PARAKLETOS 3 (c): the witness of the Holy Spirit (iii) 'witness support'

Only once have I been called upon to give evidence in a court of law; it was a fairly minor case in a juvenile court, and so not a very daunting prospect. Nevertheless, before the case was due, I received several phone-calls, and a letter, from a friendly policewoman who identified herself as my ‘witness support officer’. On the day itself, she greeted me with a warm smile and a hot (-ish) cup of coffee, and helpfully went through the procedures I could expect. She was, in fact, a credit to the police service; it was just a pity that the CPS failed to produce a vital document to the court, and the magistrates dismissed the case before my evidence was required. ‘Witness support officer’ might not seem the most obvious translation of ‘parakletos’ in this verse (John 15. 26); as elsewhere, ‘helper’ reads more naturally. But this illustration does, I think, enable us to understand just what kind of help the Spirit offers us when we ‘bear witness’ for Jesus. Maybe we have time to prepare in advance; maybe we are suddenly put on the spot by a question or a criticism; we may be ‘ready’, as Peter urges us to be in such situations (1 Peter 3. 15); but in either circumstance we need to ‘call to our side’ the ‘parakletos’ to help us, both by convincing us of the truth, and by making Jesus so real to us that we speak not just of what we know but of the one whom we know. It has been said that witnessing for Jesus needs a cool head and a warm heart; our ‘witness support officer’, if we ask for his help, can give us both clarity and passion.