“Receive the Holy Spirit”

Abstract

A pivotal moment in the Gospel of John comes when the resurrected Jesus breathes the Spirit into his disciples and sends them as he was sent. The double thrust of Johannine spirituality is desiring Jesus and desiring what he desires: on the one hand, going deeper into relationship with Jesus in trust, understanding and love; and, on the other hand, going deeper into the world now, inspired by how Jesus was sent, with learning, praying, and loving as the core practices of disciples.

Introduction

This article is a wisdom-seeking exercise in biblical interpretation. Wisdom is, I think, the main biblical category for what we call theology. I have summed up this approach, which attempts to unite scholarship, hermeneutics, contemporary theology, ¹ and Christian living, under the heading, “A Wisdom Interpretation of Scripture.” ² The main published result of trying to practice this approach on a scriptural text has been a recently published theological commentary on the Gospel of John, ³ about which I will say more below. But an earlier attempt to do this was in a book of essays co-authored with Frances Young on a letter of Paul, Meaning and Truth in 2 Corinthians. ⁴ The five years we spent on that, discussing and writing, translating the letter, and co-teaching a postgraduate group in which colleagues also took part, were formative for the development of the approach, and Frances Young has remained a conversation partner. ⁵

The present article asks about the Spirit in the Gospel of John, with special reference to the death of Jesus, asking the question: what wisdom about the Holy Spirit might be learned from the Gospel of John for Christian thinking today?

Commenting on John

I spent over twenty years writing the commentary on John, and it was a deeply formative experience. It involved year after year of reading and rereading the Gospel, by myself and with many others: family and friends; students in courses; academic colleagues in several universities; fellow Christians in a wide range of church settings in several countries; people from other religious traditions in the practice of Scriptural Reasoning; ⁶ and also, of course, many of whom I have not met in person and who have responded to this text during the past two thousand years around the world, whether in theology, art, poetry, liturgy, hymns, architecture, spiritualities, podcasts, films, politics, social action, education, or through having their lives shaped by it. One result is that the commentary on John became something like a distillation of my whole theology and experience of God, of the church, of other religions, and of life. The attempt to distill the wisdom accessibly is especially focused in the sentences in italics that punctuate the commentary that sum up what I have learned.

Out of all this emerged my core desire for the commentary: that it might encourage people to become habitual re-readers of the Gospel of John. I found one of the most perceptive commentators on John to be Trond Dokka, a Norwegian who combines the elements most needed in interpreting John: good scholarship and historical critical judgement; literary perception and imagination (for me the single most helpful body of writing on John in the past thirty years or so has been the outpouring of literary interpretations); and philosophical, theological and practical wisdom about the Gospel’s profound relevance to life now. He has written one of the best articles on John I have read, on irony, ⁷ and in it he says that one of the very remarkable things about John is how it is both accessible and endlessly rich. I have found that to be the case. To use an old folk saying in relation to the Gospel of John: “mice can paddle and elephants can swim.” On the one hand it is written in easy Greek, has well-crafted stories, uses readily understood imagery and metaphors, and so on—and, at the same time, its depths of meaning are inexhaustible. This Gospel is continually challenging to those who reread and reread it year after year.

The Superabundant Spirit

In my experience, John is a Gospel of superabundance. It bombards the imagination with images of abundance, from hundreds of gallons of water turned into wine (2:1–11), through small amounts of bread and fish feeding thousands (6:1–15), to the final picture of a kosmos that could not contain all the books that could be written about Jesus (21:25). Overall, John testifies to multiple dimensions of abundance—of life; meaning, light and truth; joy; love; glory; and more. The headline is there in the Prologue: “From his fullness (plērōma) we have all received, grace upon grace” (1:16). The open secret of the ongoing drama of participation in this abundance is in the title of this paper, the imperative invitation: “Receive the Holy Spirit” (20:22), which Frederick Dale Bruner translates with an emphasis on the invitation, “Welcome the Holy Spirit!” ⁸

The Holy Spirit in John is superabundant. It—or he or she—is like a wind or a breath that blows where it chooses, springing surprises (3:8). It is a gift given “without measure” (3:34). In ch. 7 there is one of the climactic moments of Jesus’s public ministry at the Feast of Tabernacles in the Temple in Jerusalem, which celebrated harvest, water, and light: “On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the Scripture has said, Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” (7:37–39). The Farewell Discourses in chs. 13–17 include wave after wave of teaching on the Holy Spirit, which is called the paraklētos—the Paraclete, Encourager, Helper, Comforter, Advocate, the one who “cries out alongside” us—and in the Holy Spirit, too, is superabundance, inseparable from the core concerns with love, glory, and truth. The Spirit offers ultimate promise, desire, challenge, and mystery: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (16:13).

