Trinity Sunday Sermon, 2008

A Homily for the Feast of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity, Year

A Preached at Saint Matthias’, Bellwoods, Toronto

On The First Sunday after Pentecost, 18 May AD 2008

Christians of the Catholic tradition perform certain reverences: they bow at certain moments or words, bend the knee, make the sign of the cross, and so on. Contrary to what some think, they do not generally do these things for the fun of it, but because they desire to worship God in body as well as in mind and heart and voice. They desire to worship with the whole person. To bend the knee or genuflect before the Blessed Sacrament is to worship Christ who said This is my Body. If we did not believe his word, it would be blasphemy to bend the knee before a piece of bread. Now before you conclude that I have got my Sundays wrong and this is Corpus Christi sermon, let me asure you it is not. I mention it because the belief that makes us genuflect before the Sacrament signifies an even more basic belief. Unless we believe that the one who said This is my Body was (and is) himself God, then not only the reverence to the Sacrament but all our worship is blasphemy, divine honour paid to a mortal — indeed, if he is not God, paid to a dead Galilean carpenter — is nothing but blasphemy.

Not just our reverences, but all our worship proclaims our belief that this man, Jesus Christ, is the Living Lord, God the Son, whom the Father sent into the world for our salvation, and who sent the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, to give us life. And on this is founded our belief that in the unity of the Godhead there are three persons, of one substance, power and eternity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. each is God, each is Lord, but there are not three Gods and three Lords but One God and one Lord.

Now it is usually a mistake for a preacher on Trinity Sunday to try to explain the doctrine of the Trinity, or to use some homely object like a shamrock to make it easy to digest. Instead, I want to talk for a bit about how this belief arose, and particularly why Christians had to make it all complicated with doctrines and dogmas and other things that modern people don’t much like, but which are really only the tools we use to keep us safe when we try to explain what we believe. For the doctrine of the Trinity arose simply because Christians wanted to be faithful to all the experience of God recorded in the Scriptures, and we in our day can do no better than to stick to it.

In the first place, there is the undeniable truth that God is One and we are to worship him alone. God seems to have spent centuries hammering this fact into the heads of his chosen people To their everlasting credit, Israel has to this day maintained an absolute commitment to Monotheism and an absolute horror of idolatry. This was just as true two thousand years ago. As we know, Jesus and his disciples were Jews, raised and nutured in the belief in the One God. Every day they would recite the great words, Hear O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is one, and all the rest, which Jesus identified as the first and great commandment.

In their life with Jesus his disciples experienced God in a new way. Now the best way I could stretch out this homily is to point out all the passages that show this; if you will forgive me I won’t do that now. (Some passages gathered by E. J. Bicknell are in the added note below.) Enough to say that the whole impression Jesus’ life and works made on his disciples convinced them he was divine. Not only the disciples saw this; even the religious authorities who opposed him had no doubt that his traching and actions implied a claim to be equal to God, and for this he was killed. The Resurrection crowned the disciples’ conviction and brought it to full consciousness, a consciousness so overwhelming that S.Thomas, a Jew, cried out, “My Lord and my God!”

They also has a new experience of God in the Holy Spirit. Christ himself had spoken of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, as divine yet distinct from Himself, and when that Spirit came upon his disciples in power they knew that He too could be no less than God. The belief in God as Trinity is grounded on the Christian commitment to taking seriously the experience of God in Christ and the Holy Spirit while at the same time remaining faithful to the revelation of God’s Unity. In the letters of the New Testament we find passage after passage which show that the first Christians thought of the supreme source of spiritual blessing not as single but as threefold—threefold in essence and not merely in manner of speech. (References to many of these passages may be found in the notes for today elsewhere in this blog.) A supreme example of this triadic language is the passage from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians which we heard a few minutes ago. As has been remarked, St Paul wrote these words in the expectation that his converts would understand their meaning from their own spiritual experience; it was nothing new or unfamiliar. “In speaking almost casually of ‘the grace or the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost’ (2 Cor 13.14), he simply sums up the working faith of the Christian community.”

Perhaps, though, we might be forgiven for asking why the Church couldn’t have stopped there without developing a doctrine of the Trinity, with all its difficult language about persons and natures, processions, generations, and spirations, and that blessed word Perichoresis, which is translated mutual indwelling but seems to mean that the Divine Persons are forever dancing with each other? ( This won’t be on the test)

Well at first, they did stop there. The first believers were hardly aware that there was any problem, or that their faith was inconsistent with monotheism. Divine names, titles and functions that belong to God alone in the Old Testament, are freely ascribed in the pages of the New to the Lord Jesus and to the Holy Spirit. As has been well said, ‘In the first flush of their new hope Christians rather felt than reasoned out their conviction that their master was divine. It was a certainty of heart and mind—but the mind could hardly subject the conception to the processes of reason—the soul leapt to the great conclusion, even though the mind might lag behind, They did not stay to reason; they knew.’[1]

