Festival Eucharist - Trinity Sunday
“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
Overview
Such a short gospel reading for today: John 16:12-15.
Yet so complicated! I lose track of what on earth Jesus is saying: it moves from him to God to the spirit to us to him to spirit to God back to us again. Fittingly, the passage begins with Jesus telling us that he has much to tell us but we won’t get it! You don’t say!
This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, a day that has generated hymns about God’s nature being immortal, invisible, consubstantial, coeternal – I have no idea what we are supposed to get from any of these descriptions other than confused. At heart it is Jesus trying to explain love. But we can’t explain love, we feel it, we express it, we are transformed and changed by it, it shapes and moulds us, but we don’t understand it. What we do know is that once it starts it doesn’t stop, it doesn’t respect boundaries, or understand limits, it continues to generate more love.Thankfully we are not called to understand God, just to receive and to hand on the love that is given, and take our place in the great love story that is life.
GOSPEL READING
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; 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.’
