Article
- Date:
- Sunday 12th June 2022
Year C, Trinity Sunday - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Parish Eucharist
- Readings:
- Romans 5.1-5
John 16.12-15
The great 20th Century theologian Bernard Lonergan once began a lecture as follows: "In the most Blessed Trinity, there are five notions, four relations, three persons, two processions, one nature and, some would say, no problem"; so, encouraged by that, let me begin.
Because of my Irish Catholic upbringing, I can never quite rid myself of that misty vision of Saint Patrick brandishing a sodden shamrock plant to demonstrate the Trinitarian concept of 3 in 1; but thinking about the Trinity in this way is to think of it as a metaphysical problem. You know the sort of thing. Somebody says: "how can you believe in one God when you've got what you call 'three persons"; to which my immediate reply is: "How can you call it one orchestra when it's got so many players with such a variety of instruments." What people confuse, either maliciously or naively, are the quite different concepts of unicity and unity. Unicity is an arithmetical concept describing a unit which can only be divided into fractions of itself; whereas a union, to use its technical term, is economic or, to make it more familiar, if slightly less precise, communal. The Trinity is a dynamic, timeless relationship within the Godhead, a way of fusing the timeless with the time-bound.
So, to illustrate, let us begin before the beginning with the Prologue to Saint John's Gospel whose first line is technically misleading when it says: "In the beginning was The Word" when it means "before there was time there was the word", or, even better, "Quite outside time was the Word". In other words, the "Word of God" is as timeless as the Creator God and God's Spirit but the economy of the Godhead, collectively willed that that Word should enter into time. Before we look at 'why', although that is not a term we can apply to the Godhead, we need to look at the term "economy" and some misleading, even near heretical language, which we use about the relationship between the Father and the Word made flesh in The Son. An economy in this sense is a mutually interactive, mutually loving, dynamic existence of God. The 4th Century theologian, Gregory of Nazianzus, more colourfully described the relationship as a perichoresis, a mutual dance of the Trinity. We use language because of the problem of the union of the timeless and time to identify Father, Son and Spirit but each of these is all three of these. Because of this mutual in-dwelling: the Father did not "send" the Son as that is an inappropriate verb for a mutual economy; and The Son did not in some way "appease the wrath" of the Father by shedding his blood, nor give his life as a "ransom"; and he wasn't "abandoned" while he was dying on the Cross. All three use inappropriate anthropocentric, or people-based, language. The trouble is that because we lack adequate language to handle the interface of the divine and the human, we fall into describing God this way which is fine, it is the best we can do, as long as we admit that what we say is only a tentative approximation.
Now for the "why" of the Trinity. Again, language falls short but in the timeless being of the economy of the Trinity, The Word always was going to be made flesh. And so it was, and sojourned with us for a while and then returned to God's realm. Why Jesus God in history should be incarnate and die for us is often presented as the ultimate mystery but actually there is a mystery deeper yet behind it which is why were we created with free will which would inevitably lead to lapses from our created purpose of voluntarily loving God, only to need saving from ourselves by Jesus? The stock answer to this question is that God in some way 'wanted' some entity of his creation to love God freely, to worship God for the wonderful creation of the physical and intellectual world of the integrally physical and spiritual. Why did the Creator God make something that Jesus God in History had to fix?
These are the deepest mysteries of our faith and it is in that light that we can see how the Trinity operates. So let us look at this from a slightly different theological angle.
God could have made us as we are and somehow proclaimed that our unloving exercise of free will would be cancelled by God's exercise of mercy. Instead, Jesus God in history broke into human time to speak to us of the nature of God as Creator and Sanctifier and to speak of Himself as the Divine corrective to our failures. In other words, because we are human God chose to communicate with us through God in human form rather than as an abstraction, not only in an act of ultimate love but also of enlightening consonance. Where the Chosen People had been harassed almost to destruction by trying to come to terms with an abstract God, we have the real life of God in History to look back upon for an example of the Holy Life and the authoritative teaching on the Godhead.
That part of the Trinity which relates to the Creator and Redeemer has occupied most of the Church's theological bandwidth for the past two thousand years to the detriment of that presence of God we call "The Spirit" without which we would be poor lovers of God and followers of Christ.
So, forget the analogies, the shamrock and the rest, and instead turn to the most profound Trinitarian manifesto ever written, not by one of our eminent theologians as such but by the figure we know as John, the author of the Fourth Gospel. I began by citing the Prologue which tries to wrestle with the interface of the timeless and the historic but the whole work is absolutely grounded in the relationship between the Father and the Son and the operational necessity of the Holy Spirit.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not easy but it is made much more difficult if we are drawn onto enemy territory, forced to use the terminology of our opponents. Be sure, then, that God created everything, that the reunification of God's Realm and our Realm, under-written in the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus, will come about because of the operation of the Holy Spirit as God's self-communication within us and between us. That is what the Gospel of John says and that is what the economy of the Trinity is and does in an eternal 'act' of performative promise.