Thursday • 2/16/2023 •
Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me.
Although this is the sixth week of Epiphany, we’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.
They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office next week.
Rediscovering the Trinity and Spirit-led Worship,” Part Two of Three
The Spirit in John’s Gospel
If we reflect on some of Jesus’s sayings and conversations in John’s gospel we get a glimpse into the vision that animated Jesus that day he cleansed the Temple.
The Spirit must remake the innermost parts of us, he tells Israel’s preeminent (but clueless) teacher, Nicodemus (John 3). The Spirit will bring together in worship of the Father both a respectable, over-educated Jew like Nicodemus and a promiscuous, disreputable non-Jew like the woman at the well in Samaritan Sychar (John 3 and 4). The Spirit will create such worship through the One who is the Truth (4:24), but who also is the Way and the Life (14:6).
Image: Guercino (1591-1666), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Besides the Passover, the one named festival in John’s gospel is the harvest-time Feast of Tabernacles, a celebration of God’s provision in the wilderness during the exodus. On the last day of the Feast, celebrants pour out water to remember the way God had taken care of his people’s thirst in the wilderness. While that is taking place on one such occasion, Jesus steps forward and declares that anybody who is really thirsty needs to come to him. Conjuring Ezekiel 47’s image of rivers flowing out from the threshold of the Temple, Jesus says that he himself will provide the Spirit for everyone who comes to drink from him (John 7:37-39).
In his Final Discourse, Jesus outlines the transfer of life from himself, to the Spirit, to his followers, and then to the world (John 13-17).
Jesus explains that his disciples will experience an absence that, incongruously, makes his presence nearer. They will do greater works (14:12). All the time that Jesus has been “alongside them” (14:25) the Holy Spirit has also been “alongside them” (14:17). The Spirit who came upon the Son “and remained on him” (1:32) at his baptism has been accomplishing the Father’s works through Jesus. Because Jesus goes away, that divine presence — the divine breath — will not be just alongside, but “inside them” (14:17). After Jesus’s bodily departure, the Holy Spirit coming inside them will be the means by which Jesus himself comes back “to them” (14:18) — with a presence that is better than his pre-death and pre-resurrection presence. A closeness emerges that some have called “coinherence,” a mutual indwelling: “I in my Father and you in me and I in you” (14:20).
Spirit Representing Trinity
What is so utterly characteristic of the Holy Spirit, “the Spirit of Truth,” is that he does not come to represent himself, but the Son and the Father who have sent him (15:26; 16:12-15). In this, the Spirit reflects the Son, who has come not to serve his own ends, but his Father’s (see John 5:19,30; 14:28). As the Son has glorified the Father, the Spirit will glorify the Son (17:4; 16:14a). He will do so by explaining the things of the Son to us and by convicting the world of sin and righteousness and judgment (16:14b, 8).
What the Spirit does is create among us a communion of love that externalizes in time and space the eternal communion of love that has existed from before time and space. What the Spirit creates among us is a life of mutual deference — a life Jesus models at the beginning of the Final Discourse in the foot washing (John 13) and prays for at the Discourse’s close: “… that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (17:21).
With literary artistry, John describes Jesus’ arrest, suffering, death, and resurrection, but then announces Jesus’ ascension without ever describing it (20:17). Instead, John provides a number of vignettes illustrating the way Jesus prepared his followers for life without his physical presence. The vignettes are lessons in how to worship now under this new regime of “in Spirit and Truth” (4:24).
The promise of a new order of worship that Jesus had announced at the Temple cleansing receives fulfillment when Jesus first appears in his risen body — the very body that he said would be the beginning of the building of a new house for worship. Pointedly, Jesus tells his gathered disciples: “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you” (20:21). Dramatically, he breathes on them, and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” By his breath, mere disciples become apostles, equipped to build God’s house and to lead worship “in Spirit and Truth.”
The Book of Acts has its own way of telling the same story, first, with the transfer of Jesus’ ministry here on earth (the Gospel According to Luke) to his ministry at the right hand of God by means of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:29-36), and second, with Pentecost’s amazing manifestations of the new life rippling from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth.
The apostle Paul, too, tells the same story through his developed theology of how the “Last Adam” became “Life-Giving Spirit” (1 Cor 15:45) in order to make dead people come to life (Eph 2:1-10) and to unite once estranged people into a dwelling for God (Eph 2:11-22).
But John’s gospel has taken us to the heart of what the Spirit of God effects in our worship.
Tomorrow, the third installment of thoughts on the ministry of the Holy Spirit in worship…
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+