Trinity Sunday

by Josie Smith.

When Moses cheekily asked God for his I.D., the answer was something like ‘I AM’. That’s three letters in our alphabet, but what a complexity of meaning!    Not just ‘I am what I am’ in the present tense, but ‘I always was and always will be.’    It even carries the meaning ‘I continuously cause all things to be’.  The Name is both noun and verb, both Being and Doing.    The very nature of Being, in fact, in whom all things and all times and places and people have THEIR being.   No wonder people refused to pronounce the name of God.    

The doctrine of the Trinity came out of experience, not theorising.    People were certain that the transcendent yet immanent ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ was the one creator God.    Embodied in Jesus they recognised ‘the way, the truth and the life’. And in the Pentecost experience they knew that this too was God in action.   But our human minds want to know what all this topsy-turvy three-in-one maths means.     How can three aspects of Divinity be ‘co-equal together and co-eternal’?   (The Church has been split by the Filioque clause – the ‘and the Son’ bit – for centuries, and whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or from the Father and the Son, and how they can be co-eternal in either case, really gives people sleepless nights.)

When Jesus was asked questions his reply was so often in the form of another question – What do you think?   Who do you say that I am?    Are these your words, or did someone else tell you that?     Or he painted a simple picture – the Kingdom of God is LIKE – yeast, a mustard seed, a pearl.      He spoke of a lost coin or a missing child or a shepherd with his flock.     Or bread and wine, the stuff of everyday nourishment, which for us now carries such a wealth of meaning in Holy Communion.    A picture, a story, a symbol, to take away and reflect on.     Even Jesus couldn’t describe that which cannot be described.     The Kingdom is like – is like – is like.

The Trinity has been likened to a shamrock leaf, or a triangle (a very strong structure) or water which comes in many forms from clouds to solid ice and which is essential to  life.    We can drink it, wash in it, cook with it, drown in it.    We are largely composed of it.     It formed the continents over geological time, and continues to do so.     A plait of hair is another three-in-one symbol.     But these are only clues.    COVID isn’t that little green thing with knobs on which we’ve seen pictures of.    God isn’t a shamrock leaf and the Kingdom isn’t a pearl.    I like to think of the doctrine of the Trinity as a clue – a representation – a map, if you like.   That black line on the map is, we know, a road, because we have been taught to read a map.   But we can’t begin to imagine the lives of all the travellers on that road, nor yet their speed, destinations or missions, their home lives or their work.     Those contour lines tell us that we are approaching hill country, and there are little symbols which give us all sorts of clues about the terrain.   But sitting at home gives us no idea of the weather out there in the real world.

The map is not the country.     These small, everyday, fertile ideas (the map, the credal statements) are there to help us to get out into the real wind-in-the-hair country with wide views, with miles between us and the horizon in all directions, where God is the total reality surrounding us and filling us.     God whose name and nature is Love.

In the name of the Father,  the Son and the Holy Spirit,  Amen.