Why does Christ say the Holy Ghost 'shall bear testimony of Me'?
Christ answered hatred not with vengeance, but by sending the Spirit of Truth—so that the Apostles could bear witness to His divine mission.
Christ answered hatred not with vengeance, but by sending the Spirit of Truth—so that the Apostles could bear witness to His divine mission.
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ promises a double witness: from the Holy Ghost and the Apostles themselves.
That this witness flows from love, not vengeance—even after His Passion and Israel’s rejection.
Why the Spirit’s coming is presented as the fruit of the Passion and a means of ongoing mercy.
He shows us that the Church’s witness is not just human or divine, but both—inseparable and perpetual.
For more on this section, its place in the Gospel and the Liturgy, and the role of persecution as a “quasi-mark” of the Church, see Part I. (It has been updated since it was published.)
Hatred of the World
Passiontide, Part III
Chapter III
St. John xv. 11-27.
Story of the Gospels, § 156
Burns and Oates, London, 1892
Why did Christ say his people 'hated both me and my Father'?
Why does Christ say the Holy Ghost 'shall bear testimony of Me'?
Promise of the Paraclete
‘But when the Paraclete cometh, Whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth Who proceedeth from the Father, He shall give testimony of Me, and you shall give testimony, because you have been with Me from the beginning.’
As the discourse of our Lord after these words returns to the subject of the ill-treatment of the Apostles by the Jews, it seems sometimes difficult to understand how this clause is connected with what precedes it and with what follows it.
For our Lord, after some more words about the sufferings of the Apostles, seems to return to the Mission of the Paraclete. The connection seems to be something of this kind. We might have thought that after the complaints against the Jews for their hatred against Him without a cause, our Lord would have left them, as it were, to themselves, except perhaps to speak of the great judgments which they were to bring on themselves.
Not in vengeance
As has been said, there are many verses in the Psalm from which He had quoted which might have served the purpose of strong declaration on this point.
But we know that in the Heart of our Blessed Lord there were thoughts not of vengeance but of mercy, rising higher and higher in proportion as the floods of their ingratitude and malice mounted up more and more. He was lovingly reckoning up all the sufferings of the day which was in a few hours to dawn, sufferings which were to be intensified by the ingratitude and hatred of which He had been speaking.
But of all this He says not a word to the Apostles now. All the malignity displayed in the Passion only drew from Him greater manifestations of the tenderest love. Instead of leaving the Jews to themselves, or sending at once the armies that were to root out their name among the nations, He offered up all that He suffered for their redemption, and prayed for them on the Cross.
Then He sent the Holy Ghost, the promised Paraclete, to the Apostles and the Church, for them, and by the witness of the Paraclete to Him, with which was to be joined, as He says, the witness of the Apostles themselves, He gave them a new and most fruitful opportunity of learning Who He really was, and of having their share in the salvation which had been wrought for the whole world on the Cross. This, then, He mentions first of all, as if to show how little their ingratitude had made Him forget that they were His own kindred.
Our Lord then, as we see, passes in silence over all that is to take place between the persecution and rejection of Himself, even the bitter outrages of the Passion, and the Mission of the Paraclete, and goes on to speak tranquilly of what He was to do for the deliverance of the ungrateful people after that supreme wickedness of theirs had been accomplished.
He shall bear testimony
‘But when the Paraclete cometh Whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth Who proceedeth from the Father, He shall bear testimony of Me, and you also shall bear testimony because you are with Me from the beginning.’
He has already spoken to them of the Paraclete, Whom He had called another Paraclete, that is a comforter and strengthener like Himself, and Who was to take His place. Then He had said that He would ask the Father, Who at His prayer would send them another Paraclete, for He was Himself the Gift of the Father to them. And He then added that this other Paraclete was to abide with them for ever, and thus to supply His own visible withdrawal.
The Paraclete was then said to be given at the prayer of our Lord, for it was the merits of the sufferings of the Sacred Humanity that gave efficacy to that prayer, and won that great boon. But as our Lord is One with the Father in the possession of the Divine Nature and Substance, He says here that He will send the Paraclete, Who proceeds from the Father and from Him by one Spiration, and is said to be sent by the Father and the Son from Whom He proceeds, to bring about the effects which result from His presence with creatures.
He says that He will send the Holy Ghost from the Father to them, for He has before said that the Father would give or send the Paraclete, and that there might be no apparent diversity in the statements, as if He had said that He would send Him without mention of the Father.
For the Son sends the Paraclete from the Father, because He has from the Father the Divine Essence, by reason of which He is able to send Him. The Father is said to send the Paraclete from Himself, because He Himself proceeds from no other Divine Person. The Son sends Him with the Father, and by one and the same Mission, because He proceeds from the Father, from Whom He has the Divine Essence.
