Translating the Paraclete

Pentecost, Year C 2025; John 14:8-17 (25-27).

Most will preach about the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, but that may be at the expense of the readings themselves. A doctrine of the Spirit often seems to sag either into fairly generic ideas about inclusion (perhaps in some relation to the Acts reading), or into reflection about religious experience or feelings (also mostly in relation to Acts).

In the last couple of weeks I have read more or less explicit claims that the Holy Spirit (or just God) was active and discernible in 1) the feelings engendered by religious singing, 2) interactions with artificial intelligence, 3) experiences engendered by psychedelic mushrooms, and 4) the election of a bishop (driven by factional number-crunching, but hey).¹ I'm guessing readers will find some of these suggestions (or my assessments of them) more surprising than others, but they all have problems.

Of course the Spirit blows where she wills, but the reasons given were uniformly weak in these cases. What they had in common was, first, the idea that a particular kind of feeling or experience was always the work of the Spirit, and second a lack of reflection on who and what the Spirit promised by Jesus really is. If the Spirit is intimately present for the faithful, and remakes and renews us, it does not follow that the times she claims our conscious attention and praise are moments of euphoria rather than of struggle. The Gospel reading in particular calls us to some accountability on this.

Jesus’ promise of the Spirit (14:17) is part of the farewell discourses which we have been reading for a few weeks. As noted before, the theme of the whole discourse is Jesus’ impending absence, and how the disciples (as well as their successors) are supposed to understand that loss. This reading begins not with the Spirit, but with an extended reflection from Jesus (14:8-14) about the unity of the Son and the Father, in answer to Philip’s “show us the Father” question, which has practical consequences: “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father” (14:12).

The promise comes only after this forceful assurance, and the affirmation that to love Jesus and believe in him is to keep his commandments (14:15). Then we read that Jesus will ask the Father who will “send another Paraclete” (14:16). The first thing to note, then, is that whatever a paraclete is, Jesus was one first.

Here I have kept an English transliteration of the Greek word παράκλητος/paraklētos instead of using the NRSV’s “advocate,” because the original word is difficult but offers to communicate something important about the nature of the Spirit. John is the only Gospel author to use the word, which also appears in the First Letter of John (2:1). The translational problem—note the irony here, relative to the Acts reading and its message of mutual comprehension— is not unique to modern English. Ancient translators of John already struggled with the best way to render it for their readers. “Paraclete” at its most literal means someone called to another’s side. It typically means a legal representative (hence the rendering “advocate”), and in John 16 that sense is used to full potential, with an extended word picture of the Spirit prosecuting the world.

Pentecost; carving from the Cloister of St Trophimus’ Church, Arles

Yet it means more than being God’s lawyer. “Paraclete” had some useful ambiguity that often encouraged its borrowing, without attempt to translate, when rendering John’s Gospel into other languages. Jerome’s influential Vulgate, the standard Latin translation, simply uses paracletus; ancient Syriac, Ethiopic, and others also just borrowed the word rather than translating. Beyond the Christian sphere too, it was also used in the Jewish Targums (free translations of the OT with commentary) in reference to Job’s “miserable comforters” (16:2).

English translations from Wycliffe through to the King James however did translate, and used “Comforter” for all the relevant cases in John’s Gospel (but “advocate” in 1 John 2:1). However the older English sense of “comforter” was rather different from ours; it meant to “strengthen” rather than to console or soothe, and hence worked better in the 16th and 17th centuries to render the sense of someone called in to help. Translations in the 20th and 21st centuries have thus opted variously for “Counsellor” (RSV) or “Advocate” (NRSV) or “Helper” (ESV), but this serves to illustrate the dilemma more than to solve it.

Across the five passages (this one in 14:16, as well as 14:26, 15:26, 16:7-11, 16:13-15) in which Jesus speaks of the Paraclete there is a sort of gradual expansion or development of its meaning. This first instance does not actually say anything more specific about the Paraclete beyond identity with “the Spirit of Truth” (and the “another” aspect already mentioned). There is some elucidation in v. 26: “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (26). The mentions in chapters 15 and 16 then extend the sense out further from teaching to witnessing, and then to advocacy: the struggle with the world over “sin and righteousness and judgment” (16:8). So the work of the Paraclete is truth first, but its expression and experience in memory lead to witness and action; they are outward, not inward.

We have noted that Jesus called the Spirit “another Paraclete.” What is true of the Spirit has already been true of Jesus. Before the gift of the Spirit, Jesus had already been “called to their side,” and had been their advocate, strengthener, helper, in the difficult work of discerning how to love and live in a world that does not know him, or indeed God, or love itself. What Jesus has been, the Paraclete will be.

Just as “the Father who dwells in me does his works” (14:10), the Spirit of truth will now do the works of Jesus, with and in the disciples. The Paraclete is thus a sort of translator too, a means of connecting them with God’s purpose. The Spirit will be active in their experience; in fact the Spirit is closer than they or we may otherwise be inclined to imagine.

While we should consider some claims to her presence and activity cautiously, the Paraclete is present whenever the life of Jesus is remembered and where his “works” are performed anew, translated into our present life. The Paraclete is simply the presence of Jesus in the Church, at all times and in all ways, in struggle as well as in joy. If the Paraclete is always at our side, it is when we are most like Jesus that the Spirit is most clearly active; not in our feelings alone, but in our actions, not only in peak experiences, but in struggle. Above all, the Spirit is known in the keeping of Jesus’ commandments, and hence in love of him and of each other.

Further reading:

Miranda, José Porfirio. Being and the Messiah: The Message of St. John. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1977.

Schnackenburg, Rudolf. The Gospel According to St. John. London & New York: Burns & Oates; Herder & Herder, 1968.

1. Not all of these used the language of “Holy Spirit,” admittedly; all referred to the presence and experience of God that Christians might call “the Holy Spirit.”