A Sermon preached by the Revd Canon Dr Alison Joyce on Trinity Sunday (18th May 2008)
A former colleague of mine, who had once been on the staff of a theological college in another part of the country, told me the following story from his time in that earlier post. One of his students there, who was very keen on liturgical dance, had offered, as part of the college’s worship one Trinity Sunday, to put together a choreographed representation of the Holy Trinity in dance. Keen to encourage such creative initiatives, my friend agreed.
At the service itself, the Trinitarian liturgical dance was certainly a source of great wonder and amazement to the watching congregation, but it did leave its audience somewhat bemused. What was perplexing to them was not the fact that the dancers who were supposed to represent the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit all happened to be female – that was not a problem at all. The problem was that there were only two of them.
Now, I have to say that even though I am all in favour of creative approaches to Christian doctrine, I can’t help feeling that there is something a tad non-negotiable about the number three where the Holy Trinity is concerned – call me old-fashioned - call me a hidebound theological conservative if you will. But nevertheless this does actually raise a very interesting question – namely this: why does the Christian tradition describe God and know God as three persons (rather than one, or two, or for that matter seven)? And, more importantly still, why does it matter?
I have to say that it really troubles me when I encounter clergy (as I seem to do with alarming frequency these days) who really ‘can’t be doing’ with the idea of the Trinity - because they dismiss it as being either too difficult, or too boring, or too irrelevant for Christians in the twenty-first century to be bothering about. Because, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The doctrine of the Trinity is wonderful and astonishing, and mind-blowing; and contrary to the widespread assumptions that it is both unnecessarily complicated, and merely abstract theorising, the Trinity is, in fact, both devastatingly simple, and profoundly rooted in lived reality.
Where a lot of people go wrong with the Trinity is that they start in the wrong place. Because they begin at the point where it became a formal doctrine of the early Church, at a time when attempts were being made to systematise and explain the nature of God in the context of the philosophical debates of the fourth and fifth centuries. Start there and you will soon get thoroughly bogged down in all the technical stuff about the substance and the personhood of God and God’s self-differentiation, and in what sense God can be understood to be three and one at the same time. Quite the most boring book I have ever read (and, I can assure you, I have read some pretty tedious tomes in my time) was a highly academic and authoritative work on precisely this subject – although I have to say, it did have a deceptively enticing title. It was called Divine Substance (which made it sound rather like an in-depth study of the joys of Turkish Delight).
So, if we shouldn’t start with the official formulation of the doctrine in the early Christian centuries, where then should we begin? The obvious answer is, of course, with scripture. Because the Bible tells us just about everything we need to know about the three persons of the Trinity: it is in scripture that we encounter God the Father, the Creator of all things; all powerful, all mighty; the one who is above all, and beyond all. It is in scripture that we encounter the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ; God’s Messiah, the Saviour of us all. And it is in scripture that we encounter the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who brooded over the face of the waters at Creation; the Spirit who inspired the prophets – hence the famous passage recounting the call of Isaiah: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me.’ (Isaiah 61.1)
So, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all three are there in the pages of the Bible; and each one of them is very clearly distinguishable from the other two. So, for example, at the baptism of Jesus, the Holy Spirit descends upon him, and the voice of God declares him to be ‘my Son, the beloved.’ Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all there, each in a distinctive role. At the Last Supper in John’s Gospel, Jesus tells of the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send ‘in my name’. At the crucifixion Jesus cries out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’; at his Ascension he promises that the Father will send the Holy Spirit to the disciples.
So, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are quite distinct. And yet, at the same time, other biblical passages demonstrate to us that they are so integrally linked that at times they are indistinguishable: in John chapter 14, Jesus famously tells the disciples ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9) declaring that ‘The Father and I are one.’ And the Risen Christ is himself the bearer of the Spirit when, in last Sunday’s Gospel reading for example, he breathed the Holy Spirit into his disciples. And although scripture never gives us a nicely-honed, clearly-defined Trinitarian doctrine neatly summarising and explaining the relationship between the three, what we do have in our Gospel reading today is the Risen Lord instructing the eleven remaining followers to go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The idea of the Trinity emerged out of the lived experience of the people of God throughout the centuries: their experience of the nature of God, and their reflections upon the ways in which God works. Because that is the nature of the testimony of Scripture.
The 16th Century poet and Anglican priest, John Donne, firmly believed that the reason for the doctrine of the Trinity was not in order to make the idea of God more complicated, but to make it simpler. He wrote this: ‘God being infinitely one hath manifested himself to us in three persons to be the more easily discerned by us and the more closely and effectually applied by us.’ The Trinity does not make God more complicated to understand – it makes the reality of God easier for us to grasp.
Because a God who was purely mighty and powerful could seem remote; difficult to love; wholly separate from the complex and broken reality that is the stuff of our daily lives – were it not for the fact that he has a Son, who came to earth and dwelt among us; who experienced the reality of human life, with all its sorrows and its hardships, and did so precisely the same terms on which we experience them: ‘surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.’
And our experience of God the Father and God the Son would be incomplete without the Holy Spirit: the Spirit who blasts through our lives when we are least expecting it, who disturbs our complacency, and overturns our priorities, and sets us ablaze with the love of God. The Spirit who brings us comfort when we are afraid; who strengthens us when we face tasks that seem beyond our capabilities; the Spirit who prays for us and prays within us, when we ourselves feel lost for words.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit: our understanding of God is impoverished unless we can rejoice in the richness and fullness of the Trinity. Without all three we would fail to do justice to the Christian experience of God throughout the centuries, in its wholeness and completeness: God the Creator; God the Redeemer; God the Sustainer. God is so much bigger than any single model, or image, or experience could ever hope to encapsulate.
But returning to one of the first questions I posed, what is the significance of the number three in all of this? And the answer to this question lies in the fact that the Christian God is a God of Love. Because love can only exist in relationship. It is hard to see how an all-powerful God, perfect, complete, timeless, and unchanging, could, alone, be a God of Love. And yet a relationship that involves only two individuals can end up being exclusive and inward looking; a couple who are deeply in love can sometimes be so absorbed in one another that they are unable to see anyone else around them.
But a love shared equally and profoundly between the three persons of the Trinity, between the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, is a love that has a quite different momentum; for it is a love that is full to overflowing; a love that spills over and floods the world. And a love that is that powerful and that generous cannot help but transform our lives too.
Amen