Eventually they had to reason. In the first place, people then were no less intelligent, inquisitive, and argumentative than they are today, and asked questions (just like parishioners today). “If Jesus is God’s Son, is he really God?” “Uhm, right then, … does that mean there are two Gods?” All around them was a society that asked more or less politely, “What do you people believe that is so important you can’t just live like other folk?” “If you can worship Jesus, why can’t you offer a little pinch of incense to the Emperor?” And when persecutions arose, it was hardly unreasonable that people who might have to die for their faith should want to understand it. So Church leaders tried to give answers, like clergy do today. Some did a better job, some a worse, like clergy do today. Some of the answers had the advantage of being simple and easy to understand, but at the cost of ignoring or explaining away some of the facts. Some teachers fudged over the divinity of Christ; some acknowldedged that he was Divine, but not of the same being as the Father, conveniently forgetting the Unity of God; some made the Son and the Spirit temporary masks the Father put on, and were quite surprised when other Christians objected to the idea that the Father suffered on the Cross. The Christian Church, which preferred not to speculate about God, was forced to think out her belief and find words to express it. That was a long process, and we do not need to rehearse it all now. (If you want to read the story a good place to start is the book Fathers and Heretics by G. L. Prestige.)

We might perhaps note here that the tradition does not only give us language to safeguard our faith, but warns us that our langauge is limited. For example, Latin-speaking Christians used the word Person to describe the three, but St Augustine says of this word “Yet, when the question is asked, What three? human language labors altogether under great poverty of speech. The answer, however, is given, “three persons”, not that it might be [completely] spoken, but that it might not be left [wholly] unspoken.”[2] This is true of all our words, of course; but the fact that they cannot express all the truth does make them untrue or worthless. So far I have only attempted to show that the Christian belief in One God in three Persons is not a piece of clever speculation but the natural result of the Christian experience that the source of spiritual blessing is not single but threefold. This belief grows from, supports, and allows our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Much more ought to be said, but there is no time. So I end with the simple thought that the Christian life does not consist in what we can know about God the Holy Trinity, but in coming to know and live with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This knowledge and life comes through the faith and love which we find in word, prayer, and sacrament, and the love of our neighbours. It comes in following Jesus Christ who has promised to bring us even now into his life,

in union with the Father and the Holy Spirit;

to whom be given, as is most justly due,

all praise and glory now and for ever and unto ages of ages, Amen
_________________________________________________________
Added Note:
The Gospel Passages referred to above, as mentioned in E. J. Bicknell, A Historical and Theological Introduction to the XXXIX Articles.

Through their prolonged intercourse with Him the disciples became convinced that our Lord too was divine. He spoke of Himself as ‘Son of Man’,[3] and Himself interpreted the meaning of that title in the light of Dan 7.13 (e.g. Mark 14.62). They were compelled to ask ‘what manner of man is this?” (Mt 8.27, &c.) By His question He encouraged them to think out for themselves who He was. He commended S. Peter who could find no word short of ‘Messiah’ able to contain all that He had shown Himself to be. He claimed a unique intimacy with the Father (Mt 11.25-27) In His own name He revised and deepened the law of Moses (Mt 5.2, &c.). He taught His disciples to repose in Him an unlimited confidence that no mere man had the right to demand of his fellow-men (Mt 7.24, &c.). He died for His claim to be the Christ and the Son of God (Mk 14.61). The whole impression made upon them by Hid life and works was crowned and brought to consciousness by His Resurrection(e.g. Rom 1:4). He was indeed the Son of God. No language short of this could express the place that He had come to take in their knowledge of God.

He had spoken to the disciples of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, as divine yet distinct from Himself[4] (Jn 14:16 and 15:26). They were to expect the Spirit’s coming when He was gone (Acts 1.4-5). In that coming He Himself would come too (John 14.18). At Pentecost they had a personal experience of the Holy Spirit. A new and lasting power entered into their lives. They knew that He too could be no less than God. Further, in the Baptismal formula the teaching of Christ is summed up. Converts are to be baptized ‘into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’ (Mt 28.19). The name is one. It belongs equally to the three Persons, who are associated on an equality and distinguished from one another by the use of the definite article.
Footnotes [

[1] Bethune Baker, Christian Doctrines; how they arose, p. 16.

[2] De Trinitate, V.9.

[3] [Bicknell's note] The title seems to come from Dan. 7.13. There it denotes not an individual but a figure in human form, which is interpreted as ‘the saints of the most high’, v.27. That is, it stands for Israel in contrast with the beasts, which stand for heathen nations. But very soon ‘One like unto a son of man’ came to be interpreted as an individual, the Messiah. In the Book of Enoch this interpretation is made explicit. ‘The Son of Man’ is a superhuman being, who executes God’s judgement. How far it was a recognized Messianic title in our Lord’s day, is disputed. He would hardly have assumed it if it was popularly regarded as synonymous with Messiah. For discussion of this title, see A. E. J. Rawlinson, The New testament Doctrine of Christ, pp 242ff.; C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, pp 241 ff.; A. M. Farrer, A Study in S. Mark, pp 247ff.

[4] [Bicknell's note.] It is not easy to distinguish in the fourth Gospel between our Lord’s actual words and the Evangelist’s own meditation on them