This passage brings us front and center for Trinity Sunday. It’s also a very important day for me personally, since it is our twelfth wedding anniversary…but I digress.
Trinity Sunday — The Holy Spirit figures prominently in this passage, but the Father and the Son are not absent. When I read this short Gospel passage, my mind drifts off to a few places —
First, I think about the title Spirit of Truth. I love that title. It’s so easy to glide past this title, but there is so much bound up in it. Most particularly, there is freedom, but there is also life and endless wonder. To me, at least, it’s so important that the Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth, not fact. Truth has fact mixed in there, of course, but it is also imbued with love, beauty, and deep meaning behind the bare facts. Perhaps, we could all meditate just on this one title as we look toward Sunday, but there’s something else here too.
Second, I love how the gift of the Holy Spirit is about relationship. It’s so easy to interpret the gift of the Holy Spirit as power or ability, but I think that’s missing the point. The point is that we’re not alone. You’re never alone. I’m never alone. We’re not alone — because the Holy Spirit binds us to the Trinity and to each other. Not alone. Never alone.
Third, the Trinity is perhaps the most difficult theological concept within Christianity. We’ve spent centuries trying to define it and millennia trying to make sense of what we defined. To me, that’s encouraging. Century after century, God is bigger than our concepts and explanations. So, what can we do to meditate on the Trinity?
Perhaps, we could use a tangible action: The Sign of the Cross (thanks to Cindy Streit for sending this one to me!)
Also, perhaps, we could stay humble by remembering to laugh at ourselves: St Patrick’s Bad Analogies
As we look toward Sunday…