Trinity Sunday

This week starts with Trinity Sunday when the church reflects more explicitly on God as Father, Son and Spirit.  One God in three persons.  The Gospel passage is the account of Jesus’ teaching about the Holy Spirit – the one person of the Trinity that the disciples would have most difficulty in understanding.  Jesus identified the Spirit as the Spirit that brings truth and reveals God to people.  This revelation of truth has three facets.  Firstly, we can only understand God’s ways in bite-sized chunks.  In mathematics, before we teach partial fractions we need to teach simple algebra.  In the same way much of the teaching in the Old Testament is simple and crude because that is all the people could understand at the time.  Jesus says, “I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now!”  Secondly, truth is from God and truth is of God.  God is both the explainer of truth and the source of all truth.  Finally, truth is to reveal the significance of Jesus’ words and actions to us.  To plumb the inexhaustible depth of love and grace found in them.  The revelation of truth comes not from any book or any object or any created artefact.  The revelation of truth comes from the person of Jesus Christ.  This is the ultimate truth that the Holy Spirit reveals to us.