John 16:1-11

It must’ve been impossibly confusing to have been one of Jesus’s disciples. He said, ‘Now I am going to him who sent me; yet none of you asked me, where are you going? But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts.’ Keep up, disciples! You’re sad that Jesus is going, but it hasn’t occurred to you to ask where he is going; and indeed, whether in fact it’s a better place. Oh, well.

Then, even more confusingly, He’s got to go because otherwise, he says, he couldn’t send somebody called ‘the Advocate’ to them. Even after a lot of thought and reading, I’m not sure that I’m any better off than the disciples were, in fully understanding the implications of these sentences. Who is or was the Advocate? Where was Jesus going? And what does it mean that Jesus was going to send the Advocate?

Today I want to concentrate not so much on where Jesus was going, because I think, with the benefit of hindsight, we are rather better off than the disciples at that point, although perhaps if you are tempted to say, ‘Oh yes, he was going to heaven’, one ought to pause and ask whether heaven is a definite place in space and time, because no one’s ever found it, and it looks as though in some ways they never will, because it’s not that kind of place. It’s not defined in time or space. Well, that’s for another day.

But what about the Advocate? It’s a funny word, and if you read the King James Bible you’ll see that he is described as ‘the Comforter’. If you remember that really ancient hymn or canticle called the Te Deum, at Mattins, canticle at Mattins, theTe Deum Laudamus, ‘We praise thee, O God,’ there is a line in there, ‘Also the Holy Ghost; the Comforter.’ This is the bit:

The holy Church throughout all the world doth acknowledge Thee;

The Father of an infinite Majesty;

Thine honourable, true, and only Son;

Also the Holy Ghost: the Comforter.

The holy Trinity, God in three persons. Father, son and Holy Ghost: the Holy Ghost: the Comforter.

And if you read on further in John chapter 16, beyond our lesson today, you will see that Jesus goes on to say, ‘There is still much that I could say to you, but the burden would be too great for you now. However, when he comes who is the Spirit of truth, he will guide you into all the truth (John 16:12–13, NEB),’ and the ‘Spirit of truth’ is clearly a reference to the Advocate or the Comforter.

The word in Greek which is translated as the Advocate or the Comforter is our Bibles, is Paraclete (παρακλητος). Sometimes people do talk about the ‘Holy Paraclete’ but that strikes me as being a bit of an ‘in’ word, in that only people in church, and only some people in church, know what it means. It’s a bit like the special language of railways. You don’t get off a train; you alight from it. To ‘alight’ is a railway word, an ‘in’ word for railwaymen. Similarly only nerdy vicars talk about paracletes.

The Greek word for the advocate, the comforter, has all sorts of connotations, probably starting with a courtroom meaning. It’s not quite an advocate in the sense of being a barrister or a KC, who speaks for you; it’s more a question of standing alongside you and supporting you, perhaps prompting you or passing you notes to help you in your case.

It definitely also has a context, outside the courtroom, of encouragement, of comfort, so the King James’s translation, the Comforter, is certainly a possible one. When you start thinking about ‘comfortable’ things in church perhaps you will remember the ‘Comfortable Words’ in the communion service; and interestingly, there is a quote in them, from not John’s Gospel but from St John’s first letter: ‘If any man sin, we have an advocate with the father, Jesus Christ the righteous.’ [1 John 2:1 – my emphasis]. That’s interesting. There, the advocate, the comforter, is Jesus, but here clearly the Comforter is standing in for him.

I hope it’s not a heretical thought, but it has occurred to me that if you were, say, piecing together the gospel story from fragments, so bits were missing, but you had to work back from an ending with the church believing that God is a God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, (or Holy Spirit if you’re not keen on ghosts), you’d almost have to infer or make up the coming of the Holy Spirit.

If God created the world, and by sending his son Jesus demonstrated a continuing and personal concern and care for the world, there is no reason why, Jesus having ended his time among us as a man, God’s omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence should suddenly dry up; so it’s natural to expect that the divine presence would continue in some way. And Jesus seems to be saying exactly that, that God’s care for the world, his ‘comfort’ for it, will still be there, even when Jesus has gone.

Jesus says that he, Jesus, will send the comforter; so those of you who are connoisseurs of theology will realise that this might be one of the passages which people look at in connection with the anniversary of the Nicene Creed, where some people, influenced by the early theologian Arius (and it’s permitted by canon law in the Church of England, at least), can simply say, ‘…proceeds from the father’; whereas most of us include the words ‘and the Son… Who proceeds from the Father and the Son’. This passage in John 16 suggests that it is right to add ‘… and from the Son…’. It’s called the ‘filioque’ clause – which is just Latin for the same thing.

So the Advocate, the Comforter, is the divine Spirit of truth – but also the spirit of love as well, and hope; I’m thinking of Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, where Paul writes: ‘… hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’ [Romans 5:5]

We look forward to the events of Whitsuntide or Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit came in a spectacular way, making everyone able to speak in a multitude of languages and setting their hair on fire without burning it up, with a sound like a rushing wind. Like so much in the Bible, we could never prove that it was literally like that, but clearly something happened, and it was sufficiently well known to end up in Saint Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles. [Acts 2]

So what’s the relevance of this today? I’ve just been to a conference held by Modern Church, which despite its name is one of the oldest theological societies in Anglicanism. It was founded as the Modern Churchmen’s Union in 1898.This year’s conference was called ‘Enacting Hope in a Ruined World’.

Hope in a Ruined World: and the line from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans which I’ve just quoted, about the Holy Spirit pouring love into our hearts, so that ‘…hope does not disappoint us,’ was the theme of the conference: how we could bring a Christian hope to bear in our communities and in our national life in the face of the rise of populism, nationalism, fascism, war and starvation.

In the face of all that we do need an Advocate, a Comforter, a spirit of truth. We need to know what is true and to remember that the spirit of truth is also the spirit of love.

Hugh Bryant

(Sermon for Evensong on the 18th Sunday after Trinity, 19th October 2025, at All Saints Church, Penarth)