6-12-19 - The Holy Translator

(You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.)

If we set out to write a profile of the Holy Spirit, we would do well to attend closely to how Jesus described him to his disciples before leaving them. We might learn, for instance, that the Holy Spirit functions as a sort of spokesperson for what theologians call “the Godhead,” aka the Holy Trinity:

"When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come."

More than once, Jesus says it is the Father's Word that matters – that Word, in fact, which became flesh in the Son, that Word which creates worlds and holy occasions through the Spirit. The Spirit gives voice to what the Father says, and declares what the Father purposes, “the things that are to come.”

When we hear the voice of God, then, it is the Spirit we are hearing. And when God hears our voice, it is the voice of the Spirit. “… that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words,” Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, adding that the Spirit intercedes for us. (Romans 8)

I’ve never thought of the Spirit in those terms, as the divine translator facilitating the communication between us and God. We don’t need to pray on our own, or be prophetic on our own; in fact, we cannot. The Spirit does that in us, as we invite God’s Life into our lives.

What if we too were able to cultivate that practice – to speak not on our own, but only what we hear from God? How might our churches, our relationships, our lives be affected by inviting the Spirit to speak to us and through us, not speaking unless we felt it was God’s word? I wonder if I could do it for an hour, let alone a day.

We can start by being more aware of the Holy Spirit as communications intermediary, taking thoughts we think on our wavelength, and interpreting them into the heavenly realms; and taking God’s thoughts – which are on a spectrum virtually impossible for us to comprehend – and articulating them in us. Just asking to receive the translation is a prayer I believe God will answer.

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