Curate’s sermon. Trinity Sunday: Isaiah 40.12-17, 27-end; Matthew 28.16-end

In one of the episodes of the BBC series ‘Rev’, the Vicar, Adam Smallbone, teams up with the local imam, Yussef, to raise funds for a run-down playground just around the corner from their church and mosque. The mosque does not seem to have any problem finding money for anything, including the playground, whereas the church, with its dwindling congregation, struggles. As Adam complains to Yussef about the lack of resources, the imam says, ‘Couldn’t one of your three gods do something about this?’.
Yussef is of course mocking Adam, but this comment also betrays a truthful struggle many people, including Christians, have with understanding what the Trinity means and how it can simultaneously be both three and one.
Purely intuitively, this is something that should make a lot of sense to us, as the world we live in, the creation itself, consists of concepts that embody a similar idea. For example, water can be in three states – liquid, ice and vapour and yet, we know that all three are the same substance consisting of exactly the same molecules. This rule, by the way, applies to other types of matter. Time is comprised of the past, present and future but they all are one in the weirdest of ways, because time is also fluid, and the ‘present’ mark shifts every fraction of a second, making the ‘present’ instantly become the ‘past’ and moving the future into the present. Such a flow underlines the oneness of time and yet, we can never be confused between, say, the past and the future, because they clearly are very different. Physical space we exist in comes in three dimensions – height, length and width – and yet, we do not perceive it as a set of axes and instead experience it as a whole. Apparently the Big Bang Theory and the evolution of the universe are driven by three components: ordinary matter, dark matter and dark energy, but all three constitute one universe. In Newtonian physics, all motion can be described by three fundamental laws. We don’t actively observe all three, but it is embedded even in the way our bodies move. I can keep going, but you get the gist: the three-ness and one-ness of things are part of the fabric of creation and the laws that keep it moving.
The almighty power of the three has been recognised in myths, religions and even superstitions. The ancient Greek pantheon of gods rested on the three brothers Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, Hinduism also has a primary triad of gods, mottos tend to come in threes, and even bad things, as we all know, happen as a sequence of three. Christian theology, in this respect, follows the general human feeling about the significance of the three, except it also emphasises the oneness of God, and this is where people’s heads start hurting.
Reading the Bible often leads us to believe that there was first the Father, the creator God. The Son came next, as we know from the Gospels. The Spirit, very clearly, appears after the Son has ascended to the Father – we only celebrated it last week. It is very easy to perceive the story as an unfolding narrative and yet, this is where it may be misleading. What unfolds gradually is our understanding of and our relationship with God, and I will return to this point in a moment, but the existence of all three is undeniable from the beginning.
On the very first page of the Bible, we read that the Spirit of God was hovering above the waters when God was creating the world, so there is at least two. God then goes on to proclaim, ‘let us make humankind in our own image’. There are different ways of interpreting this, but one of them is Trinitarian: the ‘us’ is not only God the creator and the Holy Spirit but also Christ, the Son. In a theological argument that would be too long to recite now, Jesus has the role of Wisdom in the Trinity, and the role of Wisdom as the agent of creation is explained in Proverbs 8, which says that Wisdom was there from the very beginning and through Wisdom everything was created. If Jesus is Wisdom then all was created through Him. These words are echoed in the very beginning of the Gospel of John, which also proclaims the coeternal nature of the Father and the Son. Indeed, we affirm this belief in the words of the Creed every Sunday morning, saying that ‘through him [the Son] all things were made’.
Let me now return to the notion of the unfolding understanding of God and, as a result, our growing relationship with him. One of the verses from Isiah 40 we heard earlier quite clearly says that God’s understanding no one can fathom. This is part of our condition. But despite not ever having a complete understanding of God’s power and His will, we can enter into a relationship with Him. The oneness of God, as history unfolds, offers new visible facets of the Trinity to those who believe and invites us to respond. The covenant between God and His people is renewed throughout the Bible, ‘updating’ this relationship all the time; the arrival of Christ on this earth as a human allows for this relationship to become tangible and to expand its horizons to include the Gentiles, as well as the Jews. After Christ’s Ascension, the coming of the Spirit manifests a continuous presence of God with His people, giving them strength and bearing good fruit through them. But to enter a relationship with God, something is asked of the people. In the passage known as the Great Commission from Matthew 28, Jesus tells the disciples that He now has all authority in heaven and on earth and is giving them a task to make disciples. This can be achieved by teaching and baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the first and the most direct reference to the Trinity in the Bible. Interestingly, both the one-ness and the three-ness of the Trinity are expressed in this one phrase: there is three persons but one name (it is not ‘names’ but ‘the name’ of the Trinity). But perhaps the most important thing is that to become a disciple, one has to be baptised. The name of God alone, even throughout the Old Testament, expressed His ultimate power, and to baptise into this name is to baptise into the possession of Him who owned the name, so the possession of God. Those who are baptised thus belong to God; and not an abstract God, but all three persons who are God. Cyril of Jerusalem wrote that all three are honoured together in baptism, and the candidate also ascends to them separately through the three immersions, or, in our time, more often the act of pouring the water over the candidate’s head three times whilst naming the Trinity. The fact that baptism is a shift in humankind’s relationship with God is indicated by Tertullian, who argued that before Christ’s command, since the day of Abraham, salvation was given by faith alone, whereas since the command, beginning with the conversion of Paul in Acts, baptism represents an act of entering into a relationship with God and expressing a desire for salvation.
So we may not really understand the Trinity, but we are, whether we are aware of it or not, in an active ongoing communion with it, following our baptism. We belong to God as disciples and are, in a mystical way, entangled with the Trinity, so when we celebrate the Trinity, we are not looking up into the sky trying to comprehend what the Trinity even means but instead are reminded of a tender, lasting and very personal connection we have with our God, mysterious, incomprehensible, and yet closer to our hearts than anyone else. Amen.