Trinity Sunday, June 3 2012
Deut 4:32-34, 39-40; Rom 8:14-17; Matt 28:16-20
Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday. Most of us today don’t spend much time thinking about the Trinity. It’s a doctrine, and we learned what it says, but I suspect that it doesn’t mean much in the lives of most of us. For the first Christians, it was the other way around: they didn’t know the word “Trinity” or the doctrine, but they had a lively sense of the presence of the Trinity in their lives.
We learned as children that we worship one God in three divine persons: the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. The word “person” comes from the Latin word persona. The Latin persona did not mean anything like our modern concept of a person, with his or her own thoughts and feelings and likes and dislikes. The word persona originally meant “to sound through”; it referred to a mask that an actor wore on the stage and spoke his lines through. The actor, an ordinary Roman man, wore a very large mask, which told the audience that this was not just Claudius the actor, but they were to see Achilles, or Hercules, or Zeus. It probably also amplified the actor’s voice. The mask did not hide the actor; it revealed the character. This use of the word persona survives today in the phrase dramatis personae, or persons of the drama, which is sometimes used to refer to the characters in the play.
So the “person” of the Trinity was like a mask that reveals God to us. Because there is no way that we can see God. Even if we could, our poor human eyes and brains and hearts would have no idea what we were seeing. So God reveals Himself to us in different guises.
The first, original “mask” or image of God for us is God the creator and lawgiver of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is the God in our first reading today, who rescued the Israelites from slavery. But he had no statue they could bow down before and worship. He was transcendent, above our power to imagine or know. So God was revealed as great but hard to know.
To help people to know Him, God revealed Himself to the Israelites through scripture, through his Word, the same “word of his mouth” by which “the heavens were made,” as it says in today’s psalm:
By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and all their host by the breath of his mouth.
Since we could not grasp his transcendent majesty, He revealed himself in words that we could understand. This was the second “mask” by which people could come to know God.
But this revelation in scripture had its limits. You can’t see words. The first Christians came to believe that Jesus was the perfection and personification of God’s revelation in the Word: “In the beginning was the Word.” They realized that in Jesus they came to know what God was like. They saw God’s loving kindness in him, God’s creative power, and finally God’s power to bring life out of death, when Jesus rose from the dead. Revelation, and Jesus as revelation incarnate, was the second mask by which we could perceive God.
However, Jesus, even after his resurrection, did not stay on earth. Ten days ago, we celebrated the feast of the Ascension, which marked the end of the post-resurrection appearances, and which left the apostles to carry on alone. But Jesus did not leave them really alone, because before he left, he breathed his Spirit into them. The Greek word for spirit, πνευμα, also means breath and wind. The early Christians knew that they were the mystical body of Christ in the world. A body is living only while it has breath. Jesus breathed his spirit or breath into their community just as God breathed life into Adam. For the early Christians, this spirit or breath was the same spirit that had hovered over the deep before God created heaven and earth. It was the breath with which God spoke his Word. It was the life of the Church. It was the third mask by which God reveals Himself to us.
When we say the Creed in a few minutes, we will repeat our faith in the Father, in Jesus his son, and in the Holy Spirit that gives life to our community. We will celebrate these three “masks” by which God is revealed to us and in whose life we participate. Then after we have worshipped the Father, we will go out into our world to do the work of the son, inspired and comforted by the Holy Spirit.