Spirit, water and blood
Sermon for the First Sunday after Easter (1662 lectionary)
Spirit, water and blood: St John, Evangelist and Beloved Disciple, gives us both Epistle and Gospel today. He gives a subtly different account of the Apostles’ first meeting with the Risen Lord in the Upper Room from St Luke’s, which we heard earlier in the week. They agree on Our Lord’s words: “Peace be with you.” But how He proved His identity is different. St Luke’s informant recalls Him showing His hands and feet; St John, who unlike St Luke was actually there, remembers Him showing His hands and side.
Why? Well: spirit, water and blood. Because if you recall St John’s account of the Passion from Good Friday last week, when Our Lord died on the Cross, He “gave up the Ghost,” which is the Holy Spirit. Then, when a soldier took a spear and pierced His side, “forthwith came thereout blood and water.” Those three elements of spirit, water and blood are there in St John’s Passion, his first Epistle, and in his Gospel account of the first post-resurrection appearance to the Apostles.
So what does it mean, this repeated motif? Let’s make the connections.
First, the Spirit. At the Passion, just before He breathes His last and gives up the Ghost, Our Lord says, “it is finished.” We could equally translate the word, tetelestai, as “it is completed.” He is saying that His work is done. Everything has been achieved. That is why, there and then, without waiting for Pentecost, St John sees the Lord as sending out the Holy Spirit to succeed Him: the Holy Spirit which will fill the Church with His life, and so make it His Body, the Body of Christ.
So now, in the Upper Room, the Risen Lord breathes over all of the remaining eleven Apostles. Remember that breath, wind and spirit are all one word in the Greek of the New Testament just as they are in the Hebrew of the Old (pneuma is the Greek, ruach the Hebrew). So His breathing over them is literally giving them what He tells them: “receive ye the Holy Ghost.” And this first draught of the Holy Spirit gives them divine power, His power: the power to remit or to retain sins. And to this day, this is one of the two things which the priests who they and their successors ordained can do which other people cannot: pronouncing the forgiveness of sins is part of the priestly ministry of the Church entrusted to the ordained priests and bishops alone.
Now the remission of sins is a great gift. But it is not the only gift. In a sense, it is only the basics, the fundamentals of the work of Christ on the Cross and through the ministry of His Church. There is more to the Christian faith than just the remission of sins. And we find what that “more” is in the water and in the blood.
Perhaps you have worked it out, but let’s talk it through: the water, next. After all our studies of biblical symbolism, we should be instantly attuned to what this means. Baptism! One of the two dominical sacraments, that is, those which the Lord bequeathed as generally necessary for salvation, baptism is the passage through the chaos of the void at the beginning of creation, through the flood with Noah, through the Red Sea with Moses, through the Jordan with Joshua, Ss Elijah and Elisha, St John the Baptist and finally, conclusively, with Our Lord Himself. And in every case, it is the breath of the Spirit on those waters which calms or moves them and which makes them vehicles of life rather than of death. It is so on the baptismal waters even now, which is why we call down the Spirit on them before baptising. So, water and the Spirit give one passage into the Kingdom of God, which is embodied as the Church.
The blood should be obvious. Sacrifice, the Cross – the Eucharist. The night before He died, Our Lord called the wine the Blood of the New Testament, or New Covenant. The blood of goats or oxen or sheep would no longer be needed. His precious Blood is offered for us forever in Heaven, and He has given us all access to the Holy of Holies by sharing in His priesthood here below through the sharing of His Cup. That, too, is consecrated with the Bread by the power of the Holy Spirit. So, both Water and Spirit are prerequisite to admission to Holy Communion, in addition to repentance and forgiveness of sins. The reason we do not give the Sacrament to the unbaptised is not meanness. It is because only the protecting garment of Baptism can protect us as we enter the Holy of Holies and the Presence of our God, who, the Scriptures tell us, is a consuming fire. And Communion with Him is precisely entering into that Presence; more, it is receiving that Presence into us, that He may dwell in us who dwell in Him.
So what is Our Lord doing, then, in the Upper Room? He is forming the Church. He is giving the Apostles not only power over sin, but on top of that, the means of bringing people to sanctification. Because the forgiveness of sin is now possible, thanks to new Adam - where the old Adam had made it impossible - growth in the image of God, becoming more like Christ is also possible. And this, this assimilation to God which is implied by that word in Genesis, “likeness,” is the aim of human life. God became man that man might become God.
What is this likeness of God actually like? There is a key in the timing of today’s events. Good Friday, when Our Lord died and pronounced everything “finished,” was the sixth day, which you might recall is the day when the old Adam was made. Saturday is the sabbath day, when God rested, and all was in that state of peace and order the Hebrew Bible calls shalom. But Christ is here on the first day in the Upper Room, a kind of eighth day of the week, better even than the seventh. “Peace be unto you,” He says to the Apostles, and offers them a better kind of peace even than the peace of Paradise in Eden. It is the peace and harmony of the New Jerusalem, a city kingdom made of living stones.
We are those stones. Today, we welcome a new brother to become part of the living Temple and its Sacramental life, to be baptised in water and Spirit, and to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. With his baptism, we become one stone closer towards the building of the New Jerusalem, for his benefit, and for ours: because the best of what we experience here in church, of our common life together, of the beauty of our liturgy, of the knowledge of the presence and peace of God we find in prayer – all of that is to be magnified beyond all expectation when the Kingdom is fully realised among us, and we have in us the fulness of the life of God.