John 16:12-15 Commentary

Even on the best of days, if ever anything counted as information that we “cannot bear,” the nature of the Trinity is one of them. The nature of the three persons and their union will forever be out of our reach, but at least we know that we will have some inklings about it because of what Jesus promises to us here.

In the lectionary calendar, we’re on Trinity Sunday. This week’s message is so in step with last week’s gospel message we might wonder if it’s here on purpose—ensuring all of us who took a break from the gospel texts on Pentecost Sunday will still get one of the gospel of John’s sections on the Holy Spirit. Last week was the first of five statements about the Holy Spirit in Jesus’s farewell discourse, and today’s text is the last of those five.

Whereas last week we were told by Jesus that the Holy Spirit will help us understand what has already happened, this week Jesus tells us that the Spirit will also tell us about things to come. And though Jesus describes the Holy Spirit’s actions in the future tense, we are meant to read them as our current reality. I find this a unique approach to giving a holistic view of the Spirit’s work: the Spirit is the Spirit of truth of all time, helping us discern the times in light of God and God’s gospel.

Another reason to appreciate this week’s pairing with last week’s is that we can be tempted to belittle the Spirit as some sort of errand runner for the Father and Son—especially with our passage today. There seems to be a lot of emphasis on the Spirit’s lack of novelty in Jesus’s description: the Spirit does not speak on the Spirit’s own but only what the Spirit hears, the Spirit glorifies Jesus by taking what is Jesus’s and declaring it to us… It can feel like the Spirit is some sort of middle-man for Jesus.

Many of us have a Christocentric bias that leads us to leave off recognition of the Father and the Spirit when we’re talking about God. It’s “Jesus this… and Jesus that…” But even Jesus modelled to us a different way as he regularly spoke of his connection with the Father and the Spirit—like he does throughout this passage. There are any number of reasons why our bias exists, but I would argue that one of the reasons why it exists is because it is so difficult to understand one God in three persons—even the fully human-fully God person of Jesus Christ seems easier to make sense of!

But of course, this is exact point Jesus is trying to make to his disciples about the Spirit. The Spirit is the one who makes us understand truth. The Spirit shares this same desire with the other persons of the Trinity to be known by their creations. The Spirit, the Father, and the Son have the same message for us, have the same ultimate purpose for us, and the same commitment as one another to see truth prevail.

And it is also the Spirit who comes and abides with us forever in a way that the Father and Son did not and do not. It is the Spirit of truth who is actively guiding us into things that are new to us. This is no small task in one person’s life, let alone in every person’s life! And in the sense that all truth is God’s truth, then to God, there is truly nothing new.

How we ought to best understand Jesus’s promise that the Spirit will “declare to you the things that are to come” continues to confound. Is this only an eschatological message? Is this a prophetic allusion about the apocalypse? Or is it very much a more general sense about the signs of the age and the time? Jesus gave us his own cryptic messages about needing to be able to discern the times, so perhaps that is what he means when he describes the Spirit’s message. This is where Dale Bruner lands in his commentary, finding the Spirit’s role as preparing the church to be a relevant, prophetic, witness to their times—if only we listen.

Because there’s the rub, isn’t it? We can hear the Spirit speak and declare and we can discern the way the Spirit is guiding us, but we can just as easily ignore the Spirit of truth, pretend we heard something different or didn’t hear at all. On this side of eternity, we can refuse to participate in the inner workings of the Trinity. But we will only grow in faith and knowledge if we listen to God—the Spirit who has come to dwell within us so that the message will always be close at hand, just a prayer away and the adventure begins!

Textual Point

Did you notice how the Holy Spirit is described as verbally active? Along with guiding us, the Spirit speaks and declares and by doing so, glorifies Christ. The verb for declare is formed from the preposition ana (back) and the verb angelō (to carry information or report). To me, the addition of that preposition implies the Spirit’s movement back and forth between us and the Godhead.

Illustration Idea

Whenever the Doctor on Doctor Who gets a new travelling companion, they always look at him funny when he shows them the outside of his spaceship. The blue British police call box can’t really be it, can it? And what does the Doctor say? “It’s bigger on the inside.” It seems to me that that’s how we’re supposed to feel as we get to know the Trinity through Jesus Christ. Our faith can seem overly Christocentric, but that’s only if we stay looking at it from the outside. If, by faith and as we are called by the Spirit, we enter into life in Christ, the Spirit and the Father come into fullness of relationship as well.