Paraclesis: Preaching in the New Testament
Amid the rich and varied language used in the New Testament to describe the act of preaching, two of the most striking words are paraklesis and parakaleo, cognate words that share their root with one of the early names for the Holy Spirit: the Paraclete. In this article, I trace the varied meanings of paraklesis and parakaleo, exploring how this fertile New Testament language can provide us with a revelatory lens into the origin, reality and purpose of preaching.
Paraclesis: Origin of Preaching
Preaching originates in the sovereign movement of God’s spirit, the Paraclete. Preaching, properly understood, can never emerge without the inspiration – or, inSpiration – of God. I understand God’s Spirit to be essential in enabling at least two transitional and transformational events in the preaching process.
First, the illuminating Spirit enables the preacher to faithfully interpret the biblical text, thereby transforming an ancient document into a living word capable of yielding a sermon for God’s people today. This is why the process of preparing to preach must proceed prayerfully, as the preacher asks that God’s Spirit would, as it were, induce the delivery of the very word which God knows His people need at this present time. Accordingly, as I prepare a sermon, I pray petitions such as, “Guide me, O Lord, to write the sermon that will encourage and edify your people.” Indeed, I am most fully aware of my dependence on the Spirit’s guidance when, in the course of pulpit supply, I am required to prepare an entire service – including prayers and sermon – for a congregation whom I have never met. When, after preaching, the congregation has somehow been touched by the word, I am humbled to know that God’s Spirit had worked to guide me during the preceding week of preparation.
Second, God’s Spirit enables a series of words spoken by the preacher to bear the word of God, thereby effecting the transformation of the sermon text from typewritten manuscript to vehicle of the living word. In her essay simply entitled “Preaching,” Episcopalian priest and professor Barbara Brown Taylor recalls delivering a sermon at the funeral of a young girl, where she “stood plucking the words out of thin air as they appeared before [her] eyes.” Still, she reflects, these words “worked” because “God [had] consented to be present in them.” However, when she later read a transcript of what she had preached, she felt that the text “had been written in disappearing ink.” Taylor observes, “There was nothing there but a jumble of phrases and images, trailing off at the end into awkward silence. While the Holy Spirit was in them, they lived. Afterward, they were no more than empty boxes, lying where the wind had left them.”
At the same time, this movement of God’s Spirit to breathe the divine word into a sermon text shows God’s gracious accommodation to overcome the weaknesses present in the preacher and congregation. Taylor writes: “…even our incompetence cannot shut God out for long. The living word of God is more able than we are. If we will remain with it, it will heal us, because God is in it.” In this sense, the “prayer for illumination” acknowledges our dependence on God’s Spirit to enable the hearing of His word amid the human words of preaching. When Gregory Jones, dean of Duke Divinity School, preached last year at the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, Montreal, his prayer for illumination aptly expressed the sovereignty and necessity of God’s Spirit in the preaching event. Jones prayed, “O God, descend Your Holy Spirit upon us gathered here: speak through me, if necessary in spite of me, and always beyond me, that Your word might be heard by Your people this day. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” This prayer rightly places the preacher as an instrument within God’s broader purpose of graciously conveying His living word to His faithful people.
Paraclesis: Reality of Preaching
The necessity of the prayer for illumination, however, implies that though the sovereign movement of God’s Spirit is an indispensable component of Christian preaching,
the Spirit’s action accommodates rather than annuls human agency. This characteristic of the preaching event introduces my second point, tracing how paraclesis sheds light on the reality of preaching. In the prayer for illumination we pray that a sermon may become a word of the Spirit’s own creation, yet the preacher is not thereby transformed into a divine puppet or mouthpiece. A preacher does not, of course, function as God’s dictaphone. Rather, the preacher participates in an incarnational event, as the Spirit of God knits His word in and through the flawed series of words spoken from the pulpit.
I understand this incarnational process as paraclesis because it was the essential agency of the Paraclete that effected the incarnation of Christ, who was “conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.” In a discussion of the Incarnation that might also serve helpfully to describe the incarnational reality of preaching, theologian Colin Gunton addresses the centrality and necessity of the Paraclete to make what he calls “the logic of God” comprehensible. “In Jesus of Nazareth,” writes Gunton, “as He had done with Israel, God lays out His own logic within the frame of ours, and by His Spirit enables us to understand it, according to His and our limits. The reference to the Spirit is crucial, for everything happens only by the Spirit’s action and is made understandable only by his gift. If we are to understand what is going on first with Jesus and then with the human response to him, the central place of the Spirit cannot be ignored” (The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine).
As in the Incarnation, so too in preaching, the sovereign and gracious initiative of God’s Spirit infuses the saving divinity of God’s word into the frailty and folly of human existence. Though it may sometimes seem difficult to believe, God Himself is present in human preaching, thus making a sermon an incarnational creature of grace that is, like Christ, “conceived by the Holy Ghost.”
Paraclesis: Purpose of Preaching
We may find guidance also for the purpose of preaching in the twofold meaning of paraclesis and its cognate verb paracaleo. The verb means “to comfort, encourage, cheer up,” but also “to urge, exhort, implore urgently.” Paraclesis is “comfort, consolation,” yet also “exhortation.” These seemingly contradictory meanings capture the essence of the purpose of preaching: to comfort and also to challenge God’s people by the proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ.
As I understand it, both the comfort and challenge of preaching derive directly from the message of the gospel. That is, preaching comforts the congregation by proclaiming what God has already accomplished in Christ for our sake; and it challenges the congregation by clarifying the call on our lives generated by that reality of God in Christ. Thus, I intentionally place these two purposes of preaching in this order (that is, “comfort and challenge” rather than “challenge and comfort”), because I understand the challenge of the gospel to arise directly and specifically from the comfort of the gospel. Accordingly, I believe that preaching which aims solely at challenge – to the exclusion of comfort – will fail for lack of evangelical grounding.
However, in preaching that aims primarily at comfort, the challenge of the gospel arises more compellingly, and thus more fruitfully, for the comfort of the gospel fuels the believer’s desire to respond in grateful service. As succinctly expressed in 1 John, “We love, because He first loved us,” the prior love of God generates the responsive love of God’s children. Indeed, it is for this reason that, though I hope my preaching consistently communicates both comfort and challenge, I prefer to weight my preaching more clearly toward the comfort of the gospel. Once, after preaching at Briarwood, Montreal, a member of the congregation told me, “Now I’ll always remember that God will love me no matter what happens.” This was the most encouraging feedback that I had ever received after preaching and, though the congregant mentioned nothing of the call to Christian service that such divine love had laid on her life, I believe that the “exhorting” Paraclete can effectively take root in the fertile soil of the knowledge of God’s unshakable love. When the message of God’s love is clearly communicated by the preacher and willingly accepted by the congregant, the challenge of the gospel begins, by God’s grace, to tug at the believer’s heart. As Isaac Watts wrote in his well-loved hymn When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”
