Our First Reading from the Book of Proverbs is a long poetic reflection of the co-eternity within the Trinity. Before that tangible and familiar creation, before the sea was set, some personal presence was. After this series of creational illustrations, this “was” states that it found delight in the interplay with the human race, imagine that! We interpret this “wasness” to be the Holy Spirit, whose descending upon the Apostles we celebrated last Sunday.

It can sound as if the Holy Spirit was like a little child or elf playing in God’s backyard, delighting God by tumbling or just getting down and dirty. But it is poetic and serious. God is more than meets the eye. Through the play-work of the Spirit we can see something of the “wasness” and “isness” of God.

In the five chapters of John’s Gospel containing the Last Discourse, Jesus is pictured as giving, handing over, and commending many things from his Father to his disciples. In the few verses from this section, which we hear in today’s Gospel, Jesus is telling his friends that what he is giving was his own—and the Father has shared everything with him. He is the Truth and has passed this Truth into the world and will continue to pass it on, this existence. Truth does not allow us to be righteously aggressive nor defensively secure. He, Jesus, as Truth, lived vulnerably and availably to be received and or rejected.

Jesus is the “what” of the Trinity, which is offered for the acceptance or dismissal of humanity. In our disrespectful youth, when a friend would offer something, holding it out in his hand, the fun thing was to bring your flattened hand up from underneath, and knock it flying. A good way to lose friends, I would say. What would happen if that friend did the hand-offering of a gift a second time—foolish of him.

It seems that one way to get a quick but insufficient glimpse of this mysterious Trinity is to watch how the creative hand of God keeps offering, with delight, the gifts of life, personality, physical, psychological, for us and to us. The Spirit of God seems to be how the material, spiritual, and everything else, are handed on again and again, whether we slap it away or reverently take it in.

Here is a little hint. We can be sure that something we have or something that we are is a gift when we desire to hand it on, hand it over, hand it without strings. This interior freedom and desire is an experience of how the Spirit of God plays its part in the Trinity. God gives the Son and then gives the Spirit so we can know and receive the Son in whom all else is created and handed to us. The Spirit is given so that we can see, know, and receive all the other gifts in the Son, in Christ, and then are gently moved.

We can refuse, deny and reject, but Love moves outward, respecting the slapping hands, and works to perhaps find away into our other hands. So it is all about being loved in action. God is not a thought, a good idea. God is a triniplex of offering, receiving and continuing. The Trinity is indeed a mystery and so is the way in which God remains patient, faithful and insistently consistent. God is this, was, and always has been.

Since you are children of God,
God has sent into your hearts the spirit of his Son,
               the Spirit who cries out, Abba, Father. (Gal 4:6)