The God Whom We Adore - A Sermon for Trinity Sunday
18 May 2008
How much can we hope to know about the transcendent God who created us, who holds us in being at every moment? Some things can be put beneath the microscope. You can analyse the atom, search for causes to explain how some pesky respiratory virus almost stopped a Dominican from preaching here today. We might even discover how to stop that virus with something better than malt whiskey – better in some respects at least. That’s all a proper exercise of our intelligence, a proper investment of academic resources. But even at Oxford University we cannot place beneath the microscope the Living God who creates this universe of intelligible events. I can never know what makes God God. We cannot fathom the One God whom we adore. How then dare we speak of the Trinity? Is this not, as many non-Christians and some liberal Christians have argued, wholly presumptuous, something we ourselves invented, an arrogant and irrelevant dogma? It was a Franciscan doctor, Bonaventure, who said of the Trinity: “Take care that you do not believe you can understand the incomprehensible.” If we put across the doctrine of the Trinity as an answer to the mystery, or as a substitute for the mystery, we sell our faith short.
Yet the liberal charge is false. For this unknown God has revealed Himself as Trinity. He has revealed Himself as Father, Son and Spirit, through the life, death and resurrection of Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost. And this revelation is not incidental to our salvation, as though it were an interesting by-product of Christ’s mission. It is integral to our redemption by Him and in His mystical body. God has revealed himself not to undo the mystery, but to admit us within that mystery, so that the love shared from eternity by Father, Son and Spirit is now shared by grace with us. This love is the eternal life which Jesus promises to Nicodemus in today’s Gospel.
As the Book of Exodus reminds us in our first reading, God’s revelation of Himself has a long history. On Mount Sinai the transcendent One reveals his hidden mercy, his steadfast love for the idolatrous Israelites. He freely reveals Himself as the God who will enter history to accompany the Israelites on their journey out of slavery. The Gospel then reveals the depth of this love. God has finally entered history in the person of the Divine Word made flesh. In Jesus of Nazareth, God has accompanied his people on their final journey into freedom even to the point of death. ‘God sent the Son into the world... that the world might be saved through him.’ The self-giving of Jesus in life and in death upon the cross is God’s self-giving. His transforming, healing presence in our midst is not cut off by Christ’s ascension, but continues in the sending of His Spirit.
So, our Christian lives are Trinitarian in character. We are drawn into God’s life by receiving the Spirit, a Spirit of sonship, becoming adopted sons of the Father and sharing in that Son’s prayer to, and praise of, his Father. How else could we creatures be so bold as to call God Father. This is how we adore God, from within, with the love of the Son for His Father poured into our hearts by the Spirit. We are drawn together by this adoptive life into a common worship and love which to be manifest in the one Church and to be practised in daily charity. No wonder that Paul, in today’s second reading, ends his letter and instructions to the church at Corinth with a Trinitarian blessing. If we are to live in peace together, we can only do so by the gift of God’s own peaceable life, respecting the place in that life of our sisters and brothers, former strangers who like ourselves have been brought near, reconciled, through the experience of God’s mercy.
Of course, none of this means that the doctrine of the Trinity can be read straight off the pages of the New Testament. The biblical data is rich, but far from simple. The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity took centuries to work out – above all through the arguments and ecclesiastical power-games of the fourth century. Then Nicene and Arian beliefs found expression in rival doxologies. Arians reluctant to say that the Son was one being with the Father, for fear that it might compromise the Father’s transcendence over the creation in which His Son took flesh, or might collapse any distinction between Father and Son, ended the psalms by singing ‘Glory be to the Father by means of the Son and in the Holy Spirit’. Their Nicene opponents, who feared to compromise the Son’s divinity, sang, as we do now, ‘Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit’. Not surprisingly, some hedged their bets. Leontius, bishop of Antioch from 344 to 357, sang Glory be to the Father, and then coughed for the remainder of the doxology. It is a strategy with which most preachers on the Trinity have some sympathy. And as I battle with my own cough, it is a strategy with which I have considerable sympathy.
Yet it was through such controversy that we arrived at our affirmation that God is one and three, our language of three persons who share one nature, one being, equal in glory and power, our talk of the Son begotten but not made, and of the Spirit which proceeds from the Father and the Son. As Newman wrote in his 1864 Letter addressed to Dr Pusey, “I should not have found out that doctrine in the sacred text without previous traditional teaching; but, when once it is suggested from without, it commends itself as the one true interpretation, from its appositeness, - because no other view of doctrine, which can be ascribed to the inspired writers, so happily solves the obscurities and seeming inconsistencies of their teaching.” The doctrine, then, gives in non-scriptural terms the deep grammar of the Scriptures. It opens up their meaning for us to spell out the depth of God’s goodness towards us.
This feast is a celebration of that goodness. Perhaps it should also serve as a mark of what we owe the combatants who debated, fought, and coughed their way through the Arian controversies of long ago - above all, the champions of orthodoxy. We owe them much for opening up the Scriptures and clarifying how it is that God so loves the world as to send His only Son for our salvation - a lesson in the value of the tradition and of theological argument within that tradition. Not that every theological fight is a clean fight. Leontius’ predecessor at Antioch, Stephen, was caught at Easter in 344 plotting to place a prostitute in the bedroom of Euphrates, the visiting bishop of Cologne, someone whose pro-Nicene stance he detested and whom he hoped to discredit on false charges of fornication. Stephen lost his job. Let’s hope that the theological battles of our own day don’t proceed with the same reckless appetite for smears, sensationalism, and character assassination. Let us glory, however, in the doctrine of the Trinity.
Fr Richard Finn OP Regent of Studies, Blackfriars, Oxford