It’s a very special verse, there in John 3, that tells us that God so loved his Son, that he gave him the whole world. What’s that, you think I’ve got it backwards? No, I don’t have it backwards: I’ve got it just right. “The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands” (John 3:35). You can look it up.

And check out the verse right before that: “He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure” (John 3:34). Together these two verses form another of the many texts that show us the Father, Son, and Spirit acting together in ministry to this needy world. God has sent his Son to speak the word to us, and freely and lavishly gives us the Spirit: so that we can hear the message – a message of the astonishing love of God, who entrusts the whole world into Jesus’ hands – and so that we, prompted by the Spirit, can have the ability to respond.

As we’ve noted before, it would be anachronistic to label this a “trinitarian” passage, as the word “Trinity” apparently did not get coined until late in the second century. The first instances of which we are aware come (in Greek) from Theophilus of Antioch around the year 180, and (in Latin) from Tertullian around the year 200.

But theologically, here and many other places we see the biblical writers working to understand God in this tripartite way: expressing the reality of God in terms of Father, Son, and Spirit. We would do well to follow their example, learning to articulate our own understanding of God the same way: recognizing the salvific intention of the Father in sending the Son, the sacrificial compassion of the Son in taking on human flesh and dying for human sin, and the empowering presence of the Spirit establishing us as the children of God.

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Help us, O God, to understand: to understand the immense love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, to understand (at least a little) what it means that the Father would give his Son for the salvation of the world, to understand the Spirit’s generosity without measure in revealing to us the love of the Father and the Son for us. This we ask in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

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