Against Macedonius

Preached Easter 6 (25th May) 2014, St Michael's, Camden Town

Acts 8:5-8,14-17
1 Peter 3:15-18
John 14:15-21

Today is the feast day of Gregory VII, one of the great medieval popes, provided you think greatness is about power. A pope so bold that he forced the most powerful man in Christendom, the Emperor of the West, to come to him to beg his forgiveness. In the snow. On bare feet. So aggressive that when I was taught about him, my tutor compared him to Stalin. Powerful he may have been, but he was not universally loved. By the end of his life, he was no longer in Rome and when he died, on this day in 1085, he cried ‘I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.’ We could say he lacks self knowledge.

And I say this because when I think about Philip (not our Fr Philip, he’s nothing like Stalin), but the Philip in our reading today, I can’t help feeling there is a lot of Gregory in him. From the account we have, Philip goes to Samaria to preach the gospel. He does so with what we might call a lack of subtlety. He performs a raft of miracles, they believe, usually because they have seen them. In a passage missed out of the reading today, he runs into a rival miracle worker, who the author of Acts calls a magician, and he beats him by doing better miracles. This is about power, not truth.

But then the next passage is fascinating. If you’re a researcher into the very early church, you get very excited about this because it gives you a hint about what is going on in Jerusalem; for the rest of us, it’s just surprising. The high command send Peter and John to do more. The Samaritans have accepted Christ, but it isn’t enough. They need to hear about the Spirit. Faith in Christ alone is not Christianity.

And I think we find that very uncomfortable, even now, perhaps especially now. For two thousand years, we have become very used to using Christ as a shorthand for our belief – that's understandable, we are called Christians. But it’s wrong. Our belief is in God: the Trinity, not just one person in it. In a few minutes, we will all recite what that means in the Creed, and the history of that is instructive.

If you’re uncomfortable with this, you’re not alone. If you’ll cast your mind back to the 350s and 360s, you’ll of course recall that it was a hot topic then too. Macedonius, who was bishop of Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire, refused to accept that the Holy Spirit was God. That debate rewrote the creed that at Nicaea itself only said, we believe in the Holy Spirit, and became what you have on your service sheet. We are affirming that the Spirit is God, identifying what he does. Of course Christ is essential, but so is the Father, and so is the Spirit.

Why?

Because a belief in God without the Spirit would change how we think of the world. It would be greatly impoverished. To my mind the most important thing that John records in the Gospel today is that the Spirit will ‘be with you for ever.’ A second, gentler Gregory, Gregory of Nazianzus, one of my all time favourite theologians (like most of my all time favourite theologians them, long dead), was an opponent of Macedonius in the fourth century and wrote a long oration on the Holy Spirit opposing him. He talked about history.

There have been … two conspicuous changes of men’s lives, which are also called two Testaments… : the one from idols to the Law [he means Moses], the other from the Law to the Gospel [he means Jesus]. And we are taught in the Gospel of a third.
(Gregory of Nazianzus, On the Holy Spirit, 25)

For Gregory, the trinity hovers over these changes - as time goes on we have a greater understanding of the nature of the God – we call this progressive revelation. In the Old Testament, it is God the Father that is talked about openly, and the Son hinted at. In the gospel, it is obviously about Jesus, but introduces the Spirit. In the current age, what Gregory calls the third testament (Gregory of Nazianzus, On the Holy Spirit, 8), when Spirit is fully visible, we are moving towards the final age, where Gregory says there will be an Earth that ‘cannot be shaken or moved.’ For Gregory, the Spirit animates our history. In the Creed, we will say the Spirit spoke through the prophets; we could easily say he speaks through the church through the ages.

So what does he say?

Today’s gospel is pretty useful, and I should say, it is the very same text that Gregory used 1600 years ago. It calls the Spirit two things – the Spirit of Truth and then the word parakletos which is translated here as advocate, but elsewhere counsellor, comforter or helper. This Spirit is not a lawyer, but a support. He is there to sustain us and to nudge us gradually towards the truth. My wide may disagree, but this is not always a characteristic of lawyers.

But if the Spirit is not God, then we might be at the mercy of lawyers. Were there no Spirit, it would mean God would have had retreated after his victory on the cross. We would be living an echo of what was important; playing out something that as solely a memorial. Perplexingly, God would have been willing to die for us, but not to stay. God would not be present to support us when we, like the recipients of the epistle, are told to do good, to hold fast. But instead, the Spirit is here: we are sustained and comforted by the Spirit throughout history.

For that letter is old, written before 100 AD. Pentecostals and others like to think of the Spirit as something that gives them licence to kick against the tradition of the church as the voice of the Spirit comes to them. What presumption? what arrogance? What do they think the Spirit has been doing for the last 2,000 years? It is they who deny the divinity of the Spirit by their rejection of the past. The gospel says ‘you know him, because he is with you, he is in you.’ That is not a licence to take create doctrine afresh, but an invitation to the revelation of God, built on 2,000 years of his work, changing, yes, as God is progressively revealed, but built on the same teaching.

Our first Gregory, Gregory VII gave us another famous quotation, also with some difficulties. He said ‘The Lord did not say I am custom, but I am truth.’ Through the Holy Spirit, the supporter and sustainer of all of us in this age, we often do not have to choose. For he is with us forever.

Amen.