Easter Weekday

A reading from
ST AUGUSTINE 3
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The Lord said, I tell you the truth: it is for your own good that I am going away, because unless I go the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go I will send him to you.

In other words, it is to your advantage that I should be taken from you as I am now, in the condition of a servant. Now indeed I dwell among you as the Word made flesh; but I do not want you to go on loving me with a merely natural affection, content with baby’s milk and lacking any ambition to leave the nursery. It is for your own good that I am going away, because unless I do the Advocate will not come to you. So far I have given you nothing but children’s food. Unless I wean you, you will never have any appetite for solid meat. As long as you cling to my bodily presence in a purely natural way you will remain incapable of receiving the Holy Spirit.

A question arises, however: when the Lord said that he had to go before the Advocate could come to the disciples, and that if he went he would send him to them, did he mean that it was impossible for him to send the Holy Spirit while he was still on earth? Surely no one would make such an assertion. He had never left the dwelling-place of the Spirit; nor had he come from the Father in such a way as no longer to be with the Father. Besides, how could it have been impossible for Christ to send the Holy Spirit while he was yet on earth, when we know he had received the abiding presence of the Spirit at his Baptism? In fact, we know that he and the Holy Spirit were inseparable.

What this Gospel passage means is that the disciples could not receive the Holy Spirit as long as they only knew Christ according to the flesh. Hence the assertion made by the Apostle Paul after he himself had received the Holy Spirit: Even if we used to think of Christ according to the flesh, we do so no longer. When we know the incarnate Word spiritually, our knowledge even of his flesh becomes more than merely according to the flesh. This, without any doubt, is the lesson their good Master wanted to give the disciples when he told them he was going away for their own good, otherwise the Advocate would not come to them.

The withdrawal of Christ’s bodily presence from his disciples meant not only that the Holy Spirit would come to them, but that the Father and the Son would also dwell with them in a spiritual manner. Christ’s departure did not mean that the Holy Spirit would simply take his place. It meant rather that together with Christ the Spirit would make his home in the hearts of the disciples. If this were not so, what would become of our Lord’s promise to be with his disciples always, to the end of time?

And what of that other saying of his, The Father and I will come to him and make our home with him? The fact is that our Lord promised to send the Holy Spirit in such a way that he himself would always remain with his disciples. And when through the coming of the Spirit their purely natural and human affections had become spiritualised, then they would be capable of the indwelling of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

3
St Augustine, Commentary on John’s Gospel, 94.4-5 (PL 35:1869-1870);Word in Season III, 1st ed.
Monday of the Sixth Week in Eastertide Year II.