NewCreation

Homily for the Trinity Sunday, Year C

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the Sunday of the Holy Trinity. Usually this is a Sunday where the subject matter — the Holy Trinity — is, or seems to be, an excuse for extraordinary speculations, or else frank confessions that the whole thing is such a complete mystery that it's scarcely worth talking about. And I don't want to do either of those, because over the last few weeks we've been having wonderfully Trinitarian readings from St. John's Gospel to help us understand what's really going on with this God thing. And today is the day, if you like, when we celebrate what we have learnt about God, and why it makes such a difference for us, why it is a subject of praise and adoration and glory. So what I hope I will be doing with you today is to say that the doctrine of the Trinity, far from being some kind of immensely complicated intellectual abstraction, is an account of how God is close to us. Let me just explain this very briefly, following really the pattern which we've been seeing in John's Gospel. First of all, the notion of God. Well, you might say, supposing that you believe in God at all, that there's something bigger than all this — it's just there. I mean, there's some "there" that we don't know anything about; it's utterly other than us. All we have to go on, if you like, is this created world, and that doesn't give us a very clear idea of what God is about. And in one sense that's true: we cannot know what God is, if you like, of ourselves. We have no criterion for God. And this is why the next step, if you like, is so important. We have no criterion for God, which means that any of us at any time can say that such and such a set of weather conditions are a sign that God is in favour of this or that or the other. In other words, we say that God is entirely outside our framework of knowing. And that means that the most powerful of our criteria get to describe what God is. That means typically the criterion of kings and conquerors and murderers — winners, if you like. And losers have no understanding of who God is, because God is simply used by the powers that be. It's simply the reflection of power, human power. But, and this is an absolutely key point, we say — Christians say — that we have a criterion for God. We don't just say that that criterion is our criterion, a human criterion. We say that God's criterion for God took on the life of a human being. The second person of the Trinity is God's criterion for God. In the ancient world referred to as the Logos, the Word, what it means is God's criterion for God. This is how God understands God's self. So how God understands God's self then comes and lives among us as a human, in the midst of a poor colony of the Roman Empire a very long time ago, in the midst of a whole variety of important religious and political discussions, but where a background of understanding of how God might have a criterion for God's self had at least begun to come into being through the Hebrew people. So God's criterion for God, which is of course God — God can't have a criterion for God's self which is anything less than God, or it wouldn't be God's criterion for God's self, it would be a criterion for something else. God's criterion for God's self is God. That criterion has come among us as a human. But any human sign, symbol, is radically capable of different interpretations. For instance, Jesus giving himself up to death on a cross could easily be interpreted as God punishing Jesus for being a seditious blasphemer, God accepting Jesus as a blood sacrifice to pay off some terrible wrath in God's heart. In fact, any human symbol is capable of a multiplicity of meanings. So to understand God's criterion fully — God's criterion for God fully — you don't only need the criterion, the human life and death of Jesus, but the ability to interpret the criterion. Or else it would be God speaking his criterion to us and leaving us to work out what on earth it meant, which would mean once again that we'd be at the mercy of our systems of power and blame and vengeance and rivalry in order to give meaning. But so what God gives is not only God's criterion for God, but God's interpretation of God's criterion for God. This is the Spirit with which God does all this. And of course God's interpretation of God's criterion for God is no less than God — the interpretation could not be less than the criterion, and the one whose criterion it is. In other words, that we are able at all to begin to try to work out that a word is spoken to us is because we are given both the criterion that is God and both the Father's and the Son's… or God and the criterion's interpretation: what they were doing in our midst, why they were doing it. And that means that now God is someone in whom we live and move and have our being. There has been breathed onto us God's interpretation of what God was doing in coming amongst us, and it's an interpretation of love. God has shown us that God's creating everything, bringing everything into being, had a criterion: human flourishing. And furthermore, that that was a plan, a project, with, if you like, an intelligence that shows the glory of God. And that God's interpretive intelligence is given us in the Holy Spirit so that we can begin to interpret reality and come to discover what really is as we follow the example and life of Jesus. Learning to give ourselves away, learning not to grasp onto fake meaning, holding back the possibility of learning what really is, but being found ourselves on the inside of the adventure of creation as daughters and sons of God. So God, God's criterion for God, which is God, and God's interpretation of God's criterion of God, which is God — if you have a notion of God that does