Today we celebrate and explore once more what it means that our God is Trinitarian; that he is both three and one. Professing our belief in a Trinitarian God is not simply an abstract statement about God; in confessing our God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit we say something important not only about God but about who we are. Through contemplating the nature of the relationships between these three divine persons we also find clues as it what it means to live in Christian community.
So the Holy Trinity can be both an inspiration for us in our relationships and leads us further into the mystery of who and what God is. Very often it is easier to reduce the mystery of a God who is both three and one to theological formulae, and in this vein I’d like to share with you a story that I was told by a priest who worked in Birmingham. He had a group of adult confirmation candidates and when it came to their confirmation service the Bishop met them each before hand to ask them questions about the Christian faith.
He asked one man What is the Holy Trinity?’
To which the man replied Father, Son and Holy Ghost, three persons, one nature’.
The bishop who had trouble understanding his accent said Sorry, could you repeat that please’ and the man said once Father, Son and Holy Ghost, three persons, one nature’.
The bishop in exasperation said I’m sorry, I simply don’t understand’.
To which the man replied Yay, and Aymen to that, it’s a divine blooming mystery, in’t it?’
In providing this orthodox definition of the Trinity- three persons, one nature- we may wonder whether the confirmation candidate himself understood this definition. I’m inclined to think that he did- or rather that he knew that the awesome mystery of God will always transcend our equations and definitions; inevitably there is a sense in which we have to accept and rest in this divine mystery.
The more meaningful question the bishop might have asked his candidates, and the question we must ask ourselves today, is what does the Holy Trinity mean to us? How does a Trinitarian God shape us, our discipleship and our relationships?
To do this perhaps we need to go back a stage. Before we think about the simultaneous one-ness and three-ness of God, what else can we say about God? Well firstly scripture witnesses to the fact that God is life and God is love. God is seeking to give us life and to draw us into his love.
God is the source of all life and Jesus came so that we might have life and have it more abundantly. On a very basic level, that I am alive at all, is a means through which God’s creation is experienced in a way in which it can never be experienced by anyone else. In our awareness and appreciation of these experiences we ourselves glorify God. As St Iraneus said “The glory of God is a human being fully alive'”
God called creation into life because God is love. God did not create us out of a sense of loneliness or need; rather, as the Holy Trinity shows us, before creation came into existence God was in relationship- we are given a sense of this in today’s reading from Proverbs where wisdom is personified as the master worker who was alongside her Lord when he established the heavens and the fountains of the deep. This passage also indicates the sort of relationship that exists between the members of the Trinity- it is one of mutual delight. Here scripture, it seems, cannot but use the language and imagery which recalls the tenderness and intimacy of lovers.
Jesus’ witness to the love of his Father provided the disciples with another testimony to the Trinitarian relationship. The belief that God is both one and three arose out of the disciples’ common experiences of the life and love of God. The early church sensed that in Christ’s dependency on God and in his intimate relationship with God the Fr something was happening to the Father. The Father was not a distant provider but was in intimate loving relationship to the Son.
The divine Father loves the divine Son because he is his Son- not because of anything that Jesus did. It is easy to assume on some level that the Fr loved the Son because the Son was obedient- even unto death on the cross- but this is all the wrong way round. The Father and the Son love one another and through the Holy Spirit they invite us to participate in this love. Humanity could bear this invitation so Christ was crucified. The death of Jesus was not something the Father demanded of the Son- to imagine this puts violence, not love, at the heart of the Trinity.
This Trinitarian love demands distinction and difference- if the three persons of the Trinity were identical we would find narcissism rather than love in the Godhead; similarly in our human relationships it is in experiencing and delighting in the other and sensing the mutuality of this delight that we become more fully ourselves. The way in which we each uniquely reflect God’s image is made clearer in our relationships with those who delight in our differences. Ironically we become more fully ourselves in the presence of the other.
So we each find our true identities in our social relationships; not in what we do, or achieve, or what we possess. God the Father is the Father in relation to God the Son- his distinctive fatherly identity is found in this relationship not through being magisterial or mighty.
If we are to see the relationship between the 3 persons of the Trinity as the model for our own relationships we need to also experience something of their relationship for ourselves.
Paul’s letter to the Romans can help us think more about what this means. In today’s reading Paul writes that we are justified by faith- we are put right with God through faith. Rather than think of faith as something we have to summon up whatever life throws at us it might be more true to think of faith as the acceptance of the unconditional love God offers, which he pours into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
It is in accepting God’s unconditional love, something that sounds simple but which is often so hard- that we are brought into right relationship with God, with others and with ourselves. We become more fully ourselves and better able to participate in the sorts of relationships where we appreciate difference rather than fear difference. In short we can live out our relationships in ways which reflect more deeply the truth of the relationships between the 3 persons of the Trinity.
But why can it be hard to accept the unconditional love of God? Why do we often live our lives as if God’s love is to be earned? Why do we find ourselves, on one level, imagining that Jesus earned the Father’s love through what he did, or achieved, rather than who he was? Partly because if we accept the unconditional nature of God’s love we have to give up control- this means a curious kind of self-surrender on our part. We are loved for who we are not the person we are trying to be.
I’d like to end with a poem which reflects both God’s acceptance of us and love for us and also the fact that perhaps God is always a mystery which escapes our human definitions. Trinity Sunday might give us the opportunity to find delight in a faithful re-imagining of how God relates to us. The poem is called God says yes to me’.
God Says Yes to Me
I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes
© Kaylin Haught