Jesus being in two places at once and the necessity of the Holy Spirit
I admit that I have often found it difficult to understand the
personhood of the Holy Spirit. Even after getting to grips with Christian
doctrine concerning the personal divinity of God the Father and God the Son, it
still can seem superfluous or unnecessary to understand the Holy Spirit in this
way too. Isn’t it enough to have God ‘up there’, as the almighty creator and loving
father, and God ‘down here’ in the person of Jesus Christ, the son? Why do we
also need the Holy Spirit?
I have meditated on and prayed about these questions over the years and the main lesson I have learned is that the claim regarding the presence of the Holy Spirit is supposed to be difficult and mysterious. But when I acknowledge that the Holy Spirit as person is so impossible to grasp, I have discovered, strangely, that the feeling that he is superfluous starts to retreat too. But how does this happen exactly? One answer (of many) is that the Holy Spirit is Christ in a spiritual form, unlike the physical, which means that Jesus Christ’s love can transcend time and place, and so bizarrely, for our ears at least, he can be in two places at once.
As it says in John 14:23: "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him." Maintaining his physical body here would for sure limit him, and would limit us too, given physicality constrains anyone, even God, to time and place. Transcending time and place through the spiritual form is crucial then, if Christ is to love and support all of us, all the time. Therefore, the spiritual manifestation of Christ in the Holy Spirit, allows us to understand his resurrection as something which is empowering for everyone, including you and me, even though we were not alive at the particular time and place of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Without the Holy Spirit, the resurrection becomes nothing more than, to use the words of a previous bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, “a conjuring trick with bones”. It would have no direct relevance to us, as we could not live out the implications of Christ’s love for us – even given his resurrection overcame death – as his Spirit would not be living in us, in the here-and-now.
Click on book cover image on this blog's home page for information on my book Nine Steps to Well-Being: A Spiritual Guide for Disconnected Christians and Other Questioning Journeyers - first three chapters are FREE!!
I have meditated on and prayed about these questions over the years and the main lesson I have learned is that the claim regarding the presence of the Holy Spirit is supposed to be difficult and mysterious. But when I acknowledge that the Holy Spirit as person is so impossible to grasp, I have discovered, strangely, that the feeling that he is superfluous starts to retreat too. But how does this happen exactly? One answer (of many) is that the Holy Spirit is Christ in a spiritual form, unlike the physical, which means that Jesus Christ’s love can transcend time and place, and so bizarrely, for our ears at least, he can be in two places at once.
As it says in John 14:23: "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him." Maintaining his physical body here would for sure limit him, and would limit us too, given physicality constrains anyone, even God, to time and place. Transcending time and place through the spiritual form is crucial then, if Christ is to love and support all of us, all the time. Therefore, the spiritual manifestation of Christ in the Holy Spirit, allows us to understand his resurrection as something which is empowering for everyone, including you and me, even though we were not alive at the particular time and place of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Without the Holy Spirit, the resurrection becomes nothing more than, to use the words of a previous bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, “a conjuring trick with bones”. It would have no direct relevance to us, as we could not live out the implications of Christ’s love for us – even given his resurrection overcame death – as his Spirit would not be living in us, in the here-and-now.
Click on book cover image on this blog's home page for information on my book Nine Steps to Well-Being: A Spiritual Guide for Disconnected Christians and Other Questioning Journeyers - first three chapters are FREE!!
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