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.
