The Spirit’s fresh wind brings new life

It’s no mistake that Jesus described the Holy Spirit as an intangible uncontrollable force when talking to a Pharisee about what it meant to be godly. The Pharisees believed that virtue and holiness were defined by strict adherence to an increasingly impractical set of rules. The more rules you knew and followed, the more godly you were. To the Pharisees, holiness and perfection could be captured and attained once you cracked the code. Jesus challenged this by saying that God’s Spirit was much more like the wind—a sharp contrast to what Nicodemus was taught.

Today, the Pharisees are considered fools who didn’t understand the first thing about religion. To be fair, I don’t know that there’s a lot of what they practiced that would help us be better Christians. But, as Stephen Covey said, we need to seek first to understand, then to be understood. We don’t often talk about why the Pharisees believed what they believed and what problem they were trying to solve with their ideology. That’s a vital part of Jesus’ metaphor.

First, a brief disclaimer: I am not a religious scholar. I’ve never taken a class in theology or ancient Jewish history and I certainly don’t know as much as pastors. So I’m going to focus on the broad psychological strokes rather than the historical specifics.

The Pharisees’ ideology sprang from our natural desire to know how good we’re doing. I’m a manager at a large international advertising agency and one of the first things managers learn is that feedback is vital for happy employees. Employees want to know whether they’re performing well or poorly. They want to know what they’re doing right and wrong. Not knowing those things is frustrating; not knowing them and then being held accountable for them is infuriating. It’s not enough to be told to drive safely; we want to be told how fast we can drive—and then how much faster we can go over the posted speed limits. If there were no speed limits posted but we still got tickets for going too fast, people would quickly get fed up with that.

Pharisees sought to address the problem of ambiguity. That’s a pretty relatable goal. In modern Christianity, we talk about how Jesus’ yoke is easy and his burden is light, but I spent a lot of my adolescent and young adult years talking with my friends about what actions were a sin, which were acceptable, and which were not. Even now, when I consider myself smarter and wiser, I find myself drifting back to thoughts of where to draw the line. Despite my rhetoric, I often find myself wanting to be a Pharisee. Archaic and seemingly arbitrary rules are wrong, but I want to know that my personal rules are right.

Jesus’ description of the Holy Spirit as wind is an important message to me and people like me. Holiness is not something you can capture and put in a box. It’s all around us and we have to look for it. As uncomfortable as we are with this, we need to feel it and react to it. Of course, there’s an important place for rules and morals, but holiness is bigger than any set of rules we can come up with. There’s no autopilot or cruise control to make sure we stay in a very narrow position of morality. But paying attention to the small things going on around us all the time can lead to a greater morality than we can attain once we think we’ve cracked the code.