The Trajectory of Jesus

The Trajectory of Jesus—June 13, 2019

Jesus said: “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” [John 14:25-26]

You can’t separate the Spirit from Jesus—there’s not an inch of daylight between them.

Jesus himself says as much to his followers before the cross—that the Spirit who will be given to them will remind them of Jesus’ word and teaching, rather than inventing some new unrelated message. There is no bait and switch among members of the Trinity, in other words.

But that doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit who is among us now is reducible to Jesus re-runs or only speaks in Bible verses. As a matter of fact, in the book of Acts, often when the Holy Spirit is explicitly mentioned as acting in a situation, it is usually at the moments when the early Christian church was being pushed beyond the familiarity of established patterns and across the boundaries that had previously seemed uncrossable. It’s the Spirit who moves the apostles to preach and speak in other languages at Pentecost when they had just been minding their own business behind closed doors. It’s the Spirit who sets Philip down on the roadside to hitchhike with a black African government official, not only to tell him about Jesus but also to baptize him in a highway drainage ditch on the journey, even though there was a long list of reasons why the answer could have been “No.” It’s the Spirit who prompts Simon Peter to bring the news of Jesus to an officer in the enemy army—Cornelius, a centurion of the occupying Roman Empire—and leads him to welcome in a Gentile foreigner to belong in the family of Christ. At each of those turning points, the Christian community was led beyond “the way we’ve always done it”, not by their own choosing, and not because of their own agendas, but because the Holy Spirit pushed them to move.

Now, at first, that might seem like a contradiction. If, as Jesus says here, the Spirit’s job was to remind us of what Jesus said and taught, how could the boundaries be moving? How could Jesus have come, taught, lived, died, and risen… and then after he’s ascended into heaven, we still need Someone Else to widen the embrace of the new community?

We tend to be ok with the idea that Jesus was allowed to change things—as he clearly did in his interactions with the Respectable Religious Crowd of his day—but we often think that this was the last chance for things to change. We accept the idea that Jesus could bring a new teaching from God, as long as there’s a cap on it with his ascension into heaven. Then… it’s fixed. The concrete is set. The paint is dried. The new commandments are written in stone, and unchangeable. And after that, we often thing, the Spirit’s job is only to recite the red letter verses of Jesus’ sayings and teachings… which means (we imagine) that we can never be surprised again. The Spirit is here just to repeat the words of Jesus. Right?

Except… maybe the Spirit’s way of reminding us of Jesus isn’t to police boundaries, but rather to keep pushing them the way Jesus did. Maybe the Spirit doesn’t simply remind us of fixed points in space and time, but of the motion that Jesus started. The Spirit doesn’t merely repeat the initial moment a droplet hits the surface of the water, but to continue its motion rippling outward endlessly. After Jesus crosses the boundaries of religion, race, and gender to sit at the well with a Samaritan woman, his movement didn’t stop there—he didn’t stop and say, “Okay, so now we’re letting this one Samaritan in… and we’re letting this one woman preach to her neighbors… but THAT’S IT. No further!” The Christian church didn’t have to re-litigate that question every time women were moved to preach, or Samaritans came to faith. They could see the trajectory Jesus started, and they could see that Jesus would keep moving further. Or when Jesus invited himself over to Zacchaeus’ house for dinner, he didn’t tell his followers, “Just this one tax collector—but don’t you guys go making friends with this sort of person.” No, Jesus dared his followers to continue reaching out to everybody who had been written off as unacceptable and unworthy. The trajectory Jesus started was simply carried forward.

That’s just it. That’s how the Spirit reminds us of Jesus without merely reduplicating scenes from the first century: the Spirit teaches us the trajectory of where Jesus’ chain reaction of love begins, and then continues the motion through us. The milestones change—the curve of the arc remains constant. For the historical Jesus in the first century, it was a radical thing to gather up a bunch of semi-literate fishermen as rabbinical disciples, add in an assortment of women as fellow learners and financial backers, and then declare God’s Reign included not only them but the tax collectors, prostitutes, migrant Samaritans, and contagious lepers, too. But even that surprising assembly was limited to a piece of ground less than a hundred miles in any direction. The early church knew that continuing in Jesus’ mission was not simply to keep the boundaries there—but rather the Spirit kept moving them beyond those limits, in the same direction Jesus had set things moving: everywhere.

We should be fully aware, with eyes open, then, that when we call on the Holy Spirit to lead us these days, that almost certainly will not mean just staying where we are. After all, Jesus himself didn’t just keep things where they were. He was constantly reaching out, pushing further, crossing lines of class and gender, race and religion, shame and sin, taboo and tradition. Why would we expect the Spirit to do anything less with us—especially if Jesus promised that the Spirit would keep teaching us in the ways of Jesus?

Today, let’s allow the Spirit to do exactly what Jesus promised: to keep us on the same trajectory that Jesus himself set us on—knowing that will also push us beyond what seemed comfortable, familiar, and respectable yesterday. The mile markers change—the trajectory keeps on moving along the same arc we have see in Christ himself.

O Living Christ, let your Spirit loose among us to keep us on the course you have begun, wherever you will lead us.