My title quotation, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” is the final mention of the Holy Spirit in John, and it takes up the other mentions and anticipations that have come earlier. I now turn to that.

“Receive the Holy Spirit”

“Receive the Holy Spirit!” (20:22) is a pivotal moment in the Gospel of John. I came to the conclusion (after about nineteen years on the commentary) that the dynamic structure of John turns on this verse in a fascinating way. To sum up what will follow, in this event of the giving of the Holy Spirit by the crucified and risen Jesus, the meaning of his death and resurrection (the two climactic events that together are in this Gospel often called the “hour” of Jesus) is inseparably connected with receiving the Holy Spirit directly from Jesus.

The Holy Spirit and the Death of Jesus

I begin with the inseparability of the Holy Spirit from the death of Jesus. All through the Gospel, John has been preparing readers for the death of Jesus. This preparation begins with John the Baptist calling Jesus “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (1:29) and continues with Jesus saying to his mother, “My hour has not yet come” (2:4) during the first sign at the wedding in Cana. It intensifies towards the end of his public ministry, when Jesus is “the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep” (10:11), and when calling his friend Lazarus out of the tomb provokes the decision to plan Jesus’s death (11:53).

In ch. 12 the public ministry of Jesus culminates with his announcement: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (12:23). Immediately following this pronouncement are three profound passages that not only prepare the reader imaginatively and conceptually for his crucifixion but also, in the light of the rest of the Gospel, are deeply related to the Holy Spirit.

The first connects the death of Jesus and abundant fruit, beginning, “Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit” (12:25). Followers of Jesus are to be inspired by him to live: not fearing death; free to risk their lives for the sake of love; trusting in Jesus; living in service to him; and being where he is— “in a union of love with his Father and with those who trust and love him. And this love is oriented to the whole world, as the global horizon of the [rest of] this chapter 12 [and other chapters, especially Chapters 1 and 17] shows. . . [B]eing ‘where I am’means that followers, like Jesus, can be utterly committed to God and to a life of love in the world whatever the cost.” ⁹ But this is only possible for them after Jesus dies, is resurrected, and breathes the Holy Spirit into them. The Spirit is the ultimate gift of abundant life, truth, love, and fruitfulness, and Jesus says as early as ch. 3 that the Spirit is given “without measure” (3:34).

In the Synoptic Gospels, the voice of the Father is heard in absolute, divine affirmation of Jesus at both his baptism and his transfiguration. Neither of those events is described by John; nor is the agony of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane just before his arrest. John, with striking brevity, combines key elements of all three—baptism, transfiguration, and Gethsemane. He unites testimony to Jesus being shaken and disturbed, “Now my soul is troubled,” and facing the possibility of avoiding his death, “And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour,” with a prayer of acceptance, “‘Father, glorify your name,’” and direct affirmation by his Father, “Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again’” (12:27–28). These two verses should be read in conversation with the three Synoptic stories. But John’s distillation adds something that is essential to his framework for understanding the death of Jesus: The death of Jesus goes to the heart of who God is. The name of God, who God is in God’s own being, is glorified through this hour, central to which is the death of Jesus. The only instance of the Father’s voice sounding in John’s Gospel unites the death of Jesus inextricably with the glory of God’s name, which signifies the most comprehensive way of identifying the reality, character, and mystery of God. This event happens through an exchange between Jesus and his Father about this ultimate test and revelation of their relationship, Jesus’s death. So, at the heart of this [John’s] relational, love-centred understanding of the death of Jesus is the trust and love between the Father and the Son. ¹⁰

Jesus’s death is utterly inseparable from the Holy Spirit. In the Synoptic stories of the baptism of Jesus, the Spirit descends like a dove. In John 1 the baptism itself is not described but assumed, and the focus is on what is essential in this Gospel: the Holy Spirit and Jesus as Son of God: “And John testified, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God”’ (1:32–34). The Spirit is intrinsic to who God is (in ch. 4 Jesus says, “God is Spirit” — 4:24), and the Spirit remaining (“abiding,” the verb is menein) on Jesus means that everything he does, says, and suffers involves the Spirit, too. That raises very sharply the question of the Spirit and the actual death of Jesus. I will come back to that later.

The third, culminating passage is this statement by Jesus: ‘“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die” (12:32–33). John’s core message is about this strange attraction. It is an attraction whose scope he never limits—and some manuscripts actually read: ‘“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself”.” This comports with the Prologue calling Jesus the Word of God through whom “all things came into being” (1:3).

