John Rogers—Year C Trinity Sunday
Anthony: Our next pericope of the month is John 16:12–15. It is the Revised Common Lectionary passage for Trinity Sunday on June 15. And it reads,
I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. 14 He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. 15 All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
Trinity Sunday is another opportunity for proclaimers of the gospel to talk about the Trinity, but not as some dusty old doctrine or a mathematical conundrum, but the reality and relational substance of life. John, let me ask you this. What do you make of the Trinitarian dynamics found in this particular text?
John: I think especially as I read verse 13, “when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears.” I hear in this that there is a reliance on the parts of the Trinity with one another.
And I’m in this Sunday school class right now at our church in Durham, North Carolina that is going through pretty much all the movements of Trinitarian theology in the fourth century with the Council of Nicaea and people getting kicked out, coming back in, kicked out, coming back in, one statement here, another statement there, conversations around substance and ousia and hypostasis. And I found myself in that class on Sunday, and I really respect the people that are leading it. But a lot … what has come up a lot in this class is, what is it about the Trinity that is saying to us about who God is?
And when I think about that, and I think about your question, and here we are on Trinity Sunday. It’s … we’re probably best left with leaving it, as it seems quite biblical, but yet it feels like it falls in a maybe category of mystery that we want to be careful not to over-define it.
Anthony: Oh, for sure.
John: And I feel like this — I had somebody in in seminary once described it to me as — this dance. And again, I think we struggle with the oneness and the separateness of the Spirit. But I just love that it seems like here what we’re getting from Jesus and the Gospel of John is like, there’s an interchange in reliance on each part of the Trinity with one another, and however they’re tied together, whatever substance they are of, with one another. And I don’t want to be nailed as a heretic today on this podcast. But I think that’s the beauty of what Jesus is speaking to them and leaving with them, is that “I have a lot more to say to you. The Spirit would unveil that to you. And just be in a place of receiving that.”
Anthony: Yeah. I appreciate what you said about the beauty of the relationship. And sometimes you hear the Trinity discuss in such a way that it’s like a riddle to be solved instead of a relationship to be enjoyed …
John: Yeah.
Anthony: … to enter into. The fact that in Christ we get to enjoy unfettered relationship with the Father in the communion of the Spirit. It’s a beautiful thing that is, as you said, a mystery.
And thank God that he’s a mystery. Like we should still be in awe of the, just the awesomeness, and the bigness of our God. That’s one of the takeaways that I see here. John, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to make this a bit personal. Would you be willing to share maybe an event, a season in your life, where you experienced the Spirit guiding you into truth, maybe in surprising and unexpected ways? And how did that experience shape your understanding of God?
John: Yeah. I’ve been, and I mentioned it in my introduction to myself earlier on, I’ve gone through a couple of pretty big medical events in my life. And one recently, gosh, back in September of 2023. I went into a heart cath. lab thinking that they were just going to say, “Nothing needs to be done, head on home” to, “Oh my goodness, this is not good. You need to stay and we’re going to do surgery on Friday.” Having triple bypass heart surgery as a 50-year-old man because of some impact of a radiation field back in my twenties with my Hodgkin’s diagnosis.
And for three days I had to wait for my surgery; from that point of finding that out on a Tuesday, I was having surgery on a Friday. And everything down to having your, all your whole body shaved down so that you’re ready for surgery, all the tests run, all the pulmonary functionality tests run —everything.
Come Friday morning they wheel me down the hall. And I think everybody I knew in my life, and it’s weird … and it’s weird when people look at … I don’t know if you’ve had this happen to you in your life, Anthony, but when people look at you in a way that they think it might be the last time they see you.
Anthony: Oh wow.
John: And I just had to deal with that. My father-in-law, I still remember him walking in to see me the night before. And he came back in my room several times because he couldn’t leave. And I knew what he was doing. And so, what happened on Friday morning when they took me to surgery around five o’clock in the morning, is my pastor … and it’s weird being a pastor and having a pastor is such a gift, but one of our pastors at our church showed up around 5:30 in the pre-op area. And if you’re familiar with pre-op, I mean it’s a lot going on at 5:30 in the morning on a Friday when a lot of surgeries happen. And he walked in and he said, “John, can I pray with you?”
