From the Lectionary for 15 June 2025 (Trinity Sunday, Year C)

John 16:12-15 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“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.”

~

"In the light of the resurrection it gradually becomes possible to see that it was not that God was previously violent, now blessing, now cursing (Deut. 32:39), but had now brought all that ambivalence to an end. Rather, it became possible to see that that was all a human violence, with various degrees of projection onto God. God had been from the beginning, always, immutably, love, and that this love was made manifest in sending his Son into the midst of the violent humans, even into the midst of their persecutory projections of God, so that they might treat him as a human victim, and thus reveal the depth of the love of God, who was prepared to be a human victim simultaneously to show the depth of his love for humanity, and to reveal humanity as having been locked into the realm of the Father of lies [John 8:44].

"The process we have seen in the Pauline writings and in the Johannine epistles is then the definitive demystification of God and human beings, such that it becomes possible to look again at the crucifixion and the resurrection and develop a perception of God only as derived from that event. So it becomes possible to see the crucifixion as the meeting point between, on the one hand, a human act of violence, and, on the other hand, the love of the Father, who sends his Son into humanity as an act of love, the Son who gives himself freely to being victimized by human beings as part of his imitative love of the Father, and the Holy Spirit, who is the inner dynamic of the relationship between the two of them.

"Jesus on the Cross gives up his Spirit to the Father. The Father at the resurrection gives back the Spirit to the Son, and the two of them are then able to give this same Spirit, the Spirit of the crucified-and-risen victim to humans as induction into a new way of being human - becoming children of God (John 1:11-12), quite outside the violence of the “world.”

"The understanding of God as Trinity then is the understanding that the Cross of Christ, made alive in the resurrection, was in fact a relational reality - a reality of giving and of self-giving that was saving as revealing, and revealing as saving."

- James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, pp. 108-109

~

"The Church [...] didn't preach the Trinity just to solve a mathematical puzzle; the Church preached the Trinity because that seemed to be the best, maybe the only way, to preach salvation. [...] The Trinity [...] is not a mathematical puzzle but a story of sin and forgiveness. In spite of some outbursts of anger [as the Jewish people understood it], Yahweh claimed to be a God who was 'hesed', a Hebrew word meaning full of loving kindness and mercy. The attitude of the Pharisees towards the paralytic [Mk. 2:5] and the Sinful Woman [Lk. 7: 47] suggests that they thought forgiveness should stay up in the heavens where it belonged and not get mixed up with humans on the earth. In our angrier moments we tend to feel the same way.

"But Yahweh's 'hesed' did get mixed up with humanity: first in the person of Jesus and then in the disciples through the Gift of the Holy Spirit. So it is that we humans are given the Gift, not only of having our sins forgiven, but we have the Gift of forgiving the sins of other people. Note that it isn't we who forgive, but it is God who forgives through us. That is, the divine act of forgiveness that came to the earth in the person of Jesus has, like the Holy Spirit, spread throughout the whole world.

"Forgiveness is the air we breathe. Unfortunately, just as we can pollute the air, we can pollute the breath of the Holy Spirit through our own wrath. But fortunately, there is no getting rid of God's 'hesed'. It is all around us and we can breathe it any time we wish. And when we wish it and breathe in the Spirt, we share the life of the Holy Trinity with other people and so help them share the same forgiving life."

- Andrew Marr, Abbot of St. Gregory's Abbey (Three Rivers, MI), from blog post "The Breath of the Trinity" (https://andrewmarrosb.wordpress.com/2016/05/19/the-breath-of-the-trinity/)

~

"What I hope I will be doing with you today is to say that the doctrine of the Trinity is far from being some kind of immensely complicated intellectual abstraction, [but] is an account of how God is close to us.

[...]

"God's interpretation of what God was doing in coming amongst us [is] an interpretation of love. God has shown us that God's creating everything, bringing everything into being, had a criterion: human flourishing. And furthermore, that that was a plan, a project with, if you like, intelligence, that shows the glory of God. And that God's interpretive intelligence is given us in the Holy Spirit so that we can begin to interpret reality and come to discover what really is as we follow the example and life of Jesus, learning to give ourselves away, learning not to grasp onto fake meaning holding back the possibility of learning what really is, but being found ourselves on the inside of the adventure of creation as daughters and sons of God.

[...]

“All that the Father has is mine.” [v. 15]

"[Here] Jesus is referring to God as the Father already personalising the great Impersonal Other, but saying that the entire meaning of God is available in [him, Jesus]. There are no extra bits of God floating around out there that I am not bearing witness to. [...] There are several different ways in which in different gospels that same reality is referred to. The Father is not an extra person outside, observing with a different set of emotional reactions, a differing set of qualities. No, literally everything that is in the Father becomes visible in the Son: the Son is the criterion of the Father, the image of the Father, the icon of the Father, the way, the humanly available way.