The whole Gospel is about desire, beginning in the Prologue and followed by the first words of Jesus to his first disciples (mathētai, learners): “What are you looking for?” (1:38). Jesus is asking, “What do you really, really want? What do you desire?” I became fascinated by desire as a fundamental element in John, explicitly or implicitly present in every chapter, and also by how pervasive desire is in our personal lives and in our culture, politics, economics, and the future of our planet. What are we looking for? What desires do we prioritize?

Shoshana Zuboff perceptively examines issues of trust and desire in our contemporary world’s “information civilization.” ¹¹ As she gives her penetrating account of the development of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and online culture, economics, politics, and personal interactions, again and again her questions, concepts, and concerns resonate with the Gospel of John: in whom and in what do we trust? What is truth, and what is fake news? How do we test testimony? What is worth our attention, and what is our attention worth? What and whom are we being drawn towards? How are our horizons, choices, and relationships being shaped and manipulated? Who are the ones behind all this? Above all, Zuboff shows how central the concept of desire is for all of us, and for those dominant companies in their pursuit of wealth, knowledge, and power.

In John, there is no doubt about where our ultimate desire is to be oriented. It is neatly summed up by comparing that first question of Jesus to his first disciples—“What are you looking for? —with the moving encounter of the resurrected Jesus with Mary Magdalene after his resurrection. Mary is weeping as she searches for his body. Jesus asks her: “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?’ (20:15). The “what” of his opening question has become “whom.” The whole of John’s Gospel is centered on who Jesus is, and the desirability of finding him, trusting him, loving him, following him, and abiding in him permanently, all within the unsurpassable horizon opened by the Prologue and oriented towards the world God loves. But in order for this to happen, people need to be drawn to him and genuinely to desire to be in relationship with him. This is the ultimate vulnerability of Jesus. He comes in love for the world, but will the love be mutual? He can be misunderstood, ignored, rejected, denied, betrayed, and killed.

Jesus’s Farewell Discourses (chs. 13–17) reveal the core of his own desire, and the essence of it is clear: the desire for deep, mutual love. The opening headline for the Discourses is that “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (13:1). At the center of the Discourses is the parable of the vine: “I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (15:5), which is about mutual indwelling in trust and love, leading directly into Jesus’s desire for the mutuality of friendship. This imperative invitation is rooted in his love that is expressed in laying down his life: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father” (15:12–15).

The final chapter of the Discourses presents Jesus, as he faces death, pouring out his desire in prayer to his Father that those who come later as disciples should be utterly united in love with himself and his Father, and with one another, for the sake of the world. To be drawn to Jesus is to be drawn into a vocation of love like his, and to be invited to unite one’s desires with his. The Holy Spirit is essential to this vocation. There is one teaching after another in the Farewell Discourses about the coming gift of the Spirit to be received so that disciples can be inspired in their learning, praying, and loving. Those are the three core things John wants disciples of Jesus to be: learners, prayers, and lovers. In the context of the Gospel, this cannot happen fully until after the death of Jesus.

I have emphasized the connection of the death of Jesus with the Holy Spirit for reasons that will become clear. All through the Gospel, John has been preparing readers not only for the death of Jesus, but also for the resurrection. I will not labor the point by mentioning all of them but will note two. Jesus says that the temple will be destroyed and raised up in three days and identifies his body with the temple (2:13–22). Later, Jesus says to Martha, the sister of Lazarus, “I am the resurrection and the life” (11:25). There are many pointers towards his resurrection in the Farewell Discourses.

“As the Father Has Sent Me, So I Send You”

The convergence of the anticipatory passages about the crucified and resurrected Jesus makes his breathing his Spirit into his disciples a pivotal moment. But it is what Jesus says in this moment that points to the dynamic structure of the Gospel. He says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (20:21). What does it mean to be sent as Jesus was sent? I think it has two key elements.

First, we need to understand who Jesus is and how he was sent. In relation to John, it means going back to the beginning of the Gospel and rereading it, with our leading questions now being: Who is Jesus? What meaning does what he does, says, and suffers have for us? How can we go deeper and deeper into relationship with Jesus in trust, understanding, and love? The climactic theological statement in John is given a little later in ch. 20, when Thomas cries out to the crucified and risen Jesus: “My Lord and my God!” (20:28). So, according to John, the risen Jesus is present as God is present, and as one reads, one is in the presence of Jesus. The blessing Jesus gives, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (20:29) means (as the address in 20:31 to readers who have not seen Jesus suggests) that trusting this testimony is the way to relate to him initially and to have “life in his name” long term. It is about meeting Jesus and maturing in the relationship through reading and rereading.

