The Spirit of Truth
The famous line at Jesus’ trial from Pilate: “What
is truth?” reveals the skepticism of the Romans, and the West in general, at
being able to arrive at one unified Truth.
Jesus, however, did not proclaim to know the truth; he declared
that he was the truth.
In today’s gospel , Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit
as the Spirit of truth, which proceeds from the Father. In our Creed, we retain the original form
that declares that the Spirit proceeds from the Father without the later
addition of “and the Son”, called the filioque in Latin. One of the issues that divided the Church in
the 11th century was over the Roman church unilaterally changing the Creed to
include the phrase “and the Son” ; the East refused to accept this change
without a council, and this refusal has been a source of division between
eastern and western Christianity since then.
We get our name “Old Catholic” because we retain the original expression
of the creed out of a desire to reunite ourselves with the original, undivided Church.
Using the Western rites and rituals, we see our mission as one of
declaring the unity that was lost and inviting both the Eastern churches
and the Western churches to find more
common ground and recover the original meaning of the term “catholic”,
universal. Some have suggested the
compromise (which I think is the most accurate rendition) of changing “and the
Son” to “through the Son”. We can only
hope that one day such a healing compromise will help close the wounds of
division.
Unity is not realized through uniformity, though,
and runs against the essential truth of how we experience our world. Our unity springs from the truth of Christ’s
mission to bring everyone into God’s loving embrace through the common
pursuit of the Spirit’s call. We can
heal the divisions in our communities by not insisting on everyone doing the
same thing the same way, and by recognizing the “different workings, but the
same God” as Paul puts it in today’s reading.
The freedom of the Truth springs from this
awareness, and where this is not recognized, community builds upon the sands of
uniformity and exclusivity. Following
Christ is becoming more and more like Christ each day. It is conforming our lives to a vision we all
share while celebrating the diversity of gifts we bring to help realize that
vision. The Spirit’s truth is lived, not
simply contemplated; and it is in this living the Truth that the Truth is revealed
to the world.
