What does the Lord Christ mean when He says of the Holy Spirit: “And when He has come, He will convict the world … of righteousness” (John 16:8)?

Convicting the world of sin means revealing the truth about the evil the world has committed. This is revealed through Christ, that is, through the cross, for the suffering of Christ the Savior and His crucifixion were for the purpose of making us righteous. It is the Spirit who enlightens our eyes that we may acknowledge our sins and that we may know the power of the death of Christ, the bestower righteousness. The Spirit convicts us of our ignorance of the righteousness of Christ and His holiness. His resurrection and ascension to heaven are evidence of His righteousness. Thus, the Lord ascended to heaven and He sent to us His Spirit to carry the hearts of humanity to the place where Christ is enthroned that we may encounter Him and experience His righteousness within us; that Christ may Himself become our righteousness.

Few people knew Christ’s righteousness until His ascension to heaven. The descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, according to the divine promise, is proof of the glory of Christ “who sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Acts 2:33), and this is evidence of His divine righteousness.

St. Augustine wonders why the Lord Christ said that the Holy Spirit convicts of righteousness because He was going to His Father. He answers that the Word in His incarnation and His coming to us from the Father, revealed to the world His mercy upon us; and by His ascension to heaven and His returning to the Father, we ascend with Him to seek what is above where Christ is enthroned. When He sits at the right hand of the Father, He sits as a whole — head and body — for the Church has become His body enjoying the righteousness of Christ, and so has become worthy to sit in heaven at the right hand of God.⁸⁸⁰

Saint Augustine says, “And therefore we ought not to deem ourselves separated from that righteousness, which the Lord Himself makes mention of, saying, Of righteousness, because I go to the Father . For we too have risen with Christ, and we are with Christ our Head, now for a while by faith and hope; but our hope will be completed in the last resurrection of the dead. But when our hope shall be completed, then shall our justification be completed also. And the Lord who was to complete it showed us in His Own Flesh, (that is, in our Head,) Wherein He rose again and ascended to the Father, what we ought to hope

880 St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament , Volume 2 , trans. R. G. Macmullen (Oxford University Press, 1845) 94.3–5: pp. 672–674.

for. For that thus it is written, He was delivered for our sins, and rose again for our justification (Rom. 4:25).”⁸⁸¹

He also says, “when a righteous man is reproved, he is reproved of sin, and not of righteousness. Since in that divine utterance also, where we read, ‘Be not made righteous over-much’ (Eccles. 7:16), there is notice taken, not of the righteousness of the wise man, but of the pride of the presumptuous. The man, therefore, that becomes “righteous overmuch,” by that very excess becomes unrighteous. For he makes himself righteous over-much who says that he has no sin, or who imagines that he is made righteous, not by the grace of God, but by the sufficiency of his own will: nor is he righteous through living righteously, but is rather self-inflated with the imagination of being what he is not.”⁸⁸²

St. John Chrysostom says, “‘And of justice, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no more,’ that is, ‘I have given the example of a blameless life. And my going to the Father is an evidence of this. For, since they were continually charging that He was not of God, and therefore they maintained that He was a sinner and a transgressor of the Law (e.g., John 9:16–34), He meant that the Spirit would deprive them even of this pretext for condemning Him. ‘For, if the supposition that I am not of God proves that I am a transgressor of the Law, when the Spirit proves that I have gone to the Father, and not for a time only, but to abide there (for the words “You will see me no more” clearly have this meaning), what will they say then?’ Notice that their evil suspicion was completely dispelled by these two statements. For the performing of miracles is not the work of a sinner (a sinner, to be sure, is not capable of performing miracles), nor is it the mark of a sinner to be forever with God. ‘So that you can no longer assert that this man is a sinner, or that He is not from God.’”⁸⁸³