Progressive reflections on the lectionary #68

Monday 9th June 2025

John 16:12-15 - Trinity Sunday

The gospel reading for this week is John 16:12-15, a short passage which has Jesus saying:

"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…”

This comes from the gospel of John, a book known for being unlike the other gospels in that it doesn’t so much set out to give an ‘accurate’ account of Jesus’ life, as to present a sort of theological framework for thinking about the ideas of God and Christ. It’s not clear who wrote ‘John’, my personal favoured explanation is that this is the product of a particular community, ‘the John community’ from whom also came the letters (1,2,& 3 John) which share a preoccupation with some of the themes found in the gospel.

Our reading this week comes as the church calendar rolls around to “Trinity Sunday” the week in the year when, if I’m any judge, more heresies are likely to be joyfully preached than any other. All kinds of people will be using illustrations of water (one substance three states = ‘Modalism’) or the sun (star, light, heat = ‘Arianism’) or even an egg (shell, white, yolk = ‘Partialism’).

The Trinity is a strange doctrine, and while I would personally identify as a Trinitarian I don’t have any difficulty with people who don’t take the same view. The Unitarian approach(es) have plenty of validity I think. Perhaps part of the value of the Trinity is that it adds a layer of inexplicability to the divine that can’t be easily rationalised - perhaps.

Martin Luther said, words to the effect of: “To deny the Trinity is to risk our salvation; to try and explain the Trinity is to risk our sanity.” The nature of salvation is one among many things that the good doctor and I would have disagreed on, I think, but I’m more comfortable with his last statement.

The problem is, though, that wars have been fought over this stuff, Arianism in particular - a doctrine that denies the full divinity of Christ - was addressed with political and military force in the fourth century.

In the 16th and 17th centuries atheism was effectively illegal in the British isles, because to deny the existence of God was to deny the legitimacy of the (divinely appointed) monarch. This same sentiment carried on, although growing weaker over time - in 1811 the radical Percy Bysshe Shelley faced expulsion from Oxford for publishing The Necessity of Atheism.

Right Belief (TM) has political importance - hence it has been enforced by rigid religious social controls: e.g. “If you don’t believe this correct doctrine (per Luther) you will lose your salvation.”

What does this have to do with John’s philosophical meanderings about the Spirit of Truth? Well to answer that we need firstly to rid ourselves of the idea that these are the reported words of Jesus. They don’t appear anywhere else in the gospels, they are a John teaching. I think we should start by accepting that this is a passage designed to showcase part of the theology of the John tradition, rather than to report a teaching of Jesus himself.

Secondly I think we need to note that this passage focuses on one of the key obsessions found in the John tradition: truth. Famously, in his scene of Jesus’ dialogue with Pilate, John has Jesus affirm that he came into the world to testify “truth.” This is met by Pilate’s withering, and philosophically pertinent, response: “What is truth?” (John 18: 37 - 38).

One of the central claims found in John, then, is that God is ‘the truth’, but given that the gospel also presents the divine as a ‘person’ to whom we can relate that means that ‘truth’ too must have some relational value. In other words: we are in some sort of relationship with it. To be in relationship with someone or something means to respond to them - which is to receive from them. To receive from is to be changed by. Ultimately, then, we have the capacity to alter ‘truth’ in some way or other while at the same time it remains what it is: true.

Ok - long story short: there are a few things we might take from this passage:

1. The Trinity is not something to be easily or readily explained, rather it’s a metaphor for the way in which God exists (can be said to be real) and like all metaphors imperfect. Different approaches exist to explain that metaphor, most of which fall short in some way or another, and we need to be careful about what ideas we’re propping up in our teaching.
2. The writer(s) of John put words in the mouth of Jesus that are used to set out the core teachings of the John community - among other things this sets out a sense of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about God. This is done using philosophical language and ideas that are deliberately slippery, intentionally hard to grasp.
3. Among the key ideas in the John literature is the idea of ‘truth’ which John then identifies with God. Somehow here God is, for John, ‘truth’ itself (just as God is later in the John literature ‘love’ itself.) However, for us to have a relationship with ‘truth’ means that truth must in some way be able to ‘receive’ from us - which means that truth, even absolute truth, can change while also remaining true.

The last point is where John’s theology becomes truly relational - God-as-truth invites a response from us, and then responds to our response. “To respond is to become” as Catherine Keller would say. Here then is a sense of God’s dynamic becoming as revealed in the theology of the John community.

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