not include criterion and interpretation, you don't really have a notion of God; you have a notion of an idol. That's what makes the Trinity absolutely an astounding doctrine. It means that the act of communication is real. It's a genuinely real other — sometimes referred to as the "other other" — who is coming through to us, giving themselves a criterion that is not ours, and an interpretation that is not ours, so as to make of us something much, much more than we thought we could be. That's, if you like, the sheer amazement and joy and delight of finding ourselves on the inside of this act of communication that is turning us into sons and daughters of the Most High. Now, just in case you think I'm making it up, let's look at today's Gospel text. Here we have Jesus — that's God, criterion for God: "I still have many things to say to you now, but you cannot bear them now." In other words, he knew perfectly well that God's criterion for God would produce such an interruption of all normal human ways of being, that the process of learning thereafter would open up whole new worlds which would be, at least initially, radically incomprehensible. Let's remember that God's criterion for God came amongst us in the midst of, if you like, possibilities of determining the criteria for God: the Imperial possibility represented by Pilate, the Priestly and Sacrificial possibility represented by Caiaphas, and the Textual possibility represented by the scribes and Pharisees. For one, the criterion for God is imperial power; for another it is priestly power; and for another the criteria is in the word — in other words, God is essentially a legislator, a lawgiver, and we interpret the law. But God's criterion for God came among us as a seditious blasphemer, whose interpretation of the text was such as to leave completely flummoxed the guardians who saw in it the work of a legislator. In other words, God's criterion for God explodes all our ordinary forms of meaning. "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now." We couldn't, and we still can't. It's still very difficult for us to step outside the ways in which our gods, our idols, constrain us. "When the Spirit of truth comes" — that's God's interpretation of God's criteria — "that one will guide you into all the truth, for that one will not speak from that one's self, but will speak whatever that one hears, and will declare to you the things that are to come." This is the act of interpretation: it'll be interpreting why God sent us God's criteria for God, and what that criteria looks like in our midst. "That one will glorify me, because" — that one, excuse me, I'm trying to desexualize the reading — "because that one will take what is mine and declare it to you." The Holy Spirit is going to take everything that the criteria has made visible and interpret to us, make it available to us, so that we're constantly able to live in the same dynamic of the criterion of God. "All the Father has is mine" — Jesus referring to God as the Father, already personalizing the great impersonal other, but saying that the entire meaning of God is available in God's criterion, which is me. There are no extra bits of God floating around out there that I am not bearing witness to. "All that the Father has is mine." There are several different ways in which, in different Gospels, that same reality is referred to. The Father is not an extra person outside, observing with a different set of emotional reactions, a different set of qualities. No. Literally everything that is in the Father becomes visible in the Son. The Son is the criterion for the Father, the image of the Father, the icon of the Father, the way, the humanly available way. "All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you." In other words, God's interpretation of God's criterion for God is going to be what's operative amongst you now, building you up into an intelligence of all the things that I, Jesus, am showing you. Taking exactly from what I've been doing, my words, my actions, so that you will understand that it wasn't paying the price for some terrible vengeance, but so that you will see that literally everything that I was doing was the image of the Father. Creating and bringing into being. Even "creating" is an important point. Jesus is not simply the Saviour. Jesus is the creator. The Father gives us the entire criterion for God's creation in Jesus. Jesus is the criterion for creation, which means that his going up to his death and his breathing out the Spirit is the closest analogy we get to what creation looks like. The words Jesus uses are the birth pangs. In other words, a terribly, terribly dangerous moment whereby a woman puts her life and health extraordinarily at risk in order to bring a child into the world. He's saying that if you want to know what the act of creation looks like, that's the nearest analogy. It is someone being prepared to die in order to breathe out their spirit so that everyone else can be brought to life. That's the nearest analogy to creation we have. It's a picture not of a hugely, massively powerful maker from outside, but of someone who's prepared entirely generously to do something that's going to be independent of them, and then enable people to begin to flourish freely inside that, so as to come to discover who they are. It's this fantastic picture of the relationship, the sheer friendliness, the warmth, the spaciousness of the love that is opening up what can seem to us a frightening and terrifying and vengeful and violent world — and is that God is not associated with any of those things. But that there is this huge interpretation of love trying to well through us, so that we are able to participate in it with peace and with joy. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.