Trinity Sunday

It must have been a very intense evening for the disciples.  They had been on a rollercoaster of emotions since the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem the previous Sunday.  Perhaps NOW Jesus would announce his messiahship.  But since then, well life had been just plain difficult – run-ins with the Temple authorities and pharisees, an embarrassing supper at which a woman had anointed Jesus’ feet with very expensive oil and wiped them with her hair – and then Jesus had told Judas off publicly for the comments Judas made. A pall of anxiety lay over the friends.  They were in Jerusalem and Jesus was talking about leaving them, and dying, and coming again, the Father and someone else who was coming and how they couldn’t understand all this yet.  They were very afraid - and here was Jesus again, talking in riddles. 

Finally, Philip speaks up, possibly in frustration, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” 

How familiar is that?  “Please just stop talking about God and show Him to us!”   

But Jesus can only show his followers who the Father is through his words, who he, Jesus, is and his actions.  Jesus has been with his disciples, night and day for two years and they still haven’t got it. 

“Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” 

Whoever has seen Jesus, has seen the Father.  The gospel writer puts it as starkly as that.  Only in human terms – it has to be admitted, because those are the only terms we can comprehend.  But in all the essentials – in character, in action, in word, Jesus tells the disciples, that if they have seen him, they have seen the Father.   

Today is Trinity Sunday – the day in the Christian calendar when we try to get our heads around the mystery that is the Trinity: God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  One God, three Persons, each Person of the Godhead having a different role but being one with the other two.  Again, we are faced with riddles.  Stop talking and show us. 

Our reading today goes on to introduce the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.  Jesus says to his disciples, 

¹⁶And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate,^[d] to be with you forever. ¹⁷This is the Spirit of truth, 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. 

The first advocate is Jesus, who because he is incarnate, in the flesh, is limited to time, place and culture.  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus released in time and space and Spirit will lead the disciples into all truth – the stuff they cannot yet know before Jesus has died and been raised again from the dead.  The stuff they cannot yet know because they have not yet had time to apply and learn from all that Jesus taught them.  But they will know Jesus’ Spirit is with them as they go on their way, because they will feel his Spirit abiding in them – the Spirit of Truth.

Right from its earliest days, long before there was an official doctrine of the Trinity, the Christian community used Trinitarian language because that was how they, and how we, experience God.  Jesus talked of his Father and of the Holy Spirit.  I experience the Father as being wondrous, outside my comprehension, indescribable, the First Principle, the Creator of everything.  But God the Father is not far from me because I know him through his Son, Jesus who I believe loves me and you and everyone in the world unconditionally.  And I experience the Holy Spirit daily, not through great dramatic visions or feelings, but by little prods in one direction or another, small insights, little graces.  I was taught as a child that we pray to the Father, through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. 

Jesus is the key to knowing and understanding (within our limited human ability) both the Father and the Spirit.  He is not greater than the Father.  On the contrary, Jesus said the Father was greater than him.  But his earthly mission was/is to point to who the Father is.  If you “know” Jesus, you will know the Father and the Holy Spirit, because they are one God and three ways of being God. 

In the end the three ways of being God exist for our benefit.  God is love.  God cannot help himself but love.  Love cannot be love in a vacuum.  For love to exist there must be an object on which love can be poured out.  The whole of creation is God’s work of love and within the extraordinary work of creation, God has made beings who can respond to truth, respond to his love - us.  And because God is love, he has given us the freedom to love him or not.