Jesus said to his disciples in John 16, 13: 
“the Spirit will guide you into all the truth; for the Spirit will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.” In other words, the absence of Jesus and the uncertainties of this life and the world are not to be a reason to feel discouraged, contrary to that, all the adversities, uncertainties and challenges are real opportunities to experience the guidance of the Spirit and the miracles of the divine presence.
 
We can understand the language of God acting in the middle of the most contradictory or challenging moments of our life, because the Spirit will help us to understand the presence of God acting in our favor in all these situations.
 
The Bible confirms that the ultimate source of revelation for both Jesus and the Spirit is God. Since the Spirit takes what belongs to Jesus, and since what belongs to Jesus belongs to God, therefore, even in Jesus’s absence, God’s revelation to the world and to the church is still available “through the Spirit.”
 
As we can see in John 16:12-15, the Fourth Gospel’s particular understanding of the Spirit recognizes two realities about how Christianity relates to its past and future. 
 
The first is that the revelation that took place in and through Jesus is fundamental for our Christian identity. The second is that it is a fundamental and eternal revelation of Jesus for Christians, although the world has kept on changing from the time that revelation was first made known by itself. Like the church in John’s days, today the church finds itself trying to understand how to live its faith amid social, cultural, and global circumstances that change rapidly. We are in a permanent search for the answer to the question of what it means to be a Christian in our time.

John´s Gospel places firm confidence in the Spirit as continuing the ongoing presence and revelation of Jesus within the Christian community after Jesus’ return to God. For John, then, the church does not need to be scared of learning and practicing its faith in Jesus amid a changing world marked by Jesus’ physical absence after the Ascension. This is because the Spirit “will declare to you the things that are to come” (see in John 16:13). In other words, the Spirit makes possible a “deep understanding of what Jesus means for one’s own time,” without betraying the core truth of Jesus’ original revelation.
 
The question we are left with is whether we will listen to the Spirit and be open to newer and deeper understandings of our faith and to the implications of Jesus’s revelation for us today. 
 
Nowadays the internet, social media, and the 24-hour news cycle give us a more immediate awareness of local, national, and global crises that challenge us for a Christian response. Suffering, illness and need of heath care, insecurity and loneliness just show some examples of what we need to answer. What is the Christian response to such realities? What response is truer and more faithful to Jesus’ revelation? Can we, like John, trust the Spirit to guide us in discerning what it means to live out Christian faith today?
 
But according to Jesus all the questions and answers always return to the same point: How do we know God? The answer that Jesus shared with the disciples was:We know God because we have known Jesus.  Then, going back again to the challenges of our world let us ask ourselves how we live our Trinitarian Christian faith, a faith that is a supernatural gift and a miracle in a secular context that is trying to silence God ignoring God´s presence today.

The Holy Trinity is about relationship and indwelling. It is about collaboration and the self-communication of God. The Trinity is about the mutuality of God within the Divinity, about our invitation into the Trinity by Jesus in the power of the Spirit. The Holy Trinity is about our mutuality with each other, guiding, speaking, and declaring to one another the glory of God, Father/Creator, Jesus/Son, and Holy Spirit. 
 
So, we can see that we are challenged to live a Trinitarian inspired life, that is in essence a life of mutual relationships, love, respect and collaboration in a time of isolation, individualism, selfishness and mistrust. The world today is divided, the nations are divided, the people are divided. But it is in this context of division that the gospel today talks about the life of the Spirit, the life of the Son and the life of the Father as one life of love that is an example of perfect communion, harmony and mutual relationship.
 
We can see now how important is to understand ourselves in a model based on the example of the Trinitarian life. The Trinitarian life is a life of unity and communion but, at the same time it is a life that expresses itself respecting personal roles and gifts. The Christian Trinitarian vision of God has a lot to offer to this world.

Paul writes in his letter to the Colossians 1, 6-7:: The gospel that has come to you…it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God.

During the Roman Empire, Rome wanted fruitfulness, abundance and peace to be absolutely connected with the existence of the Roman rule. Rome wanted not only to rule externally, but also internally like in any totalitarian state, the empire wanted everyone to confess that the only way of life that was acceptable was the one declared by the Roman rule.

You can clearly find out that concepts of happiness, liberty, peace, fruitful life and love independent of the Rome power were something completely unacceptable for the Roman rulers. For a totalitarian empire, the idea that someone can be happy independent of state rule is always unacceptable. 

But Paul challenges that concept declaring that in Christ we can have a fruitful life that is not the result of the Roman state. Listen again what Paul is saying to the church: We have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. 
 
Definitely, these words were not something that emperor Nero and Roman authorities wanted to hear. Paul states that for a happy and fruitful he is praying without ceasing to a God that is not the emperor or the goddess Rome. This only action converts him in an outlaw.
 
Secondly, Paul says that the disciples should aspire to be filled with the knowledge of God´s will. Again, this was completely countercultural, Rome wanted that people only know what the state wanted to allow them to know. In modern terms, Rome wanted to control information, communication and knowledge because according to Rome, independent thinking and independent prayer could only lead, to challenge the presence of the totalitarian Roman empire. 
 
Thirdly, Paul says that his dream and aspirations for the community are clear, he wants that they may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him. Again, another challenge to the status quo of the empire. Paul´s desire is that the Christian community live a life that looks for Christ only, a life consecrated to Christ, a life that worships the real God revealed in Jesus Christ.

​If Christians live this kind of life, their lifestyle will be in complete opposition to the dominant culture, in those days represented by the culture of the Roman empire that expected people to live, worship and serve the Roman state and the emperor that personified the empire.

In the Roman Empire era, the official teaching was that the emperor embodied the glory of the gods, for this reason images of the emperor dominated public space. In that context, Paul called the Christians to worship God and Jesus only, because Jesus is the real sovereign and the real manifestation of the eternal God.
 
