The Trinity
Sermon Trinity Sunday, 31 May
Readings: Isaiah 40.12-17, 27-31; 2 Corinthians 13.11-13; Matthew 28.16-20
Theme: The Trinity
The doctrine of the Trinity distinguishes Christianity from the other monotheistic family of religions. While we share with our Jewish and Islamic friends the belief that God is one, we understand this oneness to be revealed in the three persons of the Holy Trinity. Reading the scriptures, from a Christian point of view, without acknowledging this, fails to recognize the truth that Jesus reveals about God: God is love. Understanding the meaning of this statement that God is love, and experiencing traces of this love is the key to believing in the Trinity.
This why, for a Christian, the New Testament is the revelation of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This does not mean, however, that a clear account of the Trinity is fully developed in the New Testament. It took centuries for the early church to formulate this doctrine in the Nicene Creed because there were different opinions about how to understand Jesus. Was Jesus just human or just divine? Was he fully human or only partially human? Did his divine nature overwhelm his human nature? Christian tradition worked through all these issues in the early centuries in both theory and in the practice of communal life and worship. It experimented with the implications of various doctrines for the life of a community and came to realize that Jesus was fully human and fully divine and that the One God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
As the old saying goes, lex orandi, lex credendi. That is to say, what you believe will condition how you pray and celebrate the Christian life in the liturgy. If you believe Jesus is just a good man, or only another prophet, you will not pray to him as God. However, for the Christian, our prayer should be Trinitarian. It should always worship the Father as the creator of all, the Son as the redeemer of all, and the Holy Spirit as the sanctifier of all. Three co-equal divine persons in perfect communion as One God.
This is why formulating these doctrines about Jesus and the Trinity matters because the doctrine of the Trinity enables the Christian to believe, pray and celebrate the revelation of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When belief is unsure, prayer is misdirected. When prayer is misdirected, then the celebration of the liturgy can turn into a group therapy session. When Christians pray together in liturgy, we do so to worship the One true God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are by nature homo adorans: ‘worshipping creatures.’
But what is it about Jesus that reveals the Trinity? It is perhaps easier to ask, what is it about Jesus that does not reveal the Trinity? Because, from the time of his incarnation, when the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary, through to the life and teachings of Jesus about love, healing, reconciliation and forgiveness, to his death on the cross, his resurrection on the third day, his glorious ascension into heaven and the sending of the Holy Spirit, all these events revealed in the life of Jesus unveil God as Trinity. The very title of ‘the Son of God’ for Jesus expresses this belief.
The gradual realization of this by the early followers of Jesus took time because it involved a transformation of the understanding of their Jewish faith that had been handed on to them through tradition. Jewish tradition had taught that God is one and so a Trinitarian expression of this oneness was something new. It was challenging for them to grasp that God became flesh in the Son, and that this was not another form of idolatry and blasphemy, but rather the definitive revelation of the One true God out of love.
Moreover, it challenged conceptions of God as only different to us in God’s transcendence. This was the legacy of the earlier form of Jewish monotheism. In that view, God was seen as totally other to the creation and so as not mortal, fragile, or weak as humanity is. This transcendence was viewed as incompatible with any divine immanence in the creation. So, the notion that this God could become flesh, and so intimate with us and even die in God’s immanence in the creation, was viewed as heresy. This insight into the incarnation of Jesus, as ‘Emmanuel,’ God with us, and of God as the Holy Spirit who dwells in creation sanctifying it and leading it into the whole truth was one which gradually grew as the early Christians prayed, debated and thought hard about Jesus and the Holy Spirit who they experienced in their communal lives in a new way following Jesus’s resurrection and ascension.
Fundamentally, this Trinitarian doctrine reveals that God is love because love, by its very nature, is relational. It requires a communion that is both personal and communal. Love of only oneself is incomplete. It requires others for it to be whole. This wholeness of love is manifested in the doctrine of the Trinity as three divine persons in loving communion who express this love in the acts of creation, salvation, and sanctification. These are the three-divine works of love.
This means that because we are made in the image and likeness of God, we too bear this Trinitarian trace. That is how and why we are made for love. We are communal beings made whole through this gift of Trinitarian love. Rather than viewing ourselves as isolated individuals, as in some conceptions of the human person, we should consider ourselves as communal beings, created, saved and sanctified by our God.
Moreover, in this age of artificial intelligence (AI) with all its wonderful opportunities but also concerning challenges, rather than viewing ourselves as simply ‘reasoning creatures’ (rational animals), whose rational intelligence can be artificially replicated by algorithms, we should view ourselves as fundamentally ‘relational creatures’ brought into being by the Trinitarian God. We are by nature relational beings, related to God, to one another, and to nature in the unique way spoken of in the Book of Genesis. There is nothing artificial about that. This is human intelligence that is not reproducible by an algorithm, because it is a divine gift that flows forth as our human reality that is created in the ‘image and likeness of God.’
So, while the use of our rational capacities is important in coming to acknowledge God as Trinity, our own experiences of love are even more fundamental. These are sources of deeper insight, than purely intellectual and rational thoughts we have about God, because they unite us with the God who is love beyond all imagining.
Manifested in Jesus, the doctrine of the Trinity is the key to understanding who we truly are. Through the revelation of God as Trinity, we come to know ourselves as made out of and for love, in the ‘image and likeness’ of this one true gift-giving God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
