Today the lectionary gives to us a gift from the
church – today is Trinity Sunday. The
reason that I say that it is a gift from the church is that the concept of the
Trinity does not come to us directly from Scripture because the Bible does not
use this language, this word ‘Trinity’, to describe God. Rather, in reflecting on the depth of God’s
revelation to us in Jesus Christ, the early church in its struggle to
articulate the truth of God’s existence adopted this language of describing God
as Trinity.
This comes to us as gift in the context of the struggle
of humanity to know its creator and to understand the creation. In his book The Mind of God the eminent mathematician and physicist, Paul
Davies, declared, ‘While we assume there is a design behind the physical
reality, science can’t really tell us anything about the designer, the nature
of God, or God’s relationship with human beings.’
To seek to understand God and to listen for the
story of God does not mean turning away from scientific inquiry and reason but
marrying it with the revelation of this very creator in our midst. For, to borrow a phrase from another
physicist and theologian John Polkinghorn, to describe God as Trinity is not a
case of doing some ‘speculative mystical arithmetic’ but is grounded in the
very narrative of the revelation of God found in the scriptures.
Jesus’ claims concerning himself and his relation
with God and the Holy Spirit give rise for us to speak of God in this way.
John asserts Jesus to be the eternal Word of
God.
Jesus claimed that he was in the Father and the
Father was in him and that those who had seen him had seen the Father.
The promise of the Holy Spirit is the promise of
the Spirit sent from the Father, the same Spirit that was seen descending on
Jesus at his baptism.
And, Jesus command to go and baptise in the name
of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit further makes this
description of God appropriate.
Here in these passages, and others, we encounter
God not simply as some monad but that God in Godself is a community of
existence – a communion of being, to
borrow the language of John Zizioulas.
If we listen to the very first story found in the
scriptures this truth of God’s very nature as existing as a communion is found
as we hear that we are created in God’s image:
“Let us make humankind in our image, according to
our likeness:
So God created humankind in his
image,
in
the image of God he created them;
male
and female he created them.”
Here we find that to be made in God’s image is to
be made male and female – not male or female, but both together – a
community. To be in the image of God is
to be one, yet one with distinct entities.
The fullness of being human in the image of God is being humans together,
just as God is one yet three.
This helps us to make sense of the statement that
God is love. To love involves both a
lover and an object of that love. If God
in God’s very self is love then that love is a love expressed in the mutuality
of existence of the Father, the Son and the Spirit.
This gives to us the context of our own existence
created to love and be loved by God and by each other – to do less than this
would be to deny the reality of our being created in God’s image and thereby to
deny what it means to be truly human.
Yet the narrative that unfolds in the pages of the
scriptures is that this exactly what human beings do: rather than live in the
communion of love whereby we exist as one for each other we as human beings
continually seek our personal end, our personal gain.
The story of Adam and Eve is not some isolated
event in prehistory but is each of our own stories – we deny the reality of our
existence and seek more as if what we have already been given is not
enough. And when we are questioned about
this we try to blame someone else.
But God’s love for us is so deep that he gives to
us himself, his son, the incarnation – Jesus with us to live for us. Here the work of God as Trinity becomes
clearer and even yet more confronting.
Jesus fully human and fully divine shares our human existence living in
communion with God and the creation.
The culmination of Jesus share in our existence as
well as our estrangement from God and each other is found in the cross and
resurrection. The theologian JürgenMoltman describes Jesus death as an entirely Trinitarian event in which Jesus
human cry of abandonment, ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’ is matched
by the desolation of God the Father as he mourns the estrangement of humanity
in the death of his only son.
Here we begin to have an insight into the concern
of God at our suffering and of God’s will that this not be the last word for
the cross without the resurrection leaves us without much hope. The Spirit descends into the realm of dead to
– a place we assume is completely opposed to and devoid of God’s existence to
meet Jesus there and bring him to new life.
To contemplate this is to understand that even in
the place of death to which Jesus descends, a place of complete separation from
God, Jesus is retrieved. The Eastern
Orthodox churches speak of the days between Jesus death and resurrection as the
time of his descent into hell. There is
no place in this life or in our death that God has not been and that God cannot
reach u even hell!
This God, who is love, loves us to this point of
self sacrificial giving so that we might be with God eternally. The sending of the Holy Spirit to us makes us
one with Jesus in his action for us and in the church we are made to be a sign
of hope for the world as humans existing as human beings created in God’s image
are meant to – as community.
The church is meant to be God’s people living in
respect to how we were created and were recreated to live, but it does not take
a genius to see that we do not live this way as the church, even though this is
the church we believe that God calls us to be.
Like those who lived before Jesus death and resurrection our fall into
temptation, to live as if we are not in created God’s image and so to seek
something other, is continually there.
The rampant individualism of the post
enlightenment world, both modernism and post modernism, have so impacted on the
belief of the western church that for so many our faith is simply and only private
or personal matter. Evangelists
continually emphasize our personal relationship with Jesus as being the central
reality of faith, but unless we understand that as persons we are not drawn
into a one on one faith experience but into the community of God’s existence
which includes not only other people but the fullness of creation then we have
turned away from the truth of the gospel.
To be Christian means to be the church – for the
church is the body of Christ, it is the Church in the power of the Spirit. Bound together by God’s love and into God’s
existence together we celebrate our risen Lord.
This understanding of the church came up in my
lecturing on Thursday when I was quoting a passage from John Calvin’s
Institutes written in 1559.
For when we believe the Church,
it is in order that we may be firmly persuaded that we are its members. In this
way our salvation rests on a foundation so firm and sure, that though the whole
fabric of the world were to give way, it could not be destroyed.
Half of the students reacted to this understanding
of the church expressing that whilst the ideal and imagery is great it had not
been their experience of the church.
Many had been hurt and burnt within the community of the faithful – a
reality for most of us.
Yet within the arms of the church that we believe,
the church that God has made through the power of the Spirit, our hope is that
we do share in the Trinitarian life of God and we become fully human.
Calvin, being the realist he was, declared:
But in order to embrace the unity
of the Church in this manner, it is not necessary, as I have observed, to see
it with our eyes, or feel it with our hands. Nay, rather from its being placed
in faith, we are reminded that our thoughts are to dwell upon it, as much when
it escapes our perception as when it openly appears.
Being church is as much a matter of faith and an
expression of God’s Trinitarian life as our hope in the promise of Jesus that
we will find our way home in him.
The depths of the mystery of our faith stand alongside
the mystery and wonder that is seen in the creation by the physicists and
biologist and ecologists. Our unity with
God who is Father, Son and Spirit, our unity with each other, our unity with
all living things humbles us and gives to us place in this world, in our lives
and with our God.
Giving thanks for this mystery we can echo the wonder
of the great Albert Einstein:
One cannot but be in awe when one contemplates the
mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvellous structure of reality. It is enough if one merely tries to
comprehend a little of this mystery each day.
Never lose a holy curiosity.
So with him and millions before us and millions to
come let us pass into silence before the mystery of the Trinity and seek the
face of the one in three and three in one who loves us.
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