Today’s Reflection
Gospel: Jn 16:12-15
June 12, 2022 | Sunday

Today’s Gospel

I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now. When he, the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into the whole truth.

For he will not speak of his own authority, but will speak what he hears, and he will tell you about the things which are to come. He will take what is mine and make it known to you; in doing this, he will glorify me. All that the Father has is mine; for this reason, I told you that the Spirit will take what is mine, and make it known to you.

Today’s Reflection:

The Universal Church celebrates with great joy the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity – the mystery of the three divine persons in one God. A medieval legend about Augustine would illustrate how mysterious the Trinity is. One day, Augustine walked along the beach. While taking a break from writing his treatise on the Trinity, he saw a little boy digging a hole in the sand, and then running to the ocean, filling up his hands with the seawater, running back to the hole and emptying the water into a hole. Augustine watched as the child was going back and forth several times. Finally he said to the boy, “What are you doing?” The boy said, “Trying to fill that hole with the ocean.” Augustine said, “You will never fit the ocean in that hole.” And the boy said, “Neither will you be able to fit the Trinity into your mind.”  Indeed, the dogma of the three divine persons in one God is a mystery. No one, even the brightest individual on earth can fathom its mystery.

While it is true that its mystery is unfathomable, in the Sacred Scripture, our trinitarian God has shown us a glimpse of that mystery. The  opening chapter of the book of Genesis presents how God created the world through the power of his word (דבר). When he says “let there be,” there it really is. Such is re-articulated by the author of the book of Proverbs in our first reading. We can notice the parallelism between the two books such as this:

• 8:22 “Yahweh possessed me in the beginning of his work” vs. Gen. 1:1

“In the beginning.”

• 8:24a “When there were no depths” vs. Gen. 1:2 “Darkness was on the surface of the deep.”
• 8:24b “No springs abounding with water” vs. Gen. 1:6 “Let it divide the waters from the waters.”
• 8:25 “Before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills” and Prov. 8:29 “he gave to the sea its boundary” vs. Gen. 1:9 “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear.”
• 8:26 “while as yet he had not yet made… the beginning of the dust of the world” vs. Gen. 2:7 “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground.”
• 8:27 “When he established the heavens” vs. Gen 1:2-8 “Let there be an expanse in the middle of the waters….  God called the expanse ‘sky.’”

The parallelism only suggests that there is a powerful being who created the world; he is the creator of all things and with him is wisdom (חכמה) who instructs men and women to “fear him” that is, to revere him from whom all things are and came to be. Now, with Jesus, the face of the Father has been disclosed as he himself declared that he and the Father are one (Jn. 10:30). “He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made” (Jn. 1:1-3). Despite the claim of his closeness and union with the father which he showed through signs and wonders, everything seemed to be puzzling still to his disciples. Jesus himself told them that what he is doing they do not understand now, but afterward they will understand (Jn. 13:7). Only the spirit who will make them understand who Jesus is. This spirit was promised by Jesus to his disciples before his passion. He would send the spirit whose role was to guide the disciples into the whole truth (Jn. 16:12). Suffice  it to say that only when the spirit arrived that the disciples were able to understand the words of Jesus. It was the spirit who moved them to continue the mission inaugurated by Jesus. It was from whom they received peace (Rom. 5:1) and hope (Rom. 5:2) which sprung from their perseverance and character in the midst of sufferings (Rom. 5:4).

While it is true that God is a mystery, the Father’s work in creation, the Son’s gift of salvation and the Spirit’s counsel are more than enough to believe that Trinity exists. He could never be God if the human mind is able to comprehend his entire essence. But when we are able to participate in the role the Father, Son and Spirit execute in the lives of each individual, there we realize that at the heart of them all is a person who has the capacity to take care of creation, to show kindness to others and to bring others back to him whose life became a ransom to many. (by Fr. Rodel D. Magin, OSA) /Vulnerasti, 2022