How much can you bear?
Trinity Sunday
Year C
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.....”
The three leaf clover, the
Fleur-de-Lys and the other visual representations of the Trinity of God are
traditionally used to show the faithful who (or more usually, what) the Holy Trinity
is. In practice the diagrams and patterns declare something unmoving and
eternal. Jesus' words, in the small snippet of his farewell discourse
chosen for this Sunday’s Gospel reading, tell quite a different story and
describe what the Father, Son and Holy Spirit actually do. Jesus
says there is a wellspring of love and information in the Trinity of God.
The Father has
given all to the Son
The Spirit
takes what belongs to the Son
and declares
it to us on the world’s behalf.
We might be forgiven for believing
that the Spirit merely reinforces what is already in the teaching of Jesus in
the Gospels. Is the Holy Spirit a sort of active, living index which
points the Church back to what she already knows but has perhaps forgotten or
failed to apply? Does the Holy Spirit have a Bible in its
hand? That was what I was always led to believe, anyway.
Maybe we should expect to hear
timeless truths in Church. We have a Communion Service based on very old
antecedents. The Mass is the Mass is the Mass. It warms our
hearts to hear the Bible read sometimes in traditional translation. We
refer to our hymns sometimes as the Old
One Hundredth, we even sing about being asking to be told “…the old, old story” but Jesus promises his disciples here
that the Holy Spirit will shepherd them into novel territory. Frankly, I
can see little in the passage to indicate that the content of what the Spirit
will proclaim will limit itself slavishly to what is already there in the
parables, the controversies, the public discourses of Jesus or the private
teaching between the Master and his disciples. The disciples had heard
all of that and had profited from the private teaching during his ministry and
in the days between Easter and Pentecost to clear up what they had not yet
understood. In our reading this Sunday at the end of a longer passage
Jesus says explicitly that he has other things to tell them which, at that
moment, they could not bear to hear. “The
Spirit of truth…will guide you”
We should at least be curious about
what he meant.
There is enough material in the Acts
of the Apostles to give us a hint of how the Jerusalem Church, Peter and the
other Apostles along with the newcomers Paul and Barnabas and a small army of
deacon/evangelists sent to the Samaritan and Greek cities were privileged to
express in new and changing times and places not only what the Gospel said but what it meant as well. In so doing they
disagreed which each other – sometimes quite vociferously. Following the
Spirit of God into truths which a previous generation or even our younger self
could not possibly bear courts a certain degree of risk.
It sails very close to the wind.
