“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth… All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (Jo. 16:13, 15).
Today is Trinity Sunday: the Church’s annual celebration, not of what God has done, but of who God is. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: “one God, one Lord, in Trinity of Persons and in Unity of Being” as we say in the Prayer Book. One God in three Persons: not by an equation of addition or subtraction of the Persons, but one God by the higher mathematics of Christian faith. In that calculation, three Persons can have one Being. Simpler resolutions of the nature of God are exactly that: simpler, but risk denial of our experience of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For my money, I’ll bet God is not simple, but both complex and one of a kind.
Our Gospel reading today is one of the scriptural anchors of the Christian understanding of God. It’s part of Jesus’ discourse in the Gospel of John, on the night of the last supper, after he’d washed the disciples’ feet. Jesus tells them about the coming of the Spirit, who will declare to them what he has received from the Father. “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (Jo. 16:15). The passage is an anchor because it shows, not a God who is isolated and alone, but God as Father, Son, and Spirit in relationship, Persons who are sharing and communicating everything.
Our passage tells us that what belongs to the Father has been shared with the Son, who has communicated it to the Spirit. The Spirit, in turn, shares it with the disciples. In different places in the Gospel, Jesus talks about the Spirit being sent by the Father in Jesus’ name (Jo. 14:26), or about how he himself will send the Holy Spirit “from the Father” (Jo. 15:26). However it’s said, the Spirit who is communicated to the disciples is not a message but a Messenger: a Person.
The Spirit comes to guide the disciples into all truth, as it says in our reading. Here, the word “guide” is a verbal form of the word “way” or “path”: in essence, it’s the same word. The Spirit is to “lead” the disciples along the “path” or “way” to the truth. What the Spirit shares with the disciples is the Way and the Truth himself: the One who says he is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jo. 14:6). That Way is truth and life himself, communicated to us by the Spirit.
“This is the Spirit of truth,” Jesus says earlier in John’s Gospel, “whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you” (Jo. 14:17). A Messenger, not a message; not an external communication, to be taken up and referred to or not, listened to or ignored, but rather an internal communication that reaches down deep within and grabs us. The Messenger implants within us the identity of Christ himself. The Spirit makes it possible for us to be “in Christ,” as St. Paul so often describes Christian identity.
What’s shared with us is the life of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s not information but formation, meant to make a difference in mind and heart. It’s meant to be transformative. Christians talk about communion with God, rather than communication with God, because the relationship is that close. It’s the bath we take in baptism; it’s the meal we share in communion. In baptism, word is added to water, for the washing away of sin; and in the Eucharist, Christ’s word is spoken over bread and wine, which become by faith his Body and Blood. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the symbols of Christ’s life are taken and eaten and become a part of who we are, in the deepest possible way.
Today, members of the Church are receiving the laying on of hands with prayer, in confirmation, recommitting themselves to the life that they received in baptism. The rest of us will have the opportunity to join with them in renewing our faith. Here we see the practical working out of the theological mystery that we celebrate today. “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth… All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (Jo. 16:13, 15). In truth, what we celebrate today on this feast of the Holy Trinity is the fulness of God’s life that has been shared with us.