Recently, a group of our employees in one of our Jesuit works came into the crosshairs of a very well-connected and prominent Zimbabwean businessman. The next thing we knew, the team of four employees had all been arrested and imprisoned pending trial on charges that literally defied logic. The whole team of our employees had never been in prison in their life, and one of them had a young baby who was only three months old and was still nursing. Seeing their plight and how they were separated from their families, our Jesuit machinery kicked into high gear as we tried to leverage all our connections to higher powers in order to secure the release of our employees who we were convinced were completely innocent of the charges laid against them. Eventually, whether through our efforts at securing the patronage of powerful advocates, or through the change of heart of those who had laid the initial charges, we managed to secure the release of our employees and they were able to return to their families, much to everyone’s relief.
The reason I tell this story is that it illustrates a point that I’m afraid we are all too well acquainted with, namely that we live in a society that operates largely on patronage. It is all about who you know and how powerful your connections are. This is how things normally get done in this country. We would surely prefer a country that operated on the principle of every citizen’s equality before the law. Nevertheless, the current status quo places us in the peculiar situation of being better able to understand how society operated at the time of Jesus in 1st century Palestine. Just like our own society, it was a society largely run on patronage. If you were a poor peasant, your only hope of securing justice was to find yourself a powerful patron and protector. Incidentally, it is in this same context that the parable of the unjust judge must be understood. Judges at the time of Jesus were notoriously corrupt and it is only by sheer dint of perseverance that the old widow manages to get justice for herself. Often, if a poor peasant was dragged into court by a powerful opponent, it would suffice for the peasant’s powerful patron to simply stand behind him, saying nothing, in order to get the opponent to lose heart and abandon the case.
When Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit as the Advocate in today’s gospel, it is this image that he is conjuring up for his disciples. The Advocate was a powerful patron, whose silent presence standing at your side could affect the outcome of your interactions with powerful enemies. In this same farewell discourse of John’s gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that they will be dragged before the courts and accused unjustly. He knows what is in store for them and knows that they will need all the fortification they can get. He urges them to fear not, for they will have an Advocate, a powerful patron who will ensure that they do not get flattened by the malicious powers that are opposed to the coming of the Reign of God. He tells them that “in this world you will have trouble, but take heart, for I have overcome the world” (Jn 16:33).
But lest we think that the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives will just magically make our problems go away, like a powerful patron, a word of caution is in order. We could point to countless cases in our country and in our world where the cause of justice and right has been frustrated and the rights of the powerless have been trampled over by the rich and powerful. If we need any example of this, we have merely to look at what is currently happening in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Such experiences call us to rethink how we image the type of advocate we have in the Holy Spirit. In order to try and reimagine this role, I’d like to draw on an anecdote from my experiences as a youth pastor in Zimbabwe.
In 2021, when I was serving as the chaplain to the National Movement of Catholic Students (NMCS), I had the occasion to organize the annual NMCS conference. Right from the start, NMCS was always something of a firebrand organization, bravely campaigning for the cause of justice and right under the fearless patronage of Fr. Nigel Johnson SJ, the inaugural NMCS chaplain. By the standards of our forebearers in the movement, we had arranged for a fairly tame program where the most controversial item on our agenda was an innocuous talk entitled “Youth participation in the National Discourse: Pray, Register, Vote.” But this was enough to set off red-flags in our ever-paranoid state machinery and, sure enough, on the eve of the start of the conference, the Mission Superior of the mission where we had arranged to have the conference was summoned to the local police station where he was questioned at length as to the goals and vision of the NMCS and this conference that we had arranged. He was told in no uncertain terms by the police that the conference had to be cancelled and should any students attempt to attend the conference, a police road block would be set up at the entrance to the mission to turn back any firebrand students.
My response to this intimidation tactic was to call in our Jesuit-big guns and once again activate the mechanisms of patronage by appealing to the intervention of higher powers. I was quite taken aback by the completely different response of the National coordinator of NMCS, who was a tried and trusted hand and had dealt with this kind of intimidation before. Far from trying to play a game of one-upmanship and beat them at their own game by invoking the intervention of someone higher up the food chain, his response was for them to bring it on. He counselled that we go ahead with the conference, but at a different venue. Should the police get whiff of our tactics and come to the new venue to arrest us, we would be prepared. Our national coordinator had called up two very good friends who were some of the best human rights lawyers in the country. They would both be on standby should any of us get arrested for daring to talk about the political situation in our country and how Catholic youth might get more involved.
As I reflected on the difference between our two strategies, I was struck by how much closer the National coordinator’s strategy was to that of the first Christian’s who were filled with the Holy Spirit. They knew they were going into a world that would often be openly hostile to the gospel message they had come to proclaim. Their response was not to put all their energies into developing a powerful network of patrons who could get them out of any fix they might find themselves in. Instead they fearlessly proclaimed the gospel and left the fighting for their cause up to their Advocate, the Holy Spirit. Sure, this did not prevent Paul from cleverly pitting the Pharisees against the Sadduccees when he was arrested, or leveraging his Roman citizenship and appealing for his case to be escalated to Cesar in order that he get the opportunity to preach the gospel in Rome. But this was never the focus of his activities. The early disciples all knew that their Master had “already overcome the world.” Their mission was simply to convince as many people as they could to join their ranks on the winning side. When we ourselves are facing opposition, we would do well to take to heart the words of the prophet Isaiah: “But I said ‘I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God” (Is 49:4).
Questions for reflection
1. When faced with a situation of injustice, do I let myself be filled with frustration and a sense of powerlessness?
2. Do I have a sense that God is directing the course of history towards it’s ultimate fulfilment in Christ’s victory over death and evil?
3. Where have I most powerfully felt the work of the Holy Spirit in my life?
By Fr Isaac Fernandez SJ
English