Our Expansive God: John 16:12-15 - Holy Trinity Sunday

 Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to be alive when Jesus was alive? To see his face, to hear his gentle voice, to be in his warm, gracious presence? I envy the disciples for having that opportunity, and it frustrates me how they don’t listen to him, instead arguing amongst themselves over which of them is the greatest and which will sit at his right and his lift in his glory.

To be fair, though, those who were with Jesus didn’t know Jesus as we know Jesus, because they didn’t have the New Testament. They didn’t’ have the Church, Sunday School, VBS, or Bible study; they didn’t have daily devotional booklets or a vast library of hymns, songs, and liturgies.

Even though they were physically with Jesus, their understanding and knowledge of him was rudimentary at best. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is with his disciples at the Last Supper table, and he is preparing them not only for his betrayal, arrest, crucifixion, and death, but also for his resurrection, his ascension, and all that will follow.

Photo by Pascal Bullan on Unsplash

He knows these things will cause them tremendous sorrow, confusion, and fear. And yet, he assures his disciples that it is better for them, and better for the world, that he is going away, because the Spirit of Truth will come and guide them into all the truth. Jesus will abide in them, and they in him through the Holy Spirit.

Still, Jesus knows that the disciples do not understand. And it’s not because they’re weak or foolish. They’re just not ready for these things. They will not begin to truly know Jesus, to understand Jesus, and to fulfill Jesus’s calling for their lives, until they suffer the trauma of his crucifixion, the shame of their failures, and the danger of imprisonment and death. Simply put, it is only through failure, trauma, change, and danger that they will be made ready for the new reality that will begin at Pentecost: the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the globalization of God’s mission.

It's no accident that their growth and transformation will take them through the fires of trauma, failure, confusion, uncertainty, and fear: all the things we strive to avoid in life. 

The most popular heresy of our day is that health, wealth, and prosperity signify God’s favor. I call this a heresy because this mindset turns God into a good luck charm and makes you the determining factor in what God will do.

We are so quick to reduce God into a series of cliches, like “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle” or “God only helps those who help themselves.” By doing this, we break God down into something that we can understand, explain, and control. A deity who reflects our own ideas of what’s right and what’s fair; who loves what we love and hates who we hate; one for whom there is always a reason or an explanation for everything.

God’s Trinitarian nature resists our attempts to reduce God into a divinity that can be understood, explained, and ultimately, controlled. If everything about God could be understood, explained, or controlled, then God would cease to be divine, and instead be a creation of man.

God’s Triune nature is rightfully mysterious to us. What’s not a mystery is that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for your sake, and the sake of the world. As our confirmation students learned, the Trinity is all about relationships. Just like the early disciples, you are drawn into the relationship of the Trinity. You grow into that relationship through the creative and re-creative work of God the Father, through your participation in the ministry of Christ’s love and his fellowship with you in suffering, and through the Spirit who gives life to your faith and nurtures you in hope. 

You have not been deprived of some special privilege enjoyed only by those meager few who knew Jesus in his mortal body. In fact, your relationship with Christ will be deeper and richer and fuller not only because of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the New Testament, but also because you have the church; because you know Christ in family, friends, and the saints who’ve gone before you. Moreover, you are nearer to the fulfillment of every promise Christ spoke during his ministry. And God will be even bigger and even greater to you in the future. 

How God will be bigger and greater is a mystery, and what exactly God will do in the future, I cannot say. But as the Apostle Paul reminds us in Romans 5, we know “that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.”

What is hope? The confidence that no matter what comes your way, God will be greater. 

Are you without hope? Just remember: Jesus loves you too much to be absent from your life. He’s always been there, even when you didn’t know it. I challenge you to look back on your life and remember the times that God has answered prayer; to remember the times when God has given you saving grace when you needed it most; to remember the people who have had the biggest impact on your life and who have inspired your faith.

Greater things are yet to come. The Holy Spirit will fan the flames of faith in you so that you will witness the creative and re-creative work of God the Father, so that you will increase in fellowship with Christ in afflictions and glorify him through your life like never before.

John 16:12-15

¹² “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.¹³ 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. ¹⁴ He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. ¹⁵ All that the Father has is mine. For this reason, I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.