“All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that [the Spirit] will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

"In other words, God's interpretation [the Spirit] of God's criterion [Jesus] for God is going to be what's operative amongst you now, building you up into an intelligence of all the things that I, Jesus, am showing you, taking exactly from what I've been doing - my words, my actions - so that you will understand that I wasn't paying the price for some terrible vengeance, but so you will see that literally everything that I was doing was the image of the Father: creating, breathing into being.

"Even creating, this is an important point: Jesus is not simply the Saviour, Jesus is the Creator. The Father gives us the entire criterion for God's creation in Jesus. Jesus is the criterion for creation. Which means that his going up to his death and his breathing out the Spirit is the closest analogy we get to what creation looks like. The words Jesus uses are “the birth-pangs,” in other words a terribly terribly dangerous moment whereby a woman puts her life and health extraordinarily at risk in order to bring a child into the world. He's saying, if you want to know what creation looks like, that's the nearest analogy - it is someone being prepared to die in order to breath out their spirit to that everyone else can be brought to life.

"That's the nearest analogy to creation we have, it's a picture, not of a hugely, massively powerful Maker from outside, but of someone who's prepared entirely generously to do something that's going to be independent of them, and then enable people to begin to flourish freely inside [it], so as to come to discover who they are. It is this fantastic picture of the relationship, the sheer friendliness, the warmth, the spaciousness, of the love that is opening up what can seem to us a frightening, terrifying, vengeful and violent world - and is. But God is not associated with any of those things, but that there is this huge interpretation of love trying to well through us, so that we are able to participate in it with peace and with joy."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for the Trinity Sunday 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtBJnCuSW2s)

[Source of the quote from "The Joy of Being Wrong" and link to Andrew Marr's blog, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/trinityc/]

From the Lectionary for 8 June 2025 (Pentecost - Year C)

John 20:19-23 (NRSV Updated Edition)

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Romans 8:14-17 (NRSV Updated Edition)

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs: heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

~

"What I'd like to do is to take a step back before looking at the texts and just comment something about the coming of the Holy Spirit. Very often in our basic understanding of Christianity, we have something like the Holy Spirit coming as a ... consolation prize given that Jesus isn't here. Which is exactly not how Jesus saw it. Jesus saw that what he was doing was setting something up so that we could have something much much more than him being here, at least being here in the flesh, in the form of which he was historically. That what he had done was to make possible the giving to us the Holy Spirit. The gift of the Holy Spirit is how God is now able to get through to us, inside us, between us completely. The gift is more than the giver, that's something which Jesus keeps trying to say: because I have gone to [the Father] you will be able to do more than me.

"Once we begin to understand Jesus's purpose if you like, his project as having been not so much to “pay for our sins” quote-unquote, as though that were you know a 'bill settlement' issue, but as making available to us the source of life, living fountains of a desire vastly greater and richer than that of which we are capable, that opens us up into the possibility of becoming new creatures together, that gives us a new way of being human. Once you understand that that's what he was about, all that he says and does makes more sense, his anxiety to get it done makes more sense. What Jesus was trying to do was make it possible for us to be given the Holy Spirit. He instantiating it, and the Father giving it; he breathing it out, the Father pouring it upon us.

"So what we celebrate today, if you like, is that enormous gift having become possible for humans. And I want to stress that because sometimes Pentecost is celebrated as if it's the birthday of the Church, ... though actually probably the Church's birthday was better considered to be Good Friday, but there we are - that's just my little opinion. But the real problem with thinking about it as the birthday of the Church is that it tends to make the Holy Spirit a 'churchy' thing, whereas the whole point of the Holy Spirit is that it's how God's act of communication goes worldwide. God begins to be able to spread out, the Holy One comes out of the Temple and goes worldwide.

"So this is now a universal and a cosmic difference that is made. If you like, we who have the privilege of being baptized Christians and having received the Holy Spirit, have the privilege of being on the inside of something that is for humans. If, and it's always an if, the Church manages to be a sign of the reconciled humanity, of God's children coming together as one in answer to Jesus prayer, that sign is a wonderful thing, that sign is the presence of the Holy Spirit ushering in the Kingdom. But it's doing it constantly all over the place and not necessarily where we're looking for it! That's another thing which we get from John: no one knows where the Spirit comes from, where the wind blows, where the Spirit flows. It's constantly going ahead of us, it's constantly surprising us.

"And I think that that's a very very important part of understanding: this gift is something not that we can think of as something which we possess and can give to other people but which is something which with luck possesses us and is impelling us to new places, new positions, new openings-up, new freshenings of life and belonging. All of these things are what the Holy Spirit is about.