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you” is not mere repetition—we are not living in the first century, and Jesus is not stuck there either. It is about analogous variation. It encourages endless improvisation in new situations, inspired by who Jesus is and what he has said, done, and suffered, breathing his Spirit and living faithfully and imaginatively in the world in his light.

The key to living faithfully and imaginatively in Jesus is receiving the Holy Spirit. As Jesus says in the Farewell Discourses, what the Holy Spirit does is to “remind you of all that I have said to you” (14:26) and to “glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you” (16:14). That is the first element. The second element is given in the encouragement to follow the example of Jesus, as when he took the role of the servant and washed his disciples’ feet (13:1-20), or in actively seeking truth, wherever it is found, inspired by the promise, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (16:13).

So the Spirit animates the reading and rereading of this Gospel, inspiring readers to go deeper and deeper into relationship with Jesus through it (and through its many intertexts, which include the whole Bible), and, at the same time, to go deeper and more imaginatively and daringly into life now, united in a community of love—love both for each other and for the world to which Jesus was sent and is now present in love, truth, life-giving compassion, strange attraction, and radical challenge. That is the double thrust of Johannine spirituality.

How Receive the Holy Spirit?

So, how might the Holy Spirit be received, according to John? Clearly, one way is Jesus breathing the Spirit, united with his words, into his first followers (20:22). But in addition, the Spirit comes through the blessing on those who have not seen but read (or hear) the Gospel, extending the invitation to those who come later. The combination in 20:29-31 of the blessing and the address to readers who are not eyewitnesses makes sense in various ways.

Any eyewitness sees only a bit of the action, whereas for the reader who is not an eyewitness, John provides a much more comprehensive overview. John is combining his own testimony with that of many others, and then, after much reflection and (presumably) prayer and living in a Christian community over the years, he distills for readers what he judges to be the essentials. Above all, the blessing on us readers makes sense because Jesus, who is “Lord and God,” is present to us as we read. We do not see him, but this text is letting us meet him and trust him, and then, as we go deeper and deeper into it, we can have more and more of life in his name. Margaret Daly-Denton writes, “This is a text that calls for re, re, and re-readers,” and she quotes Ingrid Kitzberger on the beatitude given by Jesus: “Blessed are those who read and reread the Gospel and believe [trust].” ¹²

If we do reread the Gospel, we pick up many signs that it is through this reading and rereading that we can receive the Spirit. For example, in the discourse after the feeding of the five thousand in ch. 6 Jesus says, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (6:63). John is giving us spirit and life as we read, spirit and life through words. Or, earlier, Jesus (or the author) says: “He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure” (3:34). At the very beginning of the Gospel, the utter unity between Word and Spirit is centered on Jesus himself, who is the Word of God in whom the Spirit abides, remains, rests. John’s deepest desire is for readers to trust his testimony, to receive the Holy Spirit through reading and rereading it, and then to be part of a community of trusting and trustworthy fellow readers who are sent now as Jesus was sent.

This is a spirituality of Word, Spirit, and community, to be lived out in practices of truth-seeking and learning, worshiping, and praying, ¹³ following Jesus, letting one’s desires be shaped and inspired by his desires, improvising on his example of service when he washed the feet of his disciples, loving as he loved, and being a friend of his, beloved and loving. Theology and spirituality are utterly inseparable, and the deepest well of both theology and spirituality are found in the prayer of Jesus in ch. 17.

“Then He Bowed His Head and Gave Up His Spirit”

But what about the dying of Jesus and the Holy Spirit? John describes his actual death as follows: “ . . . Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit” (19:30). The final clause in Greek is: paredōken to pneuma, literally: “he handed over the breath/spirit/Spirit.” Pneuma means both breath and spirit. There are no capital letters in the Greek that might indicate whether this is the Holy Spirit or just his last breath. It does mean he really died; but this handing over of the spirit could also be his first giving of the Holy Spirit. It would be characteristic of John to include such levels of meaning. If that is so, then the death of Jesus and a new beginning, the handing over of the Spirit, happen simultaneously.

To whom might the Spirit be handed over? Those commentators who have seen this as a giving of the Holy Spirit have often seen it being breathed down on his mother and the disciple Jesus loved. Jesus has just said to his mother from the cross, “Woman, here is your son,” and to his beloved disciple, “Here is your mother” (19:27). The narrator then informs the reader: “And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home” (19:26–27). So, the Spirit is breathed onto this proto-community of family and more than family, centered on the crucified Jesus.

