Midweek Mass, May 13 (Fr. Roberts)

"I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now."

The Lord does not mean that the Spirit will bring later what he has withheld now. He means that what he has already given is more than the disciples can yet receive. A chapter earlier he has said it plainly: "I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father." Nothing is held in reserve. There will be no second gospel, no later word that revises the first, no fresh disclosure from the Spirit that improves upon the Son. The Spirit does not come to add to Christ. He comes to give Christ.

"He will take what is mine and declare it to you." The verb means to re-announce, to proclaim again. Christ is the one Word in whom the Father has said himself entirely, and the Paraclete makes him audible in each generation's own hour. The Nicene Creed confesses no Christ other than the one the apostles knew. It is the Son said again, by a Church learning how to say him without losing him. Every age receives, by the Spirit, the same Christ for its own time.

"He will guide you into all the truth." The word for guide keeps the word for way. The Spirit does not teach a syllabus. He walks the Church along Christ, who is the way, until what was once an article of belief has become the manner of a life. And the truth Christ has given asks more than understanding. It asks to be borne, and we are not yet strong enough to bear it.

God does not change. His communication is his own self. What he gives, he has always given, which is everything. We are the ones who change. We are slowly enlarged by the Spirit to bear what was already ours in Christ.

So the Church waits. Not for more, since there is no more to come. We wait for the day the same Creed begins to mean what we have always said. We wait to be opened wide enough to receive what has never been withheld.