"Having said that, let's look quickly at the texts because you'll see something I hope about what I'm trying to stress there. John's text is the text we had at the very beginning of Easter. It's the text where Jesus appears in the upper room on the evening of the first day of the week, and the doors are locked. So remember, I told you before, this, if you like, ironizes the holy place in the Temple into which Jewish people quite rightly were feared to go because only the high priest could go. But here we have an ordinary house, people in it locked for fear of the Jews. It's a bit of irony there because this is in fact now a secular place in which the Holy One of God is appearing.

"And the first thing he comes and says is: “Peace be with you.” He gives peace twice thus fulfilling what Jesus had talked about earlier in John's Gospel. “After he said this he showed them his hand and his side.” So he indicates how the peace comes: it is the greeting of peace, then he's showing them what he's done to bring them peace. He's identified who he is - the one who was cast out. And it's from the cast out one that peace comes - not vengeance, not anger, [but] peace. All the great requital for passages in Isaiah have been fulfilled, but not as vengeance, as the gift of peace. And then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. In other words, peace and joy. Joy is the realization of something that has been done for us beyond our imagination and is coming upon us. Peace and joy - these are going to be the absolute keynotes of the Holy Spirit.

"Then Jesus says to them ... “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” In other words, up till now, his Father has sent him - all that he has been done has been, if you like, the iconic reflection of his Father, he has been the image, the only image. What God looks like is determined by what Jesus has done. In other words, it's become entirely a horizontal form of belonging, a form of recognition. We recognize the Father in what the Son does. The Son is equal to the Father. It's not a question of looking up, it's a question of looking sideways. And now that same package he is giving to them.

"[... Then he] breathes into them and, as I've said time and time again, it's the same verb as in Genesis 'breathing' into Adam's nostrils - this is the beginning of a new creation, starting new humanity. This is not only to do with the particular people there, it's to do with a new Adam, the possibility of becoming a new human and of creation being opened up again. And, this is the amazing thing: this power which has come from on high through him, by his breath, through that which he has achieved, this power is now ours. And that that's not simply... a 'canonical' thing, it's an actual thing.

"And he says: if you forgive the sins of any, they have forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. Let's try and de-moralize that for a bit. That's not merely a question of setting up people who can give up absolution and confession. That's one way of organizing the reception of that, but it's certainly not limiting it. No, it's saying: in as far as you forgive other people creation will be opened up, and as far as you don't, it will remain closed down. There will be no more 'deus ex machina', no more God from outside. God is now at your level, you are within God, and God is within you. It's going to work at your level. It's up to you to take this forward. Where are you going to go?

"And its power comes through forgiveness, through letting go. It's a power that seems weak. But is the strongest thing, because it's as you let go that you will come to discover what is, rather than remaining locked in confirmation bias, in violent patterns of identification and projection. It's as you're able to forgive and let go, that you will discover who others really are, who you really are, and will be able to open up the universe.

[...]

"So this is the power that we've been given. Let's think about this over the next few weeks because this notion of God having become alive sideways amongst us, at the horizontal level, enabling us to discover from within where this peace, where this joy comes from, and how it empowers us to go forth, not just in little ecclesial huddles but as people who speak and witness to something greater than us in the whole world, so that creation can start to begin to bear witness to the glory of its Creator."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Pentecost Sunday 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8DVVuJBasQ)

[Note that John 20:19-23 is the Roman Catholic lectionary Gospel text for Pentecost C - the "Revised Common Lectionary" text is John 14:8-17. For analysis and discussion on this and the other lectionary texts for this Sunday, see: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/pentecostc/]

From the Lectionary for 1 June 2025 (Easter 7C)

John 17:20-26 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

“Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them.”

~

"In his prayer in the garden (John 17) Jesus anticipates that his disciples will share in the divine life. “That they may be in us, just as you are in me and I am in you, Father.” This subjectivity is the appropriation of the life we know from the Gospel tradition, now enfleshed in our very own existence. If in the Gospels we may speak of the objective Life of Jesus (the “so-called” historical Jesus), so by the gift of the Spirit we may also speak of the subjective life of Jesus in us (the Present Christ or the 'Christus Praesens'). The life we now live is lived in Jesus. He is the vine and we are the branches (John 15:1-9).

"Where the vine ends and the branches begin is not possible to tell. So it is with us. This is the secret of Christian existence. We are not merged with Jesus so that we may confuse our identity with him, anymore than he is merged with the Father and so loses his identity. To suggest such is to end in a metaphysical miasma and psychological grandiosity. Rather, inasmuch as we imitate Jesus by living in love, as he imitated his Abba and lived in love, we become like him."

- Michael Hardin, The Jesus Driven Life, pg. 269

~

"[T]hrough the Trinity we transcend us-them, in-out thinking. Imprisoned in our old familiar dualistic thinking, we were always dividing the world into mine and yours, one and other, same and different, better and worse. In the Trinity, we move beyond that dualism so that mine and yours are reconciled into ours. One and other are transformed into one another. Same and different are harmonized without being homogenized or colonized. Us and them are united without loss of identity and without dividing walls of hostility. To put it in philosophical terms, dualism doesn't regress to monism. It is transcended.

