John 16:12-15
June 15, 2025
Trinity Sunday
“I still have many things
to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When
the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will
not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to
you the things that are to come. He will glorify me
because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All
that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is
mine and declare it to you.”
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Today is Trinity Sunday, which is not exactly on the
radar when it comes to popular awareness.
You aren’t going to find Trinity Sunday cards at the CVS. And while it would be a great excuse to eat a
lot of shortbread (since it’s made with three ingredients: butter, flour, and
sugar and often cut into triangles), or maybe donuts – just because they’re
donuts – chances are that the bakeries are not exactly overrun with that during
strawberry shortcake season.
Nevertheless, the Sunday after Pentecost is a good time to reflect on
what it means to worship a three-in-one, one-in-three God.
A good place to start is with the classic exposition of
Christian faith that we call the Nicene Creed, which was worked out at a
gathering of Christian leaders in the year 326 in the city of Nicea and refined
a bit in 381. They had come together in
response to disagreements over how Christianity describes who God is and about
how we interpret the words of Jesus when he talks about God as his Father and
the Holy Spirit being sent by him from the Father. So let’s start there.
There are a lot of places in the New Testament where
Jesus speaks about how the three work together as one, but also places where he
goes further to say that they are one in their deepest being. A lot of those moments are found in the
gospel of John and today’s passage from that book is a good example. Jesus told the disciples that he would send
the Holy Spirit from the Father to them, and that the Spirit would have the
full wisdom and power of God to continue the work that Jesus had accomplished
among them.
John is not the only gospel writer to acknowledge the interlocking
nature of God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit. At the end of the gospel of Matthew, Jesus
sends the disciples out into the world not just on his own behalf, but to
invite all people to be part of the mission of a creative, redemptive, renewing
Trinity.
“And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All
authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all
nations baptizing them in the name…”
(note: “name”, not
“names”)
“…of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit,”
[Matthew 28:18-19]
and with the promise that
“I am with you always, to the end of the
age.” [Matthew 28:20]
That is a promise kept
through the presence of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, the
Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ (we use all those terms) in our lives as
individuals and as a community of faith.
When the Council of Nicaea met, they were emerging from a
time when Christianity had been illegal and entering a time when it was gaining
official support from emperor Constantine and his eventual successors (which
would prove to have its own drawbacks).
There was a desire to be unified in their teaching, and the creed they
drew up was supposed to provide some guidelines. What they produced was a statement that would
not just speak, but sing. And it would
provide a framework for the sharing of insight of the sort Jesus had promised
that the Spirit would bring from the Father.
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will
guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak
whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He
will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All
that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is
mine and declare it to you.” [John 16:13-15]
They developed the concept, or encouraged the awareness,
of God as the Trinity. The word
“trinity” is not found in the Bible, as some critics point out. So what?
It’s a word we have developed as a shortcut for expressing an
inexpressible reality that sums up a way to honor God in his fullness by
celebrating what God has done in his particularity. Let me offer an example or two, which will not
be perfect analogies. They won’t be as
majestic as the Nicene Creed, nor as precise, but they will make sense in their
own way, I hope.
Try this one. A
tree has roots, branches (including the trunk), and leaves. It cannot stand without the roots. It cannot absorb nutrients and water without
the roots. The plant begins as a clump
of roots and without the roots there would be no tree. When the seedling appears, it isn’t clear
whether there is a root pushing upward or if there are leaves coming out of the
ground. The trunk and branches appear as
a sort of connection between roots and leaves, but then the branches start to
grow and it seems like they are producing the leaves that at first seemed to
come right from the roots. Without the
branches, there would be no more leaves.
(Yes, there are plants like ivy that work differently. I said this wouldn’t be a perfect
illustration.) No branches, no leaves,
and if the leaves die, the tree dies.
Root, trunk, and leaf are each separate and
necessary. Under the right conditions,
they each have the wherewithal to produce an entire tree, but that isn’t how it
happens. They work together simply to
exist, and the existence of the whole depends on the interlocking existence of
each part.
Or, again, what about a candle? You have the material side of it, the wax and
the wick. In a way, though, it isn’t
fully a candle until you light it. Up
until the moment that you ignite the wick, it’s just sort of a wax stick. But when you ignite it, the heat of a flame
starts a self-perpetuating cycle where the material candle produces light and
heat, and the heat keeps the reaction going until the wax is used up. But take any part of that away, and there’s
not going to be either heat or light.
We live in a universe that is filled with – even defined
by – these sorts of relationships between the parts and the whole. It’s in the small things and the large
things. Knock one part of the
environment out of alignment, and suddenly the whole thing either adjusts or,
failing to adjust, there are extinctions on the way. Right now we can see what happens when there
are disruptions in what used to be called “the social contract” or “checks and
balances”. No natural system is exempt
from change and no human system or culture is perfect.
What is perfect (or should I say who is perfect)
is the God whose inner being is revealed in the intricacy of the universe and
the realities beyond it. (Remember that
the Nicene Creed even speaks of God as “Creator of all that is, seen and
unseen”.) There is, within the divine
being, a mutuality of love that overflows into the created world to bring us
grace and hope and joy and peace and, yes, understanding of God’s love. Again, Jesus said,
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will
guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak
whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to
come. He will glorify me because he will take what
is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has
is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it
to you.” [John 16:14-15]
We
don’t have adequate words to express the full wonder of God and when we try we
generally either start blundering around in a lot of academic terminology or
oversimplify things in ways that also present a problem. But we know that when we love God’s children,
we love God; we are made in the image of God, which means we are made to live
beyond ourselves, since the ultimate expression of the Father’s love is how the
Son, through the action of the Holy Spirit, came to earth and lived beyond
himself, for us, in Jesus.
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