Trinity Sunday: 26 May 24 (Christ Church St. Lucia)
Readings: Isaiah 6: 1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8: 12-17; John 3: 1-17
Fifty years ago, a great controversy raged across the media for a while. It didn’t involve some political or corporate or sporting scandal; it involved surprisingly enough a work of art – Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles”. The National Gallery of Australia, with the support of a then fairly new Federal Government had paid what seemed like an enormous sum of money - $1.3 million – for the painting. There were headlines in the newspapers for a while – one tabloid screamed “Drunks Did It!”[1]. Others worked themselves into a lather about the waste of money. The gallery quietly exhibited the picture. It is now one of our greatest treasures, worth many times what they paid for it - at last estimate $500 million - and they don’t seek to explain it. You need to experience it.[2] And when you do see it, it’s an enormous painting. If you get too close to it, it doesn’t seem to mean anything much, but if you step back and take the time to look at it for a while, a pattern begins to emerge. I’ve seen it more than once now, and each time the experience has been the same – not exactly the same – there’s always a subtle difference in what I see.
The idea of the Trinity is a bit like that. It emerged in great controversy. The then emperor, Constantine, a recent convert to Christianity saw that the church was divided as to how God could be described as three persons in one – as Father, Son and Spirit. Constantine didn’t want a divided church but recognised that events were starting to run away from him. He called a Council at Nicea in 325 and a creed was accepted – shorter than the Nicean creed we will recite shortly. At the Council of Nicea, the bishops went on to do other things – regulate the time of preparation for baptism, regulate the morals of the clergy, work out what to do with penitents in one church trying to get pardoned in another, laying down that a new bishop should be consecrated by all the bishops in that province – or at least three of them (still happens today) and so on. Importantly, the Council established the equality of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity and asserted that only the Son became incarnate as Jesus Christ. After all this, the bishops went home – where away from the emperor and the other bishops, some began to have second thoughts and more controversies emerged. It wasn’t for about another 50 years that things were tidied up. Now I’m not going to go into all the details, but it’s a fascinating read, particularly if you thought the early church was sweetness and light. The controversy raged – there was a great cast of characters – Arius, Athanasius, Sabellius, Hippolytus, Callistus (of whom Hippolytus said he was “a senseless and unstable fellow who improvises blasphemies in every direction.”) There were excommunications, bishops sentenced to the treadmill or sent to the mines in Sardinia – just to give you an idea of what went on. In the end, Gregory of Nazianzus, who along with Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa tidied the whole thing up wrote, I suppose in exasperation, “My inclination is to avoid all assemblies of bishops, because I have never seen any council come to a good end, nor turn out to be a solution of evils. On the contrary, it usually increases them.”[3]
The early church tried to define Trinity – with words like persona rather than person, and substance and so on. Maybe they tried to get too close. I don’t think you can define Trinity – any more than Einstein’s E=mc squared and his Theory of Relativity defines or fully explains the majesty and glory of the universe that we can experience when we look at a clear night sky and with the psalmist consider the works of the heavens, the works of God’s fingers, the moon and the stars which have been set in order.[4] Or have you ever attempted to come up with an exhaustive explanation of the experience of falling in love. You can’t do it, can you? You can say things about it that are true, but you can never explain it in such a way that a person who hadn’t experienced it would understand what you were talking about. In the end it is still a mystery. In fact, to push that analogy a bit further, imagine trying to write down a set of instructions for falling in love; an explanation or equation for someone who didn’t previously know the experience, so that if they followed your formula they would fall in love. Could you do it? I doubt it.
And yet the fact that you can’t explain the experience or write a manual for it doesn’t stop you from falling in love. The experience comes whether you can comprehend it or not. I think the same is true of the Trinity. Before there was ever a doctrine of the Trinity, there was an experience of the Trinity. The early church experienced God in certain ways, and as they attempted to describe their experience the idea of the Trinity emerged. They began with their experience of the living God who’d come in human form as Jesus the Son and was now still alive and worshipped in the power of the Spirit. The theology came second. Christian faith is not about explanations, it’s about experience; it’s about stepping back and taking time; it’s about a relationship with the living God.
Yet we often feel under constant pressure to define things, to be certain about things. The English theologian and biblical scholar, Dr. Paula Gooder has written; “We live in a world obsessed by certainty. We are meant to hold clear, confident view on subjects that range widely from education to euthanasia, from economics to the environment – and to express our clear, certain views regularly….premature certainty is as corrosive of truth as lies can be. Certain things in life need time for reflection as we wrestle with issues, questions and explore possibilities. Rushing too swiftly to immovable certainty undermines our ability to grasp the truth. Today we often feel that we can only worship if we are clear in our views, if we have dotted all the “i”s and crossed all the “t”s. Doubt can be seen to be the antithesis of worship. It is not. We worship not out of our certainty but out of our response to God. Fortunately, we do not have to comprehend everything about God and God’s relationship with the world before we worship. In fact, sometimes it is our doubts that can draw us deeper into the mystery of God, and from deep within the mystery of God the only possible thing to do is worship.”[5]
In a much deeper way than one can be drawn into “Blue Poles”, the idea of Trinity, which we can’t reduce to some formula, draws us deeper into the mystery of God. One of the things that most of the theologians agree on when considering the Trinitarian nature of God is that we are not so much talking about three persons, but about three relationships. Three relationships of love that exist within the being of God.
What we have here are love relationships that are extravagantly self-giving. Rather than becoming rivals of one another, they delight in one another and strive to glorify one another. There seems no limit to their willingness to give themselves to one another, and to give themselves to the mutual strengthening of the relationships.
The more we step back and contemplate the relationships of the Trinity, rather than trying to define them, the more we see God’s emerging call to us to be like God and to love in ways which are not possessive and aggressive; to love in ways that do not seek the exclusion of the other or the glorification of ourselves. The more fully we imitate the self-giving love of the Trinity, the more we will be set free from possessiveness and self-gratification.
The beautiful and extravagantly self-giving love of the Trinity is not only a model for us to imitate. It is also an invitation. Because just as these three relationships celebrate and glory in them, they eagerly look to draw others, namely us, into the life of those relationships. God is not a closed system, an exclusive love bond that has nothing to offer to those outside. On the contrary, God is intensely and overflowingly relational, and longs to draw us into relationship. The heart of the revelation of the nature of God is Christ’s self-offering on the cross, where Jesus, having been falsely cast as a rebel and troublemaker, gives up his life rather than reciprocate the hostility, and thus reveals to us the nature of God’s self-giving love and the invitation into that love. And that’s where we stand at this table today, as witnesses of that act of self-giving, as recipients of that extravagant offer, as the Trinity of Love reaches out to us and places the body of Christ into our hands. And so here again, we are faced with the call and the invitation. How shall we respond? We can grasp at all we desire seeking to possess and control, and gratify ourselves, or we can let go, and accept the invitation and be carried by the Spirit into a relationship with self-giving love – God’s love which has already been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.[6] Trinity invites us to unlock our hearts and enter deeply into the mystery of God whose very nature is love.
© The Rev’d. W.D. Crossman
[1] The Daily Mirror 23rd October 1973
[2] I first heard this connection made in 1990 by The Rev’d. Dr. Jim McPherson when I was a theological student in the Parish of Kambah (Dio Canberra-Goulburn) where he was the Rector.
[3] https://earlychurchtexts.com/public/gregoryofnaz_councils_of_bishops.htm#
[4] Psalm 8:3
[5] Paula Gooder This Risen Existence Canterbury Press Norwich UK 2009
[6] Romans 5:5