The Trinity Answers Three Questions
Genesis 1:1-2:3, 2 Corinthians 13:5 -14, Matthew 28:16-20
William Phelps taught English literature at Yale for forty-one years until his retirement in 1933. As he was marking an examination paper shortly before Christmas one year, Phelps came across the note on one student’s paper: " This is a mystery to me. Only God knows the answer to this question. Merry Christmas." Phelps returned the paper with this note: "God gets an A. You get an F. Happy New Year." [illustration hat tip to Roy Fowler].
Fortunately, we will not get an “F” at the Judgment because we do not understand the mystery that gives this Sunday its name in the liturgical year. Today is Trinity Sunday, and it inaugurates the longest liturgical season of the church calendar: Trinity-tide. Our archbishop once remarked that when new parishes, or poor parishes, go searching for used vestments to buy, the green ones are always the most difficult to find. That is because they used more than any other color of vestment, and so they wear out and there are fewer of them available for sale.
What has not worn out, of course, is the doctrine of the Trinity. It is the hall-mark of the Christian faith. It lies at the very core of what we believe, for it summarizes the Bible’s revelation about the nature of God Himself. The essence of that statement is found, among other places, in the first of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. It says:
“THERE is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in the unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
What we must understand is that statements like this are attempts to summarize, to accurately summarize, the revelation of the Scriptures concerning the nature of God. These are statements are not meant to be understood as explanations of the nature of the Godhead. Instead, they are meant to assert that nature – a tri-unity of persons, without explaining it.
A couple of years ago, Barbara and I were up in Iowa on a ministry trip and we attended the church of a young man who was using our Bible Study materials in his ministry to his college peers. We were curious about the kind of church he attended, and so we showed up that Sunday morning. It was Trinity Sunday, and the pastor set about to explain the Trinity to the congregation.
He didn’t get very far before I turned to Barbara with one of my eyebrows crawling up toward my hairline, and she immediately rolled her eyes around in her head, partly in amazement, partly in alarm. She leaned over to me and muttered in my ear, “Do you think we should get out of here before the lightening strikes begin to fall?”
Well, we stayed there, and the lightening did not fall. And this showed me how gracious God is, when one of his undershepherds compares him to a Hostess twinkie, and God’s flock roars in knowing laughter at the cleverness of the under shepherd.
So, I am not going to try to explain the Trinity to you in the next few minutes. There are any number of theology texts which will do a fine job of that, so far as it’s possible to explain the Trinity. Instead, I am going to turn the question around. Instead of answering the question, “How do you explain the Trinity,” I am going to point you to some puzzles of life that are themselves explained by the Trinity.
There is, for example, a very old problem in philosophy – it’s often called the problem of the one and the many. Mankind for centuries on end have noticed two things about the world they inhabit. The most immediate thing they notice is the bewildering diversity of stuff inside it. The universe contains everything from ants to elephants, molehills to mountains, grunge that grows under the refrigerator to the cedars of Lebanon, tiny fire-flies to the sun, moon, and stars.
At the same time, men have also observed that this wild diversity of things can be easily organized and categorized into groups of things. There’s a children’s guessing game that does this – it’s called animal, vegetable, mineral. That’s what scientists do – they discover the groups, the categories, the concepts that organize the universe they see, and they relate all things to these concepts, and then relate the concepts to one another in a sort of ascending hierarchy.
And, there’s the puzzle – the very scientific process itself leads one to wonder about the highest, grandest, most transcendent source of all things, and yet the higher one goes up the conceptual ladder, the more distant and irrelevant the multitude of things begins to appear. The temptation in philosophy is to suppose that the diversity is the real thing and the unity we sense is a mirage. Or, to suppose that the unity of all things is the only reality and the diversity we see all round us is actually a mirage.
The Christian faith says that the unity of all things is real, and the diversity of all things is real, that neither of them is a mirage, because the source of all things is simultaneously a unity and a diversity. One God, eternally existing in three persons.
Can we understand THAT? No. But, if the ultimate, eternal reality has revealed himself to his creatures, then even though we cannot understand him, we are not dismayed to find that the things he has made reflect his glory. And, so, yes – all things are ultimately unified in the Christian Trinity, and all things are distinct and unique by the power of that same Christian Trinity.
