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| “The Spirit of truth will guide you into all truth” |
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| (John 16, 13). |
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| In the Gospel of John, at the end of the last Supper, Jesus clarified the mission of the “Comforter that the Father will send in his name”: a mission of testimony: “ The Spirit of truth shall testify of me” (John 15, 26); a mission of teaching: “He shall teach you all things” (John 14, 26), a mission of remembrance: “ He shall remember you all I said to you”; A prophetic mission: ”He shall show you all things to come”; a mission of guidance “ He shall guide you into all truth” (John 16, 13). |
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| Among all these missions of the Spirit, their relationships with knowledge are striking. Nothing astonishing because Jesus described eternal life: “The eternal life is to know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ that you have sent” (John, 17, 3). In fact it is a knowledge in the “biblical sense”, that is an understanding beyond a simple notion, more like a knowledge of being “born with” and in a loving intimacy. Since reason helps the faith, an intellectual knowledge is a component of Christian life. For Jesus, the Spirit is the motor and the guarantee of a progress towards the fullness of the knowledge. |
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The Spirit will guide us “into” or “through” the truth. The truth is a systematic enquiry, a space to be investigated all over, or better, an ocean to be crossed and discovered. It is also a place where truth is found while it is searched. |
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| The truth? We would like to have it, at once and forever. How many evidences and certainties hold one day to be replaced the next day by doubts and woolly feelings! We move from sincere convictions to unsatisfied questions…the uncompromised assertions we hold in our twenties become more adaptable through our life, eroded by a developing wisdom and our multiple experiences. We discover that not all is black or white, in this, the Spirit is already at work. |
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To know the true God and his messenger Jesus Christ. All religions pretend to approach and to propose the knowledge of the true God; their followers are sure of the way to go to the truth, most of them believe that they are the only ones to have that chance. The Jewish religion speaks about the only one God revealed to Abraham and to Moses:” Yahweh, God of tenderness and merciful”; only him is declared the true one. However this God of a specific group of people is also called the God of all the nations, the God of the universe. The Christian religion receives this message completed by the message of Jesus of Nazareth. This Jesus defined himself as the Truth and not like a simple messenger sent by a God that we cannot know:” I am the Way, The Truth and the Life” (John 14,6). With him, the truth is not an intellectual abstraction, it is a person, somebody who is the accurate icon of the Father: “Philip, who saw me has seen the Father…I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14, 9,10).
The Apostles lived with him for three years without exhausting their knowledge about him. “Slow are you to understand!” said Jesus. Who can pretend to master thoroughly this kind of Truth and to be the only one to possess it? The person of Jesus and his teaching are still interrogating us. In the past, depending on the culture, comments on what Jesus said don’t tell us anything anymore; even they surprise us. We have not to fossilise the meaning of Jesus’ message in following the ones given in the past by such Father of the Church or Scholar so holy he may be. |
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| Men and women of most religions continue to search for the truth through the study of their founding texts and through a living in harmony with the rules of wisdom. “ Who behaves in truth comes to the light” (John 3, 21). On many points their conclusions oppose to some assertions made by their predecessors. |
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| During thousands of years we believed as a truth of faith and we asserted that the world was created in six days and that the woman was extracted from the side of Adam. Saint Pius X still confirmed this assertion at the beginning of the 20th century. Some forty years later, Pius XII spoke about different kind of literary texts in Genesis; some of them should not be taken word for word. This was a Copernicus revolution (like Copernicus did in astronomy) in the field of exegesis thanks to the work of the Biblical Schools…Today with new anthropological studies and the evolution of the scientific knowledge we see differently the relationships between men and women, the position of the humans in the universe, etc… We should not become confused neither discouraged by the fact that we are always short of the truth but on the contrary we should feel stimulated to go forward to more truth. |
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The progressive opening to the light of understanding needs a humble exchange with others, following, step by step, various events, discoveries and meetings with believers or non-believers living the Gospel every day even without the label of being Christians. |
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Through lectures, times of reflections among biblical groups or others, we put in common what we understand of the God described by Jesus and the meaning we give to our life. What is the meaning of our presence on a small planet, among billions of other planets, where we have been placed by a God we consider as the Creator at the origin of all things in the universe and who is described by Jesus as his Father, our Father? It is not an easy question. Can we give it an appropriate and credible answer?
The few years of our existence on earth will not be enough to explore all the way to the entire truth. Thanks to God, we believe it, we will continue towards more understanding after our death. |
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