Honoré Daumier, Le défenseur
Thinking, with joy, about the coming of the Holy Spirit, and particularly about Him as the Paraclete. Yeshua tells his disciples that the Father will, when he is gone, send them “another Paraclete” to help them. “Paraclete” comes from the verb para-kaleo, to call to one’s side. One called to one’s side, in usage, became one’s lawyer, one’s advocate, one’s defender. Two interesting points here. In the first place, they will receive another advocate, which implies that Yeshua was already their advocate. Secondly, what they receive is what we receive also; and it is an advocate, a defender. I wonder how often we think of the Holy Spirit this way. What it means is that the Almighty, the Creator of the Universe, who is also, miraculously, our loving father, detaches a part of Himself to be our Defender. Not just “ours’ in the sense of the Christian community, the church, but even unto “ours’ in the sense of yours and mine.
Against whom is he our defender? In God’s universe, there is only one accuser, one adversary, one enemy: Shaitan, “the Adversary”. Whatever his disputed origin, he is there, always. He is against us, he accuses us, he disbelieves our arguments, he wants us dead, he is der Geist der stets verneint, the spirit who always denies. He has his servants: evil spirits for those who believe in those, wholly evil individuals, men who have given themselves over entirely to his way of being, men like Hitler and Stalin who cheerfully order thousands tortured and killed; men like the character Severidge in Charles Morgan’s The Judge’s Story, whose only purpose, whose only joy in life, is to rob others of what they hold most dear, of what symbolises their inmost self.
Against such individuals, against such powers, we ordinary mortals are almost defenceless. Concentrated, pitiless and intelligent malignity is not something we often meet, which is why we tend not to recognise it when we do. There are some very rare souls who seem naturally armoured against it, but most of us are désemparé, lost and helpless in its presence. Which is why, on and after Whitsun, Pentecost, it is so important to remember that no, we are not helpless. We have a defender. We have a Defender, the Defender: the ruach,the creator spiritus who made the universe, has Himself chosen to be always at our side, our defender – the comrade who battles beside us, the defence counsel who crushes the lies of the prosecutor, the Lord who fights to defend his vassals, the father who fights to the death to save his children. The para-klètos. He is all those things because he is not only the Holy Spirit, he is also, and as such, one Person of the Triune God.
And why? Why does he bother with little shits like us? Sometimes we think that even at our rare best we aren’t much. And yet. We have to take on board the mind-bending fact that it is for little shits like us that He created at the very least this planet and possibly the Universe. That he did so out of incomprehensible but absolute love. And that all we have to do is accept that love, accept that defence. To realise that however deep the horror or the gloom or the misery we are in, he is there with us, fighting it along with us, fighting for us, never, never abandoning us. We may feel that he is, sometimes: the Psalmist felt it and Yeshua Himself quoted it on the Cross. But that same Psalm ends in reassurance. He is with us because it was for us that he suffered crucifixion. He is with us because that was not the end. And He is with us now because “as at this time”, as the Prayer Book says, He came among us like a mighty rushing wind, and remained with us like a still, small voice – deep in our hearts, speaking words of comfort that each of us understands in our own most private language.
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