But why stop there? There are also the two others crucified with him, and John’s readers who knew the other Gospels would know about them. And there are three other women besides Jesus’s mother: his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene (19:25), who will play a key role in the next chapter in relation to the resurrected Jesus. And there is the Roman soldier who has just crucified Jesus, has gambled for his tunic, and then pierced his side with a spear to make sure he is dead. This action and what follows it are given extraordinary significance by the author: “. . . and at once blood and water came out. (He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.) These things occurred so that the Scripture might be fulfilled, ‘None of his bones shall be broken.’ And again, another passage of Scripture says, ‘They will look on the one whom they have pierced’” (19:34–37).

The resurrected Jesus breathes the Spirit to his disciples in an upper room. But here, from the cross, he hands over the Spirit as it were to the world, from an agonized position of suffering and humiliation. The breath goes out, who knows where? (see John 3:8). There is no boundary around breath, as we have been learning through the pandemic. It can go global, invisibly. Jesus lifted up on the cross exercises a strange attraction, with many surprises. There is here a hint of quiet, unspectacular, anonymous relating, as invisible as breath, but also as vital. It may even be that this mostly hidden spread of the Spirit of the crucified Jesus is primary, pervasive, as embracing and as available as the air we breathe and able to cross boundaries and inspire people, groups, traditions, communities, nations, and movements in repeatedly surprising ways.

But what about the actual death of Jesus? Something is happening to death itself. But, as often in John, it is primarily about someone, not something. Jesus, the one on whom the Spirit abides, and who is utterly one with his Father, and also utterly one with vulnerable, mortal flesh, dies. Of course what happens to Jesus is death; but in this unique event what happens to death is Jesus. John poses with incomparable insistence the challenge of this person in relation to God, to humanity, to all creation, and to what he calls darkness—suffering, sin, evil, and death.

To be sent as Jesus was sent is to be sent into this darkness—and the darkness is in ourselves, in the church, and in the world. In the last chapter of John this is underlined by mention of Peter’s martyrdom, Judas’s betrayal, and the circulation of “fake news” in the church. The light shines in the darkness (1:5), but, as we well know, the darkness still continues. Yet Jesus, according to John and Christian tradition, is not just one more victim. How is his uniqueness to be understood? What happens in his death that is once and for all? And how might this be relevant to us?

Denise Levertov’s poem, “On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX,” wrestles with this. Fairly late in life, Levertov came to believe in the incarnation while writing a poem about “doubting Thomas.” In this poem she meditates on Chapter XX of the Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. There are two key quotations from Julian. The first is about the “oneing,” the uniting of Jesus with the Godhead, the second about his union with humanity: “Every sorrow and desolation He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.” ¹⁴

On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX

Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,

hot wood, the nails, blood trickling

into the eyes, yes—

but the thieves on their neighbor crosses

survived till after the soldiers

had come to fracture their legs, or longer.

Why single out the agony? What’s

a mere six hours?

Torture then, torture now,

the same, the pain’s the same,

immemorial branding iron,

electric prod.

Hasn’t a child

dazed in the hospital ward they reserve

for the most abused, known worse?

This air we’re breathing,

these very clouds, ephemeral billows

languid upon the sky’s

moody ocean, we share

with women and men who’ve held out

days and weeks on the rack—

and in the ancient dust of the world

what particles

of the long tormented,

what ashes.

But Julian’s lucid spirit leapt

to the difference:

perceived why no awe could measure

that brief day’s endless length,

why among all the tortured

One only is “King of Grief”.

The oneing, she saw, the oneing

with the Godhead opened Him utterly

to the pain of all minds, all bodies

—sands of the sea, of the desert—

from first beginning

to last day. The great wonder is

that the human cells of His flesh and bone

didn’t explode

when utmost Imagination rose

in that flood of knowledge. Unique

in agony, Infinite strength, Incarnate,

empowered Him to endure

inside of history,

through those hours when he took to Himself

the sum total of anguish and drank

even the lees of that cup:

within the mesh of the web, Himself

woven within it, yet seeing it,

seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation

He saw, and sorrowed in kinship. ¹⁵

That poem seems to me to breathe something of the Spirit that Jesus handed over from the cross. It is about Jesus as the Word who is God, the one through whom all things came into being (1:1–4), and who is present to and through all things and people (not least in their worst times), often incognito as well as known by name. And those who are sent to learn, pray, and love in his name are invited to welcome this Spirit, breathed on executed bandits and a Roman executioner, as the same Spirit breathed on Easter Sunday by the risen Jesus, who showed his disciples the wounds in his hands and side. And, because Jesus has not stopped breathing, this superabundant Spirit—given without measure (3:34), and one with God, who is S/spirit (4:24)—is still being breathed and received in innumerable ordinary and surprising ways, among and beyond his followers, and not least through reading and rereading the text of the Gospel of John.