Jesus, the Loved One in the Trinity

Struggling with insights into a hidden reality Photo PxHere

The Hubble and more recently the Webb space telescopes have given us amazing information about the universe, to such an extent that astrophysicists have been puzzled by unexpected findings.

So, too, humanity has been bequeathed insights into the mystery of God, some elements of which are shared by the main religions today, but for Christians unique insights contain the richness of the understanding of God as one Supreme Being but simultaneously and eternally existing as a perichoresis (mutual indwelling - see at end) of three persons. Unlike the mysteries of the physical universe, the human response to the nature of the Divine reality is crucial to our understanding of ourselves and to how we should worship.

For the Christian Church last Sunday was Trinity Sunday, a day for taking stock of the unseen realities that shape the human reality.

Bishop Robert Barron, of Minnesota, devoted his Sunday sermon on YouTube to teasing out the threads of the mystery of the Trinity and to exploring its implications in our lives. He said:

The Trinity names what’s most fundamental and basic in the whole theology and spirituality of Christians. So we should rejoice in talking about the Trinity.

Can I give you appropriately three kinds of scriptural grounds or justifications for talking about God as a trinity of persons?

First of all, Jesus himself. So Jesus speaks of a Father who sent him. And you say, “Okay, fair enough. But wouldn’t Abraham or Jacob or Isaiah, Jeremiah, Moses, or Ezekiel — wouldn’t any of them have spoken of God as their Father who sent them on a mission?”

You know, “So far, so ordinary”. But here’s where it gets really complicated: even though he’s other than this Father who sent him on a mission, he speaks and acts in the very person of the God of Israel. “You’ve heard it said in the Torah . . ., but I say . . .” Well, who can claim that kind of authority except God himself?

“My son, your sins are forgiven.” Who can forgive sins but God alone, and [Jesus goes about] showing his mastery even over the elements of nature, or walking on the water and calming the storm?

“Unless you love me more than your mother and father, more than your very self, you are not worthy of me.”

Well, no prophet would ever say that. That would be the height of arrogance. But only the Supreme Good in person could say that.

Okay, he’s sent by the Father, but yet he seems to be himself the God of Israel.

Now, if you think that’s kind of abstract, every single Sunday we state this truth when, with the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) , we say that he’s God from God, light from light, true God from true God, and remember, consubstantial with the Father. That’s just the English version of “homoousios”; that was the Greek for “one in being, consubstantial.”

Well, that was the dilemma they faced in trying to understand what had been handed down to them.

Jesus is somehow other than the Father but yet consubstantial with the Father. That idea was bequeathed to the great tradition.

And then this:  “The Father and I,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John the night before he dies, “the Father and I will send to you an Advocate. We will send to you a Holy Spirit” — listen now — “who will lead you into all truth.” Who will interpret for you the meaning of Jesus and lead you into all truth.

What human figure or merely created power could lead us into all truth?

The Holy Spirit, in other words, is also one in being with the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit shares divinity with the Father and the Son.

And didn’t they experience this at Pentecost when the power of the Holy Spirit came in a divinizing way to them?

Here’s another biblical source, in some ways summing up the idea of the Trinity. We find in the First Letter of John this very peculiar claim that God is love.

Every religion, every philosophy of religion, talks about the love that God has, that love is an attribute of God, that God loves some people, or he loves as a typical activity, or whatever.

But there is no religion or philosophy that makes the truly strange claim that God is love except Christianity.

Well, if that’s the case, then God, in his own most nature, must be a play of lover, of beloved, and of shared love.  If God has love, which any religion would claim to you, I wouldn’t have to say that. I would just say the one God has this activity, that he loves.

But the Christian claim is so much more radical. Love is what God is, inescapably, always, from all eternity. It’s not something he just does; it’s what he is.

Therefore, there has to be…You can’t have love without a lover and a beloved.

And you can’t have love without the love that the lover and beloved share.

And therefore we speak of the Father (the lover), the Son (the beloved), and the Spirit (the love that they share).

See, all of this — and I’ve just been staying within the Bible here; these are all biblical references — they’re bequeathed to the tradition, and some of the smartest people in the early centuries of the Church tried to make sense of this.

The one God of Israel — and no Christian ever denies that. Remember the “Shema” prayer from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy? “Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord your God is Lord alone.”

The oneness of God, the unity of God, is affirmed up and down the biblical tradition. Nobody wants to deny that.

But what was bequeathed to them was this puzzle: that the one God nevertheless subsists as three persons, as a play of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, of lover, beloved, and shared love, of the consubstantial Father and Son, who will send a Spirit consubstantial with them.

That’s where the doctrine of the Trinity comes from.

