it and it literally gained a new heart.  The bulb and then the flower became the living centre of the teapot, and the teapot, utterly transformed, had indeed a new meaning in life.
The first Disciples badly needed a new meaning to life after Jesus’ death.  It must have seemed like the end of everything.  Their Messianic hopes had died with him.  Messiahs don’t get themselves crucified.  Did they remember then the promise we are told that Jesus made them at the Last Supper?  'It is better for you that I should go away for if I do not go, the advocate will not come to you, but if I go I will send him to you'.
The advocate (or comforter) would console them in their bereavement but the writer of the Gospel of John doesn’t stop there.  Two chapters on from where we are today, in chapter 16, Jesus likens their feelings to the pangs of childbirth.  He says, 'Though you will be plunged in grief, your grief will be turned to joy.  A woman in labour is in pain because her time has come.  But when her baby is born she forgets the anguish in her joy that a child has been born into the world'.  Ends and beginnings are inextricably mixed but humiliation and terrible hurt can sometimes turn out to be the way to a new heart and a new life.
The Disciples were not to be misled by Jesus’ humiliating death by which, in reality, he was transformed and born again.  Jesus promises to send them the advocate who would come and console and brace them.  He would remove the blindness from the disciples’ hearts.  He is the Spirit of Truth who will lead them into all truth by the light of Christ.  Nothing is clearer than that Jesus Christ is going away in order to come closer to his disciples than before.
This is as relevant for us today as it was for the first disciples.  They felt they were losing Jesus.  We may sometimes feel we can’t find him.  But he comes in the coming of his spirit whom he sends from the Father, just as much for us as for them.
It is very daunting to feel bruised and defeated.  There are times when we’d all like to hide away from life.  It is daunting to be a terrified Disciple or a broken teapot or even a very new curate hoping to find the right words.  But we cannot stay daunted.  Jesus says, 'Because I live you will also live'.  We have to get up and go out, to go out with confidence, secure in the love and power of God, given to us all by Jesus.  And those who have taken the promises of Jesus and have acted on them have found them to be gloriously true.
Jesus himself never moved outside Palestine, he addressed crowds of only thousands; he healed only a fraction of a vast multitude of diseases and dealt with only a limited variety of problems.  The world he lived in here on earth was small and restricted.  But since his death and resurrection, since he died so that he could come back, the friends of Jesus in all the time since then have shared his Good News with billions as far as the most far-flung corners of the earth.
Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever but he is not static.  He is alive and active, moving through today’s world with power and using the same basic material as he ever has – people like us - men and women who go out and share that Good News through their lives and their hearts and their actions.
And there is the point for us.  The Holy Spirit, the comforter, the Strengthener, can’t do it on its own.  Remember how Archbishop Temple described it – it makes us strong by being strong beside us.  It makes us strong – it enables us to do things.  It enables us to play our part in living out and sharing what has been given to us - the Good News of the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

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