Readings (Year C):
Proverbs 8:22-31
Psalms 8:4-5, 6-7, 8-9
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15
Reflection: Everything that the Father has is mine
In this year’s Trinity Sunday Gospel, from John’s sixteenth chapter, Jesus the Son speaks of himself, the Spirit, and the Father as working together to “declare” to us “everything” that God wants us to receive. Jesus says he and the Father “have much more” to give us, but that we “cannot bear it” without the Spirit to guide us to it and impart it to us.
That everlasting day when the Father sent Jesus to rise from the dead into glory in flesh and blood, Jesus came to his believers in the Eucharistic Upper Room, and he breathed into them the Holy Spirit out of his flesh and blood. In the Gospel, Jesus says his breath, his Spirit that he breathes into us, gives us “Everything that the Father has….”
But Jesus also states that we cannot bear “Everything that the Father has” without having the Spirit within us. Truly, the fullness of all we believe as Christians is believable to us only because we have the Spirit within us and choose freely to let the Spirit work within us. Without the Spirit and our free cooperation, the fullness of all God gives us is unbearable, intolerable, and unbelievable.
Only because God rose from the dead in human flesh and blood, breathing the Spirit into believers— only because of that can believers bear “everything” that belongs to the Father and the Son. The “Spirit of truth” carries within us that “everything” that belongs to the Father and the Son— including all their love for each other and for us.
In Baptism, God who is Love takes us in; the Father, the Son, and the Spirit receive us, and we receive them, the Trinity. The mystery of Baptism follows what Jesus commanded, and it says, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
The same gift of Baptismal immersion into the Trinity reaches out for us in the mystery of the Eucharist. To believe in, eat, and drink the Eucharist is to let the Father send the Son to rise in Body and Blood, out of death into glory, to breathe the Spirit into our bodies and souls.
To be honestly one with the Trinity in the Eucharist, let us at least begin the work of handing ourselves over for the full mystery of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit to declare itself to us, within us, and through us. In this way, the Trinity will go on working with us to uphold and spread the Gospel through the lives we choose to live.
By the loving will of the Father, the Spirit breathes anew within us when we eat and drink the Body and Blood of the Son, and so each of us can live, show, and say what Jesus says: “Everything that the Father has is mine.”
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