Please read the Scripture passage before the homily.
Allow me to introduce to you the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Advocate. The Advocate is like a defense attorney, the one who looks out for the welfare of the accused. The Holy Spirit is sent, just as Jesus was sent. The Holy Spirit is a person.
We have heard of the Holy Spirit before, but the Spirt had been defined as a force, like the force that drove Jesus into the desert at the beginning of his ministry. Here, however, the author describes the Spirit as a person, one who will teach and remind.
The Spirit’s task is not to teach something new, but to give us the proper understanding of the words Jesus gave us. The Spirit interprets for us the word of Jesus.
The task of the Holy Spirit is to teach. Since John had admitted that all the libraries of the world could not contain all that Jesus said and did, it is the Holy Spirit who will teach us the words of Jesus. The Spirit functions somewhat like a Graduate Assistant, a tutor, or a teacher’s assistant. The Holy Spirit will not teach us new things, bring to us the true meaning of what Jesus has taght us.
Once we can grasp something of the Holy Spirit as a person, we can have some better understanding of the Christian’s concept of God as a trinity of persons. If the Holy Spirit is personal, then the Holy Spirit is like the Father and the Son, a person and God. We have here a solid foundation for the Christian teaching of the Holy Trinity: the Spirit is personal just as the Father and Jesus are personal.