Trinity Sunday
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth”
Summary
John 16:12-15 starts with Jesus telling us that we won’t understand what he has to say. He’s not wrong: what he wants to say moves from Jesus to God to the Spirit to us to Jesus to the Spirit to God back to us again. In a very roundabout way Jesus is describing the intimate relationship between Father, Son and Spirit and inviting us to become a part of it. The fruitful, generative nature of this relationship is explored in Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 where it gives birth to the created world:
“when God established the heavens... made firm the skies... and marked out the foundations of the earth... I was beside him, like a master worker.”; and
overflows to embrace humanity:
“I was daily his delight... playing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
Trinity Sunday reminds us that God is not something for us to study and understand but something we are invited to be a part of. A relationship in which we experience God’s delight in us, share in his delight in the world and join with God in renewing and restoring his creation.
FIRST READING
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Does not wisdom call
and understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
“To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all who live.
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth,
when he had not yet made earth and fields
or the world’s first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there;
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker,
and I was daily his delight,
playing before him always,
playing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
GOSPEL
John 16.12-15
“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.
