READINGS

1. John 3:16-17

HOMILY

Today’s Trinity Sunday. It’s the Sunday when after all the build-up of the whole of the Easter story, everything is then combined, if you like, into the doctrine of the Trinity: the understanding that God is Father, is Son and is the Holy Spirit. And all this is God. This is the proper combination of these two seasons. I’m a Trinity fan. And so I’m delighted with this. But I should also say the Trinity Sunday is the day when… well those of us who have tried to explain Christian doctrine over the Easter season normally … our faces and say: oh my God, it’s Trinity Sunday! this is a Sunday when we say quite reasonably that we know nothing about God, quite rightly. This is the … and say: I’m not worthy, I am not worthy. Аnd we aren’t. 

The trouble about that is that it leads to two things: people either talking much about a mystery, which means ultimately the way they talk about it something in comprehensible, which is not really worth talking about; or something so distant and mathematical and that it can be talked about as if one were discussing an extremely distant galaxies about which we know very little but from which we can make various deductions. I want to say: no, not going down that route. 

I love the doctrine of the Trinity because I think it’s true, I think it does us something about being on the inside of God. So that’s what I want to explore with you today: the doctrine of the Trinity, the joy if you like of the Trinity, being the fullness of the account of how we are inside us in God, God in whom we live and move… So nothing about intellectual construction up there. 

What I want to say, I’d say, first of all that the notion of there being God at all rather than something about which we know refers to a certain sort of finding ourselves on the inside of something. It means that everything we know, everything we see, everything around us and for real, exists, and an outside to it. That’s what the word God means: basically, there’s an ouside to everything. The outside to everything that holds it all in being, is a symptom if you like it, off God. The image which I sometimes have is of a perfectly skilful sea lion with a ball balanced, perfectly balanced. The ball doesn’t know about the sea lion holding it in being, holding it up. So well we’re on the inside of that. But the doctrine of God means there’s an outside, we are not trapped. Everything that is is not some blind trap, some sort of plot against us, someone’s source of, I don’t know, bizarre cruelty. There’s an outside to everything that is. We say ‘God’. 

And our only access of course is as insiders: we have no direct knowledge what the outside; merely that there is one. That’s what belief in God means. It means: I’m on the inside of something that is held in being by something far bigger than I. In principle, I need not know anything about it. But I do because the same outside chose to come into our world as a human – to show us that there’s an outside to being human, that being human isn’t a trap, but being human isn’t simply a series of distempered fights, squabbles over who is stronger, putting of each other in places of shame so as to destroy each other and survival of the fittest. Being human isn’t that. Being human is something much more than that. And there’s an outside to our understanding of being human, therefore something about which we need not be afraid. 

Jesus is if you like the instantiation of the being outside to being human. That it is possible to live and to die as a human not run by death and its consequences, and not run by the need to protect yourself, to defend yourself, but able to give yourself. 

There an upside to being human. Even more than that: there’s an outside to all the passions and desires, the contagions, the rivalries which run us, everything which works in between us. There’s an outside to the desire. The outside to desires what we call a lowly spirit. It means that all our passions, all the ways we run each other in more or less cruel and awful ways as we’re seeing terrifyingly at the moment in many countries of the world. There’s an outside to that. That’s not actually reality. The reality is when we are able to go beyond that, to be taken into what’s real. So the outside of everything that is, the outside of what it is to be human, and the outside of every form of relationality and desire reaches us, is available to us from within. This is the extraordinary power of the Gospel. 

The power of the Gospel is: this is not an exercise in power as the world understands it. Which is why St. John’s Gospel wonderfully today tells us: God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. All this is an exercise of love. God wants us to show how much he loves the human creation, how much he loves the way we can build each other up, how much he wants us to be set free from fear and condemnation, from the sentence everything is closing down, that we’re trapped in something, that anyone who believes in Him starts to be able to say “yes, there’s an outside”. 

Because there’s an outside, I can be free, I can feel free, needn’t be run by it. That is what it is to become a son or daughter of God filled with the Spirit: finding that God is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves, as St Augustin says. He is able to move us from within without displacing. Only the gentlest form of love can do that. 

So how do I bring this into a tiny little nutshell? God the creator of everything that is not in rivalry with anything that is. But that leads, that makes it very easy for us to use and abuse the notion of God, unless God has a criterion for who God is. Well, God has a criterion for who God is. That criterion is Jesus. Jesus is God’s criterion for who God is. It’s how God lets us know who God is, what it looks like to live and die as God loves, as God is. Because not hanging on, not hanging on to life, to possessions, riches, anything but being able to give yourself away in love for other people. So that’s God’s criterion for God and we know that God’s criterion for God ended up crucified.

So you might say that’s nice enough we’ve got go with what God’s … no as humans ever since we stumbled into symbolicity there are no such things as simple facts. Everything has to be interpreted. It’s possible to look at Christ’s crucifixion and see it, as some people do, as a price paid to satisfy the vengeance of God, rather than seeing it as a sign of God’s love giving himself for us in the midst of our rage and … so a fact like the crucifixion without an interpretation doesn’t help us at all. Anyone can make an interpretation however they like, whoever perverse. So the Holy Spirit is God’s interpretation of God’s criterion of God.

Please notice what we have: God, God’s criterion for God, and God’s interpretation of God’s criterion for God. – Each one of which is God. And the important thing is that each one of them: God, God’s criterion for God and God’s interpretation of God’s criterion – are love. This is the astonishing thing, this is the Gospel: that there is an astounding power of love shown for us just beyond, if you like, our graphs, but into which we are called; which makes us capable of being participants in creation, in the opening up of reality. This is why it seems to me that the doctrine of the Trinity is not an abstract statement. It’s what it looks like to live and move and have our being in the only God who is.