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I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.
Jesus did not simply impart to them the full contents of the modern universal Catechism. He knew that they were limited in what they could receive at any one time. He had explained to them the necessity of his death and resurrection as the climactic fulfillment of the Old Testament. But they did not fully comprehend it until after the fact. Once they had seen it and only then did his words about it become more than mere words. We might infer this was true for much of what Jesus had to reveal. Nothing that happened in his life, death, resurrection, Ascension, or in the sending of the Spirit, happened exactly in the way they would have expected. Yet it Jesus had in fact predicted all of it beforehand. It was only once the realities he described became experiences that the disciples were able to make all the necessary connections. It was when his teachings encountered reality that their full depth was revealed.
What Jesus imparted to his disciples in the deposit of faith was complete, lacking nothing, capable of answering any question. But not all of the questions presented themselves immediately. Thus doctrine only developed when someone like Arius said something that sounded almost true, but not quite. The lived experience of the orthodox faith had to be clarified against all of the many permutations of possible error. What Jesus had said about his relationship with the Father and the Spirit was always the unchanging core. But there were a lot of ways to be wrong about what he said, about who Jesus was. A short list might include Gnosticism, Montanism, Sabellianism, Arianism, Nestorianism, and Monophysitism¹. Because there were so many possible ways to be wrong and only one truth it was necessary for God to provide a way to protect the truth and ensure its availability in subsequent generations. We know the the Scriptures alone were insufficient since most of these famous heresies used them, and found plausible verses that seemed to be in agreement with their teachings, but which were in fact distortions, removed from their proper context.
But when he comes, the Spirit of truth,
he will guide you to all truth.
Jesus promised the Spirit of the truth to his Church. It was a concrete way to ensure that his promise to Peter, that the gates of hell would not overcome it, was guaranteed. After all, losing the truth was to lose everything, since Jesus told us that, "the truth will set you free" (see John 8:32).
Yet the promise of all truth had to extend beyond the Church to the lives of individual believers, although not in the same way or to the same degree. Believers could not be expected to all be such scholars as to determine the true Church from others on their own. They would need the Spirit within them to direct them toward the full manifestation of the Spirit in the Church. The Church herself was radiant with truth in such a way as to be a supernatural sign to believers. And this would correspond to a growing hunger in them for a truly timeless truth, and a definitive source of meaning, a hunger placed in them by the Spirit himself. This too would only happen as they gradually become more open and ready to receive it. We see this in the reading from Acts this morning, where some didn't listen, some wanted to hear more later, and some converted immediately. It was not the clever words of Paul alone that made the difference. It was their openness to the guidance of the Spirit in their hearts. Paul himself would later lean into this aspect of evangelization, about which he said, "my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power" (see First Corinthians 2:4). He learned that too much cleverness could obscure the core of the message, and the necessity of faith to receive it. The more practiced at evangelization he became the more he learned to allow the Spirit to speak for himself.
He will not speak on his own,
but he will speak what he hears
The Spirit doesn't guide us into innovation in the form of clever new ideas with no historical precedent. Rather he guides us ever more deeply into the words of Jesus himself, since "he will take from what is mine and declare it to you". But this content remains relevant, illuminating not only the past, but even the future since he "will declare to you the things that are coming". We tend to prefer innovation, assuming that we already tried standard textbook Christianity and achieved only a mediocre result. But more probably the words of Chesterton on the subject also apply to us: "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried". So rather than seek something new, let's try it the way it was meant to be tried: in the power of the Spirit. As we move through Easter and toward Pentecost there is no better time than now to invite him to fill us once more.
¹) Learn more about the Great Heresies at Catholic Answers.
John Keating - Come Holy Spirit
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