Concentrated Contents

This coming Sunday’s Gospel lesson seems short to me. After several weeks and months of lots of words from accounts of the Good News of Christ Jesus we stumble upon this passage from John 14. Do not let its brevity deceive you though, as its contents are like a concentrated beverage mix, without some liquid, or in this case time and space they may taste or seem overwhelming.

This passage opens with a doozy of a first line. Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Wow! If we are not careful we may very well read this as an ultimatum or law and not as the graceful invitation that it is. God’s grace hits us where we are, but the transformation that comes with that grace typically leads us into following not some prescriptive path without any creativity or latitude, but rather into a life full of exciting co-creative moments when the Spirit of God moves through us. Not surprisingly, the next words of Jesus’ mouth pertain to the Spirit.

Jesus pledges that he will ask the Father to send the Advocate that is the Spirit of truth. Dangerously we may distinguish too much the persons of the Trinity making them separate entities (Father creates, Son saves, and Spirit sustains, or something like that). Maybe this is why Jesus warns of how the world has trouble receiving the Advocate. It cannot see the Spirit and does not know the Spirit, but in an attempt to nail down the mystery of the Divine Community that is the Trinity, we who make up the world **try to** pigeonhole God into the compartmentalized, dichotomous, either/or boxes in which we live our own lives. Said more concisely, the language of this world breaks down in the face of the Trinity, so Jesus speaking of Father and Spirit can come off sounding confrontational—and it is. However, this confrontation stems from Jesus’ love of us, his desire for us to live within this holy community, and the truth that we so often sell the gift of our lives short by not living in the Trinity.

If any of this worries us we only need keep reading this passage, for Jesus reminds us that we will not be left orphaned, alone, or abandoned. “I am coming to you,” Jesus promises, “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.” Sometimes the words through which John shares the Good News tend towards an esoteric realm that may be tough for us to fully grasp. Sometimes I find it frustrating, but typically I find it strangely reassuring. Christ—whom we identify as the eternal salvation-bearing person of the Trinity—continues to live now and always. But really we need say God lives always, which also means that Christ and the Father and the Spirit live always.

When Christ made himself fully known in the person of Jesus what also became fully sanctified was humanity. Yes, our bodies even in their varying degrees of failing, but not just that physical part. All aspects of our humanity were swept up in Christ Jesus’ divinity. Take a moment to remember at once both the Incarnation and the Ascension, for these were not just about God coming to earth and leaving to go to heaven, but rather providing a divine eraser for the perceived space between heaven and earth and earth and heaven. Christ lives on beyond that moment of Ascension, and through this we live. To expand this further, the divine community known as the Trinity is where we came from and it is where we are going, so certainly it is what we are made of at this very moment and it is who we are at our core. We may not currently see this reality with the eyes in our heads, but hopefully we observe it deep down with the eyes of those deeper parts of ourselves.

These Holy Words challenge us this week (and beyond) to merge the deeper vision with the way we look at the world. Christ’s Incarnation, life, death, Resurrection, and Ascension speak of the grand truth of the stages and seasons of our lives too. We do not live separately from God, but eternally dwelling in the community of the Trinity. This does not mean we always get it or see it or that life is a piece of cake. Rather, we live in this reality in which we must practice trusting that God’s Word is true that we live in Christ and Christ lives in the Father and the Father sends the Spirit and the Spirit lives in us. And yet, this statement is way too clean. For the life of the Trinity of which we are a part is both more interconnected, interwoven, and unified and at the same time more precise, distinguished, and specialized than my words can ever describe. So, it’s time I stop typing for awhile and instead experience life in the Trinity!