Trinity Sunday
Portsmouth Cathedral 26th May 2024
THE CHALLENGE OF THE TRINITY
Isaiah 6.1-8, Romans 8.12-17, John 3.1-17
Today, Trinity Sunday, marks the dividing point between the two halves of the Christian year. The first half, from Advent to Pentecost takes us through the life of Christ, from the expectation of his coming, to his Ascension into heaven and his sending of the Holy Spirit. And from tomorrow we enter the second half, which is more focused on our response, on living the Christian life, and being lights in the world.
Today we pause between the two halves of the year to reflect on the distinctive Christian understanding of God: as one God in three persons. I could spend hours explaining how the early Church came to understand God in this way, and I used to do just this in the days when I taught early Church history, but right now I only have about eight minutes, so here are just a few hints based on today’s scriptures.
First the Isaiah reading. The vision of the prophet in the year that king Uzziah died, and he saw also the Lord, high and lifted up and his train filled the temple – the passages of scripture I learnt as a child, so I always retain it in the King James version. The prophet is worshipping in the Jewish temple and suddenly there is, a window into heaven. And there is the Lord surrounded by the seraphim, ‘the burning ones’, in Hebrew. And then when the Lord speaks there is a deliberate playing with number: ‘Whom shall I send, and who shall go for us?’ ‘I’ ‘Us’ – as though in the very being of God there is neither singularity nor plurality, but rather, both. In the Hebrew Bible God is sometimes Yahweh, or Jehovah, the name by which he made himself known at the Burning Bush, and sometimes he is Adonai, the Lord, and sometimes he is Elohim, God, which is plural, though it takes a singular verb. Sometimes God is Adonai Elohim. The Lord God. On top of this there is a Hebrew tradition that God should not be named at all only indicated by phrases like ‘the most high’. All this suggests that the reality of God is just too much. Isaiah can only say ‘Woe is me, for I am undone…’
The seraphim don’t seem to mind that it is all too much for us. They simply cry out, Holy Holy, Holy, words we will echo as the Sanctus in the Eucharistic Prayer.
The point is that Holy here is not a mere a description. It’s not Holy is the Lord. It is more an exclamation: a Wow. Holy, Holy, Holy, and then back to the singular Lord God of hosts. Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus in Latin. And in the Hebrew Kabod, Kabod, Kabod, a word which has a range of meanings from breast, to soul, to glory, to weight. The point is that it is solid, it is real, it is the heart of things. We are to understand God as the most solid and real reality imaginable, so solid and real that we realise that we are can’t actually describe God at all. We are just too lightweight, flaky. Yet God can speak and we can answer, God is here and in heaven and in neither place confined.
And then we have Jesus. God Incarnate, the second person of the Trinity.
In our Gospel Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night expecting to interview him about his miracles. But Jesus cuts this short. For Nicodemus to think he can scrutinize Jesus is to miss the point. In the presence of Jesus he finds himself under question. Does he recognise God in Jesus or not? If he does, he will be changed, born again, immersed in God’s reality, rather than his own questions, and this means being reborn, born of the Spirit and not of the flesh.
Once you get this, a whole new landscape opens, earth opens to heaven, water reveals Spirit, Jesus shows us God. Our mistake is, like Nicodemus, to think all this is a discussion point.
‘I’m not sure if I believe in the Trinity’ we say, as if it were an opinion we might or might not happen to hold. But I think it is much, much more than that. One of my favourite of the early Christian fathers, Evagrius of Pontus used to speak about ‘the land of the Trinity, and ‘the kingdom of the Trinity’, language which suggests that we are seeking a homeland which can only be satisfied by becoming part of God’s life. We are born with a hunger in our hearts. We are reborn to know that hunger satisfied. So it is not just about me and my creator, it is not just about me and Jesus; Its about connection, belonging, a coming home which relates to the way be feel connected to those we most love.
The Trinity is an intellectual, emotional and spiritual challenge to us, not because it is difficult, but because we prefer to believe we are autonomous individuals, the lucky high spot of evolution. We think our highest destiny then, is to assert ourselves, to choose who we want to be in an indifferent universe.
Yet there is more. we can’t help responding to beauty, we recognise truth, above all we long to connect. Our connections are often the most important part of our lives, because we know we are not complete in ourselves. We love and we need to love and to be loved. Our existence is shot through with otherness. ‘the wind blows where it will and we hear the sound of it’, though we cannot tell what it means, where it comes from or where it is going. Only a greater immersion in reality can do that. Baptism, life experience, prayer, company, love. The earthly and the heavenly: the spiritual and the material, humanity and divinity. The Trinity is not a game of numbers or words, but more the whole of being from the perspective of heaven where God is both utterly one and totally in relationship. In love. God is love: Father, Son, Spirit.
So you can’t get to the Trinity by thinking about it or arguing about it, or even calling it an ‘it’, but only by connection. The route is mystical, contemplative and sacramental. In practice it is about churchgoing and personal prayer and loving our neighbour and reading the Bible; not just because these are good and virtuous things to do, but because they connect us to life and the source of life.
So we don’t believe in the Trinity so much as live the Trinity and the Trinity in us. And that is the mystical agenda for the second half of the Christian year.