Now, one of the very best places to look if you’re still trying to get a model for understanding all of this is the great St. Augustine. Augustine was, with Aquinas, the greatest theologian in the history of the Church, and I think his signal accomplishment intellectually was this analogy he gave us for the Trinity.

He spoke about mind, self-knowledge, and self-love. But I want to put this in more contemporary language by giving an analogy that we’re more at home with.

Anybody who’s ever been through counseling or therapy or spiritual direction, or even a  profound conversation with a friend when you’re trying to figure something out in your life, what do you do?

Well with the help of a therapist or spiritual director, you might pose your own life as an object, as an issue, as something to be examined. You say, “Okay, what was I doing? What was I thinking when I did X, Y, and Z? Or when I was a kid what was going on in me?”

Now you see what’s happening, that maybe with the help of your spiritual director, you are looking at you. You are examining as an object yourself. Now, unless you’ve lost your mind, no one in that process will think, “Oh, I’ve split into two things.” No one’s going to say, “Hey, I’ve become two different persons.”

No, no, you are both subject and object. The one person, one you, is both subject and object.

Now, take it one more step. Because Augustine calls this third move self-love. Having gone through that process, you’re examining yourself and you come to a deeper understanding.

You come to a deeper appreciation of what you were doing, or what pressures you were under, or what friendships you had or didn’t have.

And in that process, you come thereby to a greater self-acceptance or a greater love of yourself.

There’s a knower. There’s a known. And now there’s a love that obtains between the knower and the known.

And all this is going on in this ordinary process of conversing with the counselor or the spiritual director.

You haven’t become three things. You haven’t split into three. But yet there is a kind of play, a Trinitarian play, within you.

That’s what Augustine saw.

Go back to his language: mind, self-knowledge, self-love. That obtains in every one of us.

The Bible says we were made in the image and likeness of God. And Augustine said maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s it. When you go deep down into your own interiority, you find indeed this remarkable “imago Dei,” this remarkable image of God, in this Trinitarian play that exists even within our own psyches.

The Father — that’s the great mind.

The Son — there’s the great self-knowledge.

The Spirit — the love shared between the Father and the Son.

Fulton Sheen, one of my great heroes, adapted Augustine’s analogy. He said that from all eternity, the Father looks at the Son, his own image. The Son, who is consubstantial with the Father — he has everything the Father has, he’s the perfect image of the Father — he looks back, and he sees sheer perfection. And the two of them looking at each other, exhale… they sigh their love for each other. That’s the “Spiritus Sanctus,” the holy breath. Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Okay, if you’re with me so far, you might say, “Alright, alright, I guess it’s all kind of interesting, biblical and theological, and yeah, these analogies. Okay, I kind of get it, but at the end of the day, so what?”

Here’s the so-what: “God so loved the world.” I’m quoting now from the Gospel of John (3:16) When he says “God” here, he means God the Father. “God so loved the world” — note — “that he sent his only Son into the world, that all who believe in him might have life in his name.”

Now he sends the Son where? Down into our ordinary humanity. “Though he was in the form of God” — this is Paul (Philippians 2:6) now — “Jesus did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped but rather emptied himself and took the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”

Now, further, he obediently accepted even death, death on a cross. The Father sends his beloved Son all the way down. Why? To get us who had wandered far from him.

That’s what sin means. It means wandering away from God. So the Father sent the Son all the way to the limits of god-forsakenness, so that he might gather all of us back in the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the love that connects the Father and the Son, even when the Son is all the way down.

The Son’s gone all the way into death itself, but he’s still connected by the love of the Holy Spirit, and in that love, the Father calls the Son back in the Resurrection and Ascension, bringing in principle all of us sinners with him.

Now do you see how all this abstract talk about the Trinity — Father, Son, Spirit, consubstantiality — all that business becomes very viscerally real?

It’s because God is a Trinitarian play of persons that we can be saved. Not just outside of God, us begging for mercy, but now, through God’s grace, inside the dynamics of God’s life, us gathered by the Son into the power of the Holy Spirit.

There’s the whole Christian life, everybody. That’s the whole spiritual life.

God so loved the world that he sent his only Son all the way down, that we might be gathered into the Holy Spirit, the love that connects them. That’s the Trinity.

That’s what we celebrate today, Trinity Sunday.

Ω See also: Cardinal Goh: The Trinity - insights into globalisation and individualism 

Ω Perichoresis in application

The New Testament demonstrates that God brings glory to himself. John's Gospel is important in understanding how Jesus and the Father relate; a key passage for a perichoretic understanding of God's glory is John 17:1, where Jesus prays, "Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you." We see that the Son brings glory to the Father, the Father brings glory to the Son, and the Spirit brings glory to the Son (cf. John 16:14). Such an understanding of glory exhibits the love expressed within the Godhead by Father, Son and Spirit as they give glory to each other. Theopedia

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