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.”
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"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
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"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/)
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"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/]
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