And what I was saying to him is, I said, “David, I keep hearing the word.” And it helped that I was reading a book about God’s loyalty and God’s faithfulness, hesed, that I just found myself repeating that word all morning. And it wasn’t like some, I don’t know some hypnotic effect of just say this word a lot and then you’ll believe it and live into what the word actually means.
I had every reason in that moment to be in full on panic. I was the husband of a wife I deeply adore and love getting to be in life with and in ministry with. I have three kids. I have a ministry that is growing and people that I feel like I’m engaging. And there was a conceivable chance that I was not going to come out of that surgery. No matter how great a candidate I was, no matter how young they thought I was to be having this surgery, how early they caught it. But I felt like that the Holy Spirit in that moment was saying, “John, I’m loyal to you. And my faithfulness is not any less faithful if you do not survive this surgery.”
Anthony: Amen.
John: And you know what I think, Anthony. I feel like that, often, whether we call it prosperity gospel or something else, we often have this transactional understanding in the back of our head that, Lord, I’m just serving you. I’m like, I love you. I wake up every day, and why in the world do you want to give me, like, a coronary bypass procedure? I should be protected from things like that. But what I felt in that moment was not the transaction of my God, failing me.
And I know it’s not everybody’s story, but it’s my story. And my pastor said that you’re the only one I’ve ever heard reciting a Hebrew word hesed when they’re going into surgery. And I can imagine it like it was yesterday and it was nothing short of the power of the Holy Spirit, that I think in one place I’m asking the Spirit to give me clarity in the way I read Scripture.
And that’s happened time and time again. But the way that this fruitfulness of wanting to receive the Holy Spirit to get the benefit of it, that’s not what I want, but what God desires for me. And I just can’t explain it. And my mother is in one of our small groups and she said to the group a couple of months later, when I’d come back for the first time, when we’re asking a question around of what do we see and admire in other people and like where we see the Spirit at work in the world.
And to hear my mother say it, and my mother has stage four cancer, and she had to be admitted in the hospital later that day when I was going into surgery because of her own pain that she was managing. And we’re both coming back to this small group and hearing my mother say, “I noticed something about my son that was unexplainable and was only under … could only be understood as one thing, that … the Spirit of God that is often unleashed in a way with a Pentecostal fervor, right? … that the Spirit was unleashed in a way that was more Quaker-like, right — that ‘I’m going to give a hush of peace that will allow you to enter into that surgery regardless of what was going to happen.’”
Anthony: That’s … thank God for that. First of all, I’m thankful that he brought you through, but I so appreciated what you said before; even if he hadn’t …
John: Yeah.
Anthony: … God is faithful. He’s good — hesed — that faithful love is true regardless. And so often we do get into this mindset — it’s just based on the situation, the circumstances of my life. No, Lord, we are above all people blessed.
John: Yeah.
Anthony: We are so blessed, but I am thankful that he has brought you through to be able to share that for others, including your father-in-law, to see …
John: Yeah.
Anthony: … to see the trust that you had in him —that bears witness to the goodness of God. So, I really appreciate you sharing that with us.
John: And one last thing I would say, Anthony, is that often, like when I used to think about, especially like on Trinity Sunday, and like we think about the roles of each, and still on the heels of Pentecost, we think of the Spirit as this kind of violent wind.
This fire feels, oh, it’s going to loosen my tongue and I’m going to speak in an unknown language. It feels wild that there, what I’ve noticed about, like the Spirit is, the Spirit can be very gentle and tender, and like our first text when we were thinking about like this invitation of, “Come to Me.”
Anthony: Yes.
John: That there is a place of invitation that the Spirit is, that what the Spirit is doing is gentle and kind.
Anthony: Yeah. Almost a wooing, right?
John: Yeah.
Anthony: Come and see, taste and see, that the Lord is good. Come with me. Let’s go.