"The healing teaching of Trinity also helps us transcend top-down or hierarchical understandings of God. If God's Father-ness elevates and includes Son-ness in full equality, do you see what that means? If God's Son-ness doesn't grasp at equality, but rather mirrors the Father's self-giving and self-emptying love, do you see what that means? If the Spirit is not subordinated as an inferior but is honored and welcomed as equal, do you see what that means? God is characterized by equality, empathy, and generosity rather than subordination, patriarchy, and hierarchy."

- Brian McLaren, We Make the Road By Walking, pp. 228-29

~

"No doubt you're aware that many traditional Christians today consider the concept of universal anything — including salvation — heresy. Many do not even like the United Nations. And many Catholics and Orthodox Christians use the lines of ethnicity to determine who's in and who's out. I find these convictions quite strange for a religion that believes that “one God created all things.” Surely God is at least as big and mysterious as what we now know the shape of the universe to be - a universe that is expanding at ever faster speeds, just like the evolution of consciousness that has been proceeding for centuries. How can anyone read the whole or even a small part of John 17 and think either Christ or Jesus is about anything other than unity and union? “Father, may they all be one...”"

- Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ, pg. 49

~

In his video homily for this Sunday (link below), James Alison explains how the phrase “before the foundation of the world” refers to the Holy Place (Holy of Holies) in the Jewish temple, as it was thought of as being outside of Creation (both space and time), where YHWH dwells.  This links to the following from his book Jesus the Forgiving Victim, (Essay 6, “Undergoing Atonement: The Reverse Flow Sacrifice.”):

"[T]here is the High Priest, in the Holy Place, with us outside, and he is being ministered to by Angels, he is communing with the Angels who were with YHWH at the beginning of creation. He is spending time in prayer, for it is during this period that he will expect to become interpenetrated by YHWH whom he is going to incarnate for the rest of the rite. So he will pray to become one with God, and that God will become one with him, so that he can perform the sacrifice and glorify God by making God's people one. This is what At-one-ment is all about. Experts in these matters have long known that in John 17, where Jesus engages in a long prayer concerning the Father being in him, and he in the Father, and him praying that his disciples may be made one, we have the essence of the High Priestly prayer in the Atonement rite. So we can imagine the ancient High Priest praying in these terms, and becoming interpenetrated by YHWH." (pp. 247-48)

In the homily, Alison proceeds:

"[H]ere we have one of the things that Jesus is repeating from the Atonement rite, “at-one-ment” rite, which is the time when everything becomes one. The prophet Zechariah even says, “On that day God will be One.” There is the sense that creation is a dispersed reality that hasn't yet achieved One-ness, and that the power of the Creator tends to making things one.

"And that can be quite a frightening thing for us. “One” can be a way of making everyone fit into the same 'little hut' - can be a reductive thing. But it's quite obvious that Jesus's understanding of the way in which God makes them one is an ever-greater, it's one in the non-mathematical sense. [It] is of so much diversity that harmoniously works together that we are able to rejoice in being brought into it. That the Father is in Jesus, the Spirit which is being given is in both of them and is shared with us so that we find ourselves actually coming alive in them. It's “being inhabited” by something. It imagines us as malleable, not as individuals with individual spirits but as malleable inter-dividuals ... who are able to be possessed by evil desires and spirits coming from others, but also able to be inhabited, indwelt, by The Spirit which is making us, with all our distractions and separations, revenges and rivalries, is turning into One.

[...]

"[T]he whole of this is to produce people that are able to bear witness to love. That's how we know that it is of God. Titles, authority, none of those things are at the beginning of a hint of as much importance as this: are we in any sense at all dilators, symptoms, of God's love? Or are we people who think that the love is only for me and not something that I receive from others and I'm able to share with others?

[...]

"From generation to generation we are in the same place, this upper room which is also the Holy of Holies, with the Holy One who is giving himself so that we can learn always to detect where he is. He's going to look different, our imitation of it is going to be flexible, from generation to generation, but this is the witness that we're going to bear. ... [And] this plan precedes everything. This is not a reactive plan, this project of opening up creation through including us and bringing us into the possibility of discovering what is true, how things really are, what the way that the whole pattern of creation really works is. Being on the inside of that, that is what he wanted from the word go.

[...]

"The whole purpose of this was to enter that place so as to reveal what the heart of the Creator of all things is, in such a way that we might be contaminated by it ... that it may be contagious among us, so that we too can start to bear witness to what really is.

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Seventh Sunday in Easter 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exYAhK2EVqE)

[Source of book quotes from Michael Hardin, Brian McLaren, Richard Rohr and James Alison, and for further discussion and reflection on this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/easter7c/]