The Prosecutor

Some of the things Jesus says are genuinely strange the first time you hear them. Here’s one that should stop us in our tracks: he tells his closest friends, on the night before he dies, that it is actually for their good that he is going away. He says his leaving is better for them. To a group about to lose the person they’ve staked their whole lives on, that sounds almost offensive. How could Jesus going possibly be good news? The answer reveals something about the Holy Spirit that turns our instincts inside out — and it comes wrapped in a courtroom scene where nothing is quite as it appears.

Why his leaving is good news

“Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” That’s the logic. Jesus’ departure isn’t a loss to be endured; it’s the doorway to something better. We tend to assume the disciples had the best possible deal — walking, talking, eating with Jesus in the flesh — and that everything since is a pale substitute. Jesus says the opposite. Having the Spirit is not second-rate. Yes, he was leaving to do the most important work in history, going to the cross. But the Spirit he would send does important work too. So what exactly is that work? “When he comes, he will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.” It’s courtroom language again — Jesus on one side, what he calls “the world” on the other, with the Spirit acting as prosecutor. But before we walk through the three charges, one thing has to be clear about the tone of this trial.

Not a grudge match

This isn’t Jesus muscling in to crush his opponents and prove who’s boss. We can read “the world hates you because it hated me” and imagine a God spoiling for a fight. But what is Jesus’ posture toward the world? Not “God so hated the world.” He loved it. He wants to win, yes — but he wants to win hearts, to rescue people, not to destroy them. The Spirit’s prosecuting work is aimed at waking the world up, not writing it off. With that in place, the three charges each carry a deep irony.

Wrong about sin

“About sin, because people do not believe in me.” When most of us think of sin, we think of bad behaviour — wrong actions, wrong thoughts, moral failure. And the natural antidote is to be a decent person, to do enough good to offset the bad. Plenty of belief systems run exactly on that logic. But Jesus locates sin somewhere deeper. The world is wrong about sin, he says, because it does not know him. The real issue isn’t first the bad things we’ve done; it’s the rejection of God and of his Son. Think of the runaway son in Jesus’ famous parable. We assume the problem was the wild living, the wasted money. Dig deeper and the real wound is that he walked away from his father. The distance was the sin. The irony is sharp: we can be convinced we’re basically good and in no danger, while the Spirit quietly presses a different question — not mainly “what have you done?” but “what have you done with Jesus?” Do you receive him, or refuse him?

Wrong about righteousness

“About righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer.” This one takes a moment to unfold. If sin is doing bad things, then righteousness, we assume, is doing good things — a record we build for ourselves, brick by brick, hoping for reward. But the world gets righteousness as wrong as it gets sin. There has only ever been one perfectly righteous person, and when he stepped into the world, the world judged him guilty and executed him. The cross looks like the verdict: guilty. But the resurrection, and Jesus’ return to the Father’s side, is God overturning that verdict — declaring Jesus the righteous one, vindicated and exalted. And here’s the turn: as he goes to the Father, he sends his Spirit, and his people become the righteous ones. Not because we finally get our act together, but because we share in his righteousness. The world thinks righteousness is something you manufacture, and so it couldn’t recognise the real thing standing right in front of it. The Spirit shows that righteousness is available after all — just never on our own.

Wrong about judgment

“About judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.” On the surface, judgment in the story falls on Jesus. The religious authorities, the courts, the crowds all called for his death, and it looked like total defeat. To the disciples in that moment, it would have felt like the lights going out. But the resurrection flips the scene inside out. What looked like Jesus being condemned was in fact his victory — and the real sentence fell on what Jesus calls the prince of this world. Everything that stands against God, everything broken in the world, even the seemingly unbreakable grip of death — all of it was dealt with there. Notice the word “condemned”: that’s what happens at the end of a trial, when the verdict is already in. So the Spirit comes and shows us that the battle has already been won. We’re not stuck in limbo wondering whether good will finally overcome evil, whether the light will hold against the dark. The defeat has already happened. The evil one is not the prince of this world anymore; he’s defeated, living on borrowed time, and his only remaining weapon is lies. The deepest irony of all: the world thought the cross was its verdict against Jesus, but the cross was God’s verdict against the world — and at the same time, the only place left to find mercy.

Where the Spirit actually shows up

So what does all this have to do with us? Ask a simple question: where does the average person actually encounter the Spirit of God? Not, mostly, in dramatic visions. Jesus said the Spirit would be in his people. You are a temple of the Spirit. You carry and pass on God’s word. You witness to the truth of Jesus. And now you’re part of this convicting work too — because when someone meets a Spirit-filled believer, they meet these strange realities in the flesh. Here is a sinner who isn’t sunk in sin, but has received Jesus rather than refused him. Here is someone counted righteous, not by being perfect, but by sharing in another’s righteousness. The world tried to get rid of the only truly righteous one — and now it runs into him again every time it meets one of his people. And here is someone genuinely free from fear of the evil one, because the verdict is already in.

Positively weird

That makes every believer a walking contradiction in the best sense: a sinner who’s righteous, accused but free, weak yet standing beside the judge. We don’t always feel it. We still face temptation, still fail ourselves and each other, still fall short of what we were saved for. But our confidence was never in our performance. It rests on standing with Jesus, with the Advocate alongside us declaring us not guilty, clothed in a righteousness that isn’t our own. We can look at a world that seems to be winning — culturally, socially, spiritually — and feel small. But against all of that, the Spirit speaks, convicting us of what’s actually true and, through us, pressing that truth on the world. We might sometimes wish the Spirit would do something that felt more spiritual. But consider what he’s actually doing: using ordinary people like us to point to the most important reality there is — the finished work of Christ, who loved the world so much he went to the cross to win it back. The verdict is in. So the question to sit with is this: if the case is already closed, what fear are you still carrying that you no longer need to?

This post is adapted from a sermon preached by Murray Colville at St Hilda’s Anglican Church Katoomba on John 16:1–11, as part of our Holy Spirit series through John 14–16. Visit us at www.katoomba.church.