Trinity Sunday, May 26 2013
Prov 8:22-31; Rom 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday. It is the only day of the year when the liturgy calls us to ponder a teaching of the church rather than a teaching of Jesus. The scriptural readings provide Bible backup for a word that never appears in scripture: Trinity.
You might imagine that “the idea of the Trinity was thought up by ivory-tower theologians who, typically, were making things more complicated than they needed to be and were obscuring the simple faith of regular believers. In fact, the process worked pretty much the other way around.”[1] Practicing believers and worshipers all knew about God, of course, and they knew Jesus called him Father. But they also felt that they encountered the divine directly in Jesus. And after Jesus was no longer with them, they had these intense experiences of his life—his spirit—in them. They naturally talked about the Father and Jesus and the Spirit.
“All these were experiences of divinity. Yet there could not be three gods. God, to be the biblical God and the only God of all, had to be one God.”[2] The theologians then took over and tried to make this complex and profound faith more intelligible. Tertullian, a Roman lawyer in the early third century, is credited with coining the word “trinity” to describe the Christian experience of God.
People have been trying to explain this doctrine ever since. In the fifth century, St. Augustine wrote a whole book about the Trinity. While he was working on it, he took a walk on the beach and saw a small boy who had dug a hole in the sand and was pouring seawater into it. As the boy went to fetch more water, the water in the hole soaked into the sand and disappeared. St. Augustine said to the boy, “You know, you’re never going to be able to fill up that hole.” The boy looked up and replied, “And you’re never going to be able to understand the Trinity.”
When I was in third grade in Catholic school, my wonderful teacher Sr. Dolores Marie explained to us that the Trinity was like a shamrock: there were three lobes but only one leaf. I accepted that as we accept things when we are children; it did not occur to me until years later to wonder what Sr. Dolores Marie, who came from Nicaragua, knew about shamrocks or what exactly this explanation was supposed to explain.
Today’s Gospel reading is part of Jesus’ long discourse at the Last Supper in John’s Gospel. Jesus has said he is about to leave the disciples, and they have a few questions. “Lord, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way?” (14:5) “Lord, show us the father.” (14:8) Good questions. Jesus promises to send his Spirit to guide them—and us, as we raise these questions.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit “all speak the same truth about our relationship to God. This is perhaps the most important power in affirming the Trinity—that the witness of Jesus is a true witness to the power and will, the glory in a word, of the Father. The witness of the Advocate that comes after Jesus will speak the same truth. The Holy Spirit is a reliable leader in the way of truth, precisely because the Spirit witnesses to Jesus who shares all things with the Father. The Trinity helps the disciples in John and in our assemblies trust that we have indeed seen the Father and can continue to see the Father in our own time and place.”[3]
This is all we need to know about the Trinity, but the theologians are still trying to explain it. I think that if they ever do succeed in explaining the Trinity, we’ll know it’s the end of the world, because God is way too mysterious for anybody to ever figure out the mystery and lay it all out for us.
[1] Frederick Houk Borsch, qyoted by Stoffregen, Brian P. “John 16.12-15: Holy Trinity Sunday – Year C.” Exegetical Notes at CrossMarks, n.d. http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/john16x12.htm (accessed May 7, 2013).
[2] Ibid.
[3] “John 16:12-15 Commentary by Sarah Henrich – Working Preacher – Preaching This Week”, n.d. http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=586 (accessed May 7, 2013).