Paul writes in Colossians 1,15-16 [Christ Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation;16for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 
 
Paul´s language concerning the powers is rooted in Israel´s Scriptures, where the terms thrones (gr. thronoi), dominions (gr. kyriotetai) and powers (gr. exousiai) commonly refer to kings and their dynasties, their realms and the power that they exercised. While rulers (gr. archai) could be used to refer to spiritual entities, it also referred to earthly rulers.[1]
 
Think how disruptive the letter to the church in Colossae was, because in a world where the emperor was the head of the body politic, the Roman empire, Paul described Jesus as the head of a new body politic, the church. Paul brings these verses to a climax with the claim that in Jesus all things in heaven and on earth are reconciled, for he has made peace through the blood of the cross. Making peace was nothing new in the empire. In fact, making peace was the language used by the empire to justify its existence.[2]
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But Paul changes the meaning of peace. In Roman political discourse to celebrate universal peace (pax) was a result of the victory of Rome military pacification. In striking contrast to this idea of Pax Romanaor Roman Peace, where peace was brought through violent military might, economic oppression, and cultural domination, Paul proclaims in his letter to the Colossians that peace and reconciliation are the result of the self-sacrificial love of God revealed on the cross of Christ. He proclaims a victory that was not the result of a military campaign, the conquest of new territory, or the imposition of the Roman rule. Paul proclaims the victory of Jesus the same way as Jesus was crucified by a Roman governor. Jesus was raised by God in a demonstration that it was God and not the empire who had the last word.
 
Paul´s description of the reconciliation of all things, whether on earth or in heaven, and the proclamation of the gospel to all creatures provided a basis for a message of good news and redemption for all of creation.[3]
 
The victory of Christ, and the rule of the kingdom of God, according to Paul have consequences that affect not only people but also the whole creation. The whole planet is now under the blessing and protection of the living Christ; it is not the emperor the owner of the world but Christ who has the right to rule over everything and everybody.


[1] The New Testament. Fortress Commentary on the Bible. Pages 560-561

[2] Idem page 561

[3] Op. Cit. Page 562

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When you are challenged by the idea that your faith is not complete, or that there is a need of something more to believe in, or a new experience to have or a new requirement to complete, then you are tempted to believe that you are not Christian enough compared with the people that are questioning your faith.
 
That was the big problem for the church of Galatia, the Galatians were questioned and criticized in a way that they started to believe that it was real that they were not fully saved, and they started to believe that they needed something else to be really Christians.
 
But not only that, they started to rebuild the invisible barriers that the Roman State religion or the Jewish tradition built to separate the good from the bad, the believer from the non-believer, the Jew from the gentile, the good citizen from the bad citizen.
 
You see the two problems that Paul had to address in this letter. On one side, the wrong theological interpretation that the Galatians were not complete and that they needed to add something to be fully saved. And, on the other hand, the heresy that proclaimed that people had to be always separated and divided like the holy versus the unholy. Paul addressed the problem with a very strong statement:
in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.
 
The Christian faith is not an ethnic faith, it is a universal faith says Paul, then nobody needs to be Jew first to become a Christian, you can be a Christian independently of your previous religious or ethnic background. 
 
Secondly, to be children of God was not determined by the social status in the Roman society, where Romans considered that they were better than other people. Romans divided the world between the civilized Roman society and the Barbarians. Paul declares that that division is not real, that anybody can be a child of God thanks to the faith in Jesus Christ.
 
In his letter Paul emphasizes that our faith creates a community that is both diverse and unified. Gentiles who accept Christ are God´s children. As God´s children, Gentiles have full participation in the blessings of the covenant community. 

According to Galatians 3, 28, faith in Christ compels us to dismantle the social barriers that prevent us from truly being sisters and brothers in Christ because There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. You can see the big contrast in what Paul was saying and what the word of his time was offering. Paul was confronting a world and a system that emphasized differences to justify oppression and dominance of one group over the other. Paul responds to that culture saying that differences are not to justify dominance but to prove that faith in Jesus makes us one body and that faith reunites people that are different and so  we treat them all as children of God.
 
For the Roman and Jewish, the cultural differences were the perfect argument to justify segregation and oppression, for Paul that was the opposite. Differences among people were a blessing that proved that in Christ those differences don’t matter anymore, because instead of oppression, our differences should create celebration and happiness, because we can learn that God is bigger than our differences and that in Christ we can be one beyond all our human, social, cultural, political or ethnic differences.
 
For example, unfortunately many times today, differences of opinion or points of view are immediately used to create polarizations or divisions. That is wrong according to Paul. Paul taught that our differences should be used to move us to dialogue and exchange of experiences recognizing that we are in this journey together as one body. 
 
To highlight differences as something negative and use them to divide churches, nations, families, friendships, couples is to go back to what Paul was trying to eradicate. We need to move forward and talk about our differences as he did in the letter to the Galatians, recognizing that our differences are a blessing and not a curse and that in Christ they are not a reason to divide but to unite. I think this is the great contribution that the message of the letter to the Galatians has for our time.
 
First, it is a reminder that we are complete in Christ Jesus, that we don’t lack anything for our salvation, our salvation is complete, and we should celebrate this fullness in Christ as a great gift from God to the world. We are saved in Christ we don’t need to seek for or add anything else, we have fullness in Christ.
 
Secondly, Christ faith promotes unity and communion. Christ calls us to remember that in him: 28There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. Thanks, God, for that!
 
And finally, remember that difference is not bad, difference is good because we can understand more of the amazing love of God when we see that different people gather around the same table and eat the same bread and drink from the same cup as one body and one family.