The Spirit of Truth
Our Lord next speaks of the promised Paraclete as the Spirit of Truth. He is the Spirit of Truth in more ways than one. He cannot possibly be ignorant of any truth or teach anything but the perfect truth, for He knows God and all that God knows, having the whole Divine Essence communicated to Him by the Father, from Whom, with, and through the Son, He proceeds. The subject-matter of this discourse is the witness which the Holy Ghost is to bear, and therefore we may call this the chief meaning of the words about the Spirit of Truth. He is also the Spirit of Truth, in that His office is to make clear the obscure figures and promises of the Old Law.
Our Lord says that He proceeds from the Father, not adding that He proceeds from the Son, in order to avoid repeating His own words. For He has already said that He will send the Paraclete to them from the Father, and when it is said that one Divine Person is sent by another, it is meant thereby that He that is sent proceeds from Him that sends. The truth of the Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son had thus been sufficiently stated, but it was necessary to state that of His Procession from the Father, lest it should seem to be left out, and there were to be heretics in later ages, who were to call Him the Spirit of the Son and not of the Father.
How He witnessed to Our Lord
‘He shall give testimony of Me.’
Our Lord here speaks of the Mission of the Holy Ghost on the Day of Pentecost, which, as He presently tells them, was to be the fruit and recompence of His own going away. By His going away He seems to signify the Passion and Death itself which He was to undergo, and then the Ascension and Sitting on the Right Hand of the Father, which were the ineffable exaltation which was to be purchased by His Passion and Death.
The Mission of the Holy Ghost was to be both external and visible, and also internal and invisible, showing itself by the marvellous effects which it produced in the hearts and lives of men. It was externally seen in the flames of fire which sat upon the Apostles and others at the coming of the Paraclete, and in other supernatural manifestations of the same kind, and it was internal also, proved by the spiritual graces which flowed so abundantly on the children of the Church.
All these things were so many witnesses to our Lord, and especially to the great truth of all, the truth of His Mission as the Messias, the Son of God. He does not describe these manifold heads under which might be summed up this Divine witness to the truth of His Mission, for He is here speaking very concisely, and on a subject concerning which the Apostles and the Church after them were to possess abundant evidence.
So also the Apostles
He adds, however, that there was to be another testimony to Him besides that of the Holy Ghost, the witness of the Apostles themselves.
‘And you also shall give testimony, because you are with Me from the beginning.’
As our Lord’s own testimony to Himself, as He speaks in the passage lately quoted, was one witness, and the testimony of the Father to Him by the miracles was another, so also the testimony of the Apostles and the Visible Church is to be distinguished in all ages from that of the Holy Ghost, although there can be no doubt that this testimony is inspired and guided by Him.
Thus in His speech before the Sanhedrin, after the first Apostolic miracle, the healing of the impotent man at the Beautiful Gate, St. Peter after speaking of the Resurrection of our Lord, of His Ascension and Session at the right hand of the Father, says, ‘We are witnesses of these things, and the Holy Ghost, Whom God hath given to all that obey Him,’ meaning partly the invisible witness of the Holy Ghost and partly His visible manifestations.
They bore witness, because having been with Him from the beginning, their testimony to His Resurrection was the best that it was possible to conceive. We find this condition of having ‘companied with us all that time that the Lord Jesus went in and went out among us, beginning with the Baptism of John until the day wherein He was taken up from us,’ assigned by St. Peter as the qualification of the one of the faithful who was to be elected in the place of Judas as a witness of the Resurrection.1
In his speech on the Day of Pentecost, St. Peter first explains to the multitudes that the wonders which they saw were the visible witness of the Holy Ghost, according to the prophecy of Joel, which he quotes at length, and he adds the personal testimony of the Apostolic band to the fact of the Resurrection of our Lord.
Two-fold witness in the New Testament
The same insistence on the two-fold testimony runs throughout the whole of the New Testament, the testimony of the Holy Ghost and of the human witnesses, whose evidence is continuous in more ways than one. The Sacred Scriptures of the New Testament are the evidence of their human authors, as well as of their Divine author, as St. John says, in the opening of his Epistle, which has been more than once referred to here.
‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of Life—for the Life was manifested, and we have seen, and do bear witness, and declare unto you the Eternal Life, which was with the Father, and hath appeared unto us, that which we have seen and have heard we declare unto you, that you, also, may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship may be with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.’2
And besides the human testimony of Scripture, and of tradition, which is human and Divine like Scripture, and the unwritten Word of God, there is here foreshadowed by our Lord the perpetual official witness of the Church to the end of time, as a regular part of the dispensation which He was to introduce.
Thus does our Blessed Lord in these few words sum up the whole history of the future, as it may be said, until His own second coming, the Church representing Him and bearing His Name, commissioned with His message and assured by His power, the world treating the Church as it had treated Him, and for the same reason, its ignorance of God and His Incarnate Son sent upon earth to redeem mankind, the Church distinguished by its notes of Unity and Charity, in which two characteristics her whole system is summed up, the Holy Ghost abiding in her and with her, and witnessing in her and through her to the truth of His Mission and the Divine authority of His Kingdom.
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Hatred of the World
Why did Christ say his people 'hated both me and my Father'?
Why does Christ say the Holy Ghost 'shall bear testimony of Me'?
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Acts i. 22.
1 St. John i. 1-3.