Pentecost

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.