The Trinity
Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Lent
John 5:17-30
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/031826.cfm
The gospel of John starts with passage, “In the beginning* was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This passage often gets misconstrued that Jesus is the Bible or scripture in the flesh because of the use of the word “Word” which is used both to describe Jesus and the Bible as the “Word of God.” The Greek word that was translated into “Word” was logos or the expression, logic, reason, and speech. It is how God is made known. The word is Greek and not Hebrew. Early Christianity combined Hebrew theology/tradition with Greek and Roman philosophy and culture. The different people that had gathered in the region had an influence on each other and shared their ideas to make sense of the reality they were in.
Jesus is the expression of God. He is how God is made known. Some theologists discuss what is God innately and what is God economically. Or what is God within God, and what God through what God does. When Jesus speaks of the Father, it is more focused on the innate components of God, whereas when he speaks of himself as Son, he’s speaking more of the economic. Jesus is saying that the expression of God is one and the same with God. What God is in God’s self is what God expresses. For Jesus, there is no gaslighting or deception with God. What you see is what you get. That said, we do struggle with discerning what is divine and what is not. That which comes from God is God, but we have a hard time understanding and seeing what it is because our faculties are often limited in perception. We have competing priorities. We have our own will and expression of that will that gets in the way. You could say the Holy Spirit helps us with our perception to understand and see the divine.
Jesus states this at the end of the gospel, "I cannot do anything on my own; I judge as I hear, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me." As followers of Christ we want the same for ourselves. But we often put our faith in our judgements, but, without the divine will, our judgements will always have some form of prejudice to them; some form of incompleteness, personal bias, distortion, or to be used as a means to our own end. This is why Jesus warns us about judgment. Our wills compete with the divine.
Ultimately, if God is love, love is the expression of the divine. It’s as if the trinity is the noun, the verb, and the adjective/adverb of God. The Father is the noun or what is, the Son is the verb or the action of what is, and the Holy Spirit is the descriptive words, the adverbs/adjectives. God is God, and the trinity is a means for us to understand God. God is all these things. God is innate, economic, and the descriptions/attributes of both. We can find God in all these things, because God is present in them all.
