Expedient for You

“ Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. ”

Departures can be for us alarming experiences. When a person leaves us, one we have grown to depend on, lean upon, we feel the loss keenly. But sometimes it's the very thing we need.

You break your arm. I know about that—I broke my wrist three times when I was a kid. It's the weirdest feeling—sort of tingly at first. You know something's wrong, and then you can't use your hand. Anyway, the doctor sets it, then carefully wraps it in gauze, and finally a plaster cast. Mostly I had half-casts, stiff plaster troughs in which my arm lay, and around which I was practiced at wrapping an Ace bandage. Then I hung the whole heavy thing in a sling. I'd try to use the broken arm, to write with my right hand during those six weeks of bone knitting, but it was hard. Then one day the doctor said the cast must go. A whole cast must be cut off; a half cast just unwrapped and the gauze sleeve taken off.

When that happened, my arm felt cold, and looked like a skinny worm. It had shrunk in a month and a half. Now it really felt weird, and it missed the warm strength of the cast. I had to be careful of it. For weeks to come I wouldn't be able to use that arm in its full strength. But I knew it was necessary to lose the cast. Otherwise, my arm would continue to atrophy, and grow weaker and weaker. I'd needed the cast for the injury. I would need to get it off to be fully healed.

So it was with our Savior. The Hebrews had tried for two millennia to perfect their walk with Yahweh . It was touch and go, and at times they really blew it badly. They had finally settled into a nice institutionalized religion, codified their laws of righteous conduct, and felt miffed about the series of imperial conquests that left them a vassal state under Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. They yearned for something better, but failed to think that the improvements needed to be in themselves. Jesus came preaching a better life, repentance for sins of the heart, living at peace with all and enmity towards none. He challenged the religious power of the Temple and called forth the forces that would conspire to kill Him. He was supposed to die an innocent man.

When He had risen from death, Mary Magdalene recognized Him in the garden and threw herself at His feet in relief. The King James Version has Jesus say to her, “Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father.” John 20:17 This misses a better meaning, which is to say, “Don't cling to me: I still have to ascend back to heaven to be with my Father.” He was saying that He would have to go. We couldn't keep Him here. It was better for us, as well as for Him that we let Him leave.

Jesus told His disciples at the Last Supper that He was going to send them another Comforter, the Holy Spirit: “Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.” John 14:17 It's important to note that the Spirit was already with the Apostles. By the Spirit they had already cast out demons, healed the sick and preached the Kingdom of Heaven. By the Spirit, Jesus had been incarnated in the womb of Mary. The Spirit had been seen descending on Jesus at His Baptism, and immediately had led Him into the wilderness for His 40 day fast. By the Spirit of God, Jesus had performed His miracles.

But Jesus was also telling them that if He did not physically depart from the world, a special relationship with the Spirit wouldn't be established. “I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.” John 16:7 This Spirit, already present in the world, was to become something new and different in the world. Until the Baptism of Jesus, no one had been able to say the Spirit lived inside of them. And until the day of Pentecost, no other could say it of themselves . “The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” John 14:26

It was time to grow up. It was time for the broken limb to be used and strengthened without the cast. It was time for the baby bird to be pushed out into the sky, to fly or else to die. Time to be left alone to survive with the skills and abilities that had been taught. Time to fully enter into a new and vital way of knowing God.

God, for all time, has sought an intimate relationship with us. He doesn't chose to sit alone in His perfect Heaven, apart from us fallen humans, aloof and disappointed in us. Not at all. He has sought us out, revealed Himself to us, given us timeless truths and countless hints at where and who He is. His best and final revelation to us was by sending His own Son, as a man, to us. When Jesus departed this world, the training was complete, the job of redemption finally accomplished. We would now be ready to get our sea legs, set sail and move toward God in this completely better way.

Until Christ departed, man had always relied on the godly prophet, the wise man, the Avatar, the Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster: magnificent men full of human wisdom and divine inspiration. People became like children, being told what to do and deciding if they would obey. It set the standard of conduct outside , on stone tablets, in written word, doctrines, declarations and constitutions. These were fine things and still are, but the intimacy God sought with us required another stage of our development. It required that He get inside of us and rule us from within.

Jeremiah had written of that day 600 years earlier: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, … Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers … but this shall be the covenant that I will make… After those days, …I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people… for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” Jeremiah 31:31-34 How does God write His will in our hearts, except that He comes inside of us. And it's not a temporary arrangement, a haunting, a mere vision in the night. He wants permanent residency. He doesn't just want to rent your heart, but own it. He isn't interested in just a visit once in a while, or to be a houseguest, but to have you , heart, mind, soul, strength, all in all. That was what you were made for. That's why you have always felt there was something missing in your life, until now, until He claimed the right to live in you.

But the Holy Spirit is a gentleman. He doesn't enter where He is not bidden. When we deny Him access to any area of our lives, He remains outside. This is the moment of decision. Christ has departed. Our Master has gone back to heaven. The Spirit is come, and here we are. Like a kid with a half-healed arm. Do we wrap it in another Ace bandage, hang it in that sling again? Or do we bring it out and try to use it? It hurts. It feels unnatural. We've grown accustomed to the cast. Aren't we broken? How can He expect us to swing a bat? Throw a ball? Write an essay? Button our jacket? This hand doesn't work.

A new world awaits us, for to have the Spirit of God dwell inside of you is to invite heaven within. Your perspective must change.

The commandments of Christ were steep challenges: Love God with all you have, love your neighbor as you do yourself, love other Christians as Jesus loved us, be Baptized, take the bread and the wine . But they were few in number, simple, without details, rules, legalisms and definitions. He did so purposely. The details would come to us when God the Spirit came in us. We'd been nurtured enough. Now our nature needed to be altered, advanced a giant step.

Just 20 years old, I was driving south through Los Banos listening to the radio on July 20, 1969. Apollo 11 had sent the lunar landing module down to the surface of the moon, and a weird metal monster settled into its virgin dust for the first time. Neil Armstrong's voice came over the speaker from another world as he announced, “The Eagle has landed!” And so it had. I pulled over and watched the television coverage in a bar. Mankind's machines had overcome the vast distances from here to the moon, but it would have been a crowning moment for our mechanical abilities alone were the next thing not attempted. A man in a pressure suit opened the hatch of that module, bounced down its ladder, and planted a footprint on the face of the moon. “That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong told a world that held its breath. The machines conquered the distance, but a man still had to crawl out and walk on the moon. The cast came off, and he could walk.

The cast is off, and we stand wobbly-legged in the light of a new sun, pulled by the strange gravity of an unfamiliar world. The color of sky, feel of soil, taste of atmosphere, sense of equilibrium are altered from what we are used to. And yet, it is our own world, the earth, and our own lives, in the same bodies. What is new is inside of us, the eternal God has chosen us, and lives in us. It is expedient that Jesus depart from us visually, and for us to enter the new intimacy with God. The machinery of religion, of Temples and sacrifices, of careful observances and ritual obedience were necessary to get us here, but we're moving further in, higher up than mere ritual can take anyone. He calls us into Himself. We enter into the holiest place. We grow up.

PFH+