There are many ways to speak of the Holy Spirit: the spirit of wisdom, the spirit of truth, the spirit of understanding. All these tend to position the Spirit alongside the Father and the Son. After all, that is what the Trinity expresses – three “persons” in one God.
This idea of “personification” was very strong in Greek thought – and it was Greek thought that drove the development of Christian theology in the first centuries of the church. A key example is the Greek gods, who are for the most part personifications of human attributes: love (Aphrodite, and for the Romans Venus), jealousy (Hera), strength (Kratos, Roman Hercules), drunkenness (Dionysius, Roman Bacchus) etc. There is also something similar in the Hebrew tradition where Wisdom is described as a person (Books of Proverbs, Sirach, Wisdom).
John draws strongly on this wisdom tradition in the way he describes Jesus, but he also adds another element – the idea of Jesus as the “Word”. This is so important for John that he starts his gospel with this idea: “In the beginning was the Word”. This word was with God in the beginning, just as Wisdom is described as being with God in our reading today from the Book of Proverbs (Prv 8:22-31).
An idea which isn’t found in any of these ancient sources is “communication”. For us the idea of communication is everywhere. Our world revolves around communication and there are whole fields of science built around understanding and enabling communication in all its various forms.
Of course communication is fundamental to being human – we wouldn’t be human without communicating. That has not changed between the Greeks and the Hebrews and us. But communication as a “thing” is a fairly new idea. We now talk of communication in the same way as we might talk of wisdom, or of truth, and so on.
With that in mind, a “Spirit of communication” doesn’t seem so strange. And that is exactly what John describes in the gospel passage we hear today (Jn 16:12-15): “he will speak what he hears”. The Spirit is the communication that occurs between God and us, between Jesus and us, between the Father and us. Note, there is no distinction between Jesus and the Father in what is to be communicated: “Everything that the Father has is mine”.
If we focus on communication as a key feature of the Spirit then it can help us think of the Spirit, not as something somehow “separate” from the Father and the Son and in some sort of relationship with them, but as the relationship itself. God exists in relationship. The Trinity is defined as a relationship, three that is one – but that relationship isn’t just between Father and Son with the Spirit – the relationship extends to include us. The Father and the Son are bound together in a perfect relationship, a relationship of identity: “The Father and I are one” (Jn 10:30). And Jesus extends that relationship to us – he gives us the Spirit:
“Everything that the Father has is mine; he [the Spirit] will take from what is mine [thus the Father’s] and declare it to you [communicate it to you]”.
We speak a lot, as we should, of God as love. But love is nothing without communication. The Holy Spirit is a spirit of communication.
We have also been given that Spirit. Each of us is part of that relationship of God with the world. We are God communicating with his creation.