The second thing which the Trinity explains is what G. K. Chesterton called the vitality of the cosmos. It is a teeming place. It is not quiet. And it contains not only a bewildering innumerable mob of different things within it, any one of them is apt to appear on almost mindless multiplicity. Chesterton captured this in a passage of his book “Orthodoxy,” which I want to read to you. He wrote this:
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. [Orthodoxy, “The Ethics of Elfland,” near the end of the chapter]
Lying behind this vitality is, of course, personality. For us, Chesterton says, God Himself is a society. Three persons are the minimum one needs to generate all possible relationships between persons. And, that, of course, is what our God is: a unity of three persons. Pagan men since time immemorial have sensed this – that behind all the seemingly impersonal forces of nature – the storms, the lightning, the earthquakes, the volcanoes, the floods, and storms, and wind – behind all these there lurks a person. And, any person who is truly personal is never alone.
In another perceptive contrast between the God of the Christians and the God of Islam – a god who is truly alone, Chesterton wrote this:
The complex God of the Athanasian Creed may be an enigma for the intellect; but He is far less likely …[to be] … a Sultan than the lonely god of Omar or Mahomet. The god who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an Eastern king. The heart of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly much more satisfied by the …Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world. … Suffice it to say here that this triple enigma is as comforting as wine and open as an English fireside; that this thing that bewilders the intellect utterly quiets the heart: but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone. [Orthodoxy, “The Romance of Orthodoxy,” near the end of the chapter]
So, the Trinity explains the simultaneous unity and diversity of the universe, for the God who created it all is both a unity and a diversity. And, the Trinity explains the inescapable sense that the ultimate reality is person, is, indeed, a society of persons. To the darkened mind this has always led to a pantheon of petty Gods; but in His own self-revelation in the Bible, God shows us the true nature of the eternal society – what we worship as the Holy Trinity.
And, finally, the Trinity explains our the inescapable sense of wonder, amazement, and exaltation that the redeemed experience when they come into contact – even a distant contact – with such a being as we encounter in the Holy Trinity.
To get an idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll share with you a few lines from C. S. Lewis’ book That Hideous Strength. In the book, there is a character called “The Director,” who is a Christ figure. And, in the Director’s household there is a large, shaggy bear who is a pet. The bear’s name is Mr. Bultitude. Lewis devotes a couple of pages to describing the mental state of this animal, and those pages include these lines:
[Mr. Bultitude] felt, in his own fashion, the supremacy of the Director. Meetings with him were, to the bear, what mystical experiences are to men, for the Director had … [the] prerogative to ennoble beasts. In his presence, Mr. Bultitude trembled on the very borders of personality, thought the unthinkable, and did the impossible. He was troubled and enraptured with gleams from beyond his own wooly world, and he came away from them feeling tired.”
That is a tame and timid analogy to what happens when the saints of the Bible and the saints of the Church have managed to find themselves in God’s presence in some out of the ordinary way. The wonder, the majesty, the mystery, the awful divinity of the Bible’s God is what explains the scene in Isaiah 6, where the Seraphim are flying through the heavens crying Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory!” The Holy Trinity is what explains the scene John sees in heaven, when he reports this:
13And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, I heard saying: "Blessing and honor and glory and power Be to Him who sits on the throne, And to the Lamb, forever and ever!"[g]
11All the angels stood around the throne and the elders and the four living creatures, and fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12saying: "Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom, Thanksgiving and honor and power and might, Be to our God forever and ever. Amen."
I would hazard to guess that easily 99 percent of the sermons today which are preached on the gospel passage for this Sunday are preached on what we know as the Great Commission. And, that is fine and well, for in those verses Jesus does indeed give a great commission to the Apostles, and they have passed that mission to the Church whose foundation they laid in their lifetimes and sealed with their blood. It is a commission which comes down the centuries to us.
But, this Trinity Sunday, rather than to give you a homily on the Great Commission, I ask that you recall the heart of it, as Jesus gave it to them and to us, for it is that heart which makes the Great Commission unlike all the other commissions which all the other religions of the world have passed to their disciples. “Go and make disciples of all the nations,” Jesus said – and in this he was no different from Mohammet urging his disciples to make disciples for Islam. In this, he was no different from the disciples of the Buddha, or Confucius, or the Hindu pantheon. What makes Jesus’ commission different from all the others, what makes it truly great is the next line: “baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
Our God is unlike any other God. No God has ever presented Himself to His creatures as our God has presented Himself in the pages of the Bible, and in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We are baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity, both by the authority of that God and into the very midst of his wondrous fellowship, the love and glory which the Holy Trinity shared within itself from all eternity past.
May we ever recognize this wondrous God behind all the unity and diversity of His creation, and may we recognize the vitality and personality all round us to be shadows of His won majesty and wonder. And, God grant by his mercy, to behold His glory in the face of Christ, and to find ourselves overflowing with the worship for which we were created.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
