The Creator, The Christ and the Holy Spirit

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.