Holy Trinity
(based on John 17:20-26)
Saint Augustine, who lived between 354 AD - 430
AD, spent a lot of time thinking about the Trinity and trying to explain it. There is a story about Augustine walking along
the ocean’s shore, greatly perplexed about the doctrine of the Trinity. As he meditated, he observed a little boy with
a seashell, running to the water, filling his shell, and then pouring it into a
hole which he had made in the sand. “What
are you doing, my little man?” asked Augustine. “Oh,” replied the boy, “I am trying to put the
ocean in this hole.” Then it suddenly
struck him that, when it came to God, he was guilty of exactly the same thing. “That is what I am trying to do with God,” he
later confessed. “I see it now. Standing on the shores of time, I am trying to
get into this little finite mind things which are infinite.”
So, bear with me this morning as I attempt to
fill our finite minds with a glimpse of the infinite when we talk about the
Trinity today.
The Westminster Confession is the summary of the
theology adopted by our denomination. It
was formulated in 1646 and describes the Trinity this way:
In the unity of the Godhead there are three
persons, having one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the
Son, and God the Holy Ghost: The Father exists. He is not generated and does
not come from any source. The Son is eternally generated (begotten) from the
Father, and the Holy Spirit eternally comes from the Father and the Son.
Perfectly clear now, right?
If we unpack this a little bit, we would
describe the Trinity as follows:
·
There is one and only One God – one substance –
one power
·
God eternally exists in three distinct persons.
Although scripture talks of the Son
being begotten and that the Holy Spirit coming from the Father, notice how Westminster
states that each exist eternally. There wasn’t a time when the Son or the
Spirit didn’t exist.
·
The Father is God/The Son is God/The Holy
Spirit is God but, (and here is one of the confusing parts)
·
The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the
Spirit, the Father is not the Spirit
And somehow we get to this idea that there is
the Trinity in God, but that God is not Three Gods. It’s not easy to understand.
Over the years I’ve studied and reflected on
the Trinity.
The first challenge to God being singular or a
Unitarian God came from the ultimate claim of Jesus as divine. If Jesus was divine, then Jesus was also
God. The New Testament provides many
texts to prove that Jesus was divine and was, in fact, God. He revealed this about himself more and more as
the reality of the cross came closer, but Jesus’ early hidden divinity
was part of the Master plan of unveiling a very complicated and mysterious part
of God’s Trinitarian nature.
As I read some of the early church writers, I learned
that they fully accepted the divinity of Jesus. The problem was that the divinity of Jesus
challenged them to come up with a way to articulate the true nature of God.
What they couldn’t articulate was how the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit fit together. They knew that
there was just one God. And they knew
that the Father was God and they knew that Jesus admitted progressively that he
was God. And then there was the issue of
the Holy Spirit. How do they fit together?
As early as 110 AD, Ignatius of Antioch wrote
using Trinitarian language. Then late in
the 2nd Century the word Trinity first appears in the works of Theopholus of
Antioch. By early in the 3rd Century,
Tertullian, defended the doctrine of the Trinity which meant that it was
already part of the doctrine of the church.
The concept of the Trinity did not burst on the scene in the late 4th
century with the council of Nicaea, when they voted to adopt the belief in the Trinity,
but rather it was a natural progression coming from this revolutionary idea
that God became human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.
But
the question is often asked, is it Biblical?
Certainly, one of the arguments made against
the Trinity is that the word doesn’t appear in the Bible. But it isn’t just the lack of the word, the
Trinity is not even described. That’s
because the doctrine of the Trinity is not so much heard in the New Testament
as overheard. I think this is part of the
Master plan of God’s to reveal to us this incredible picture of who God is.
So, let me just highlight what we find in the
Bible
Is there just one God? Well, nowhere in our holy Scriptures does it
talk about three separate Gods. Monotheism
is the by-word for the Jews. It is not
only strongly affirmed, the opposite is strongly opposed. Even Jesus and Paul who affirm the deity of
Jesus strongly affirm that God is one. So,
no biblical scholar debates the divinity of the Father. The divinity of Christ is strongly attested
to when we really understand Jesus’ words and actions from the perspective of a
1st Century Jew as revealed to us in the writings of the gospels.
The divinity of the Holy Spirit has less
evidence. But again, Jesus, Paul and Peter
have very strong words affirming both the deity of the Holy Spirit as well as the
distinctiveness of this entity of the Trinity.
The evidence is pretty clear in scripture that there are three persons
of the Godhead distinct in function yet all part of one God, even if the word
Trinity doesn’t exist in the text.
God is one, yet exists in three persons. Our text today from John highlights the fact
that God is already a loving community who then invites us to join and become
an intimate part of that community. Which
harkens back to the very beginning of the creation when in Chapter 1 verse 26
of Genesis, when God decides to create us and says, “Let us make human beings
in our image, in our likeness…”
In John, Jesus says:
·
Verse 23 – Father, I desire that they … may be
with me where I am – There’s the invite
·
Verse 24 because you loved me before the
foundation of the world. – There’s the loving community
·
Verse 26 that the love with which you have
loved me may be in them, and I in them. – There is the intimacy
Does it matter that our life was created by a
being who pulses with love and community and honor? Let me offer you two visions of life. Bertrand
Russell was the great mathematician of the 20th century
You
are the product of causes that have no purpose or meaning. Your origin, your
growth, your hopes, fears, loves, beliefs are the outcome of accidental collections
of atoms. No fire, heroism, or intensity of thought or feeling can preserve
your life from beyond the grave. All the devotion, all the inspiration, all the
labor of all the ages are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar
system. The whole temple of human achievement must inevitably be buried in the
debris of a universe in ruins. That’s what we’re all headed for.
Or
consider this from Dallas Willard, American Christian Philosopher, professor at
University of Southern California until his death in 2013:
You
are the uniquely designed creation of a thoroughly good and unspeakably creative
God. You are made in His image, with a capacity to reason, choose, and love
that sets you above all other life forms. God’s aim in human history is the creation
of an all-inclusive community of loving persons with Himself included as its
primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant. He is even now at work to bring
this about. You have been invited, at great cost to God Himself, to be part of
this radiant community.
So, you have a choice, trajectory #1 described
by Bertrand Russell or or trajectory #2 described by Dallas Willard.
Willard tells us that God is inviting us into
an already existing community of love because of the Trinitarian nature of God.
The Trinity is essential for the essence
of God to be love.
C.S. Lewis wrote:
All
sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that 'God is
love.' But they seem not to notice that
the words 'God is love' have no real meaning unless God contains at least two
Persons. Love is something that one
person has for another person. If God
was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.
If love is part of the very fabric of God’s
essence, who or what did God love for all of eternity before the world was
created? A Unitarian God whose essence
was love would require an object for that love – because that is the nature of
love. A lover needs a beloved.
There was a divine love / a divine dance that
was going on for all of eternity long before the creation of the world. Jesus says this in our passage today. “You
loved me before the foundation of the world. “ The life of the Trinity is a
great dance of unchained communion and intimacy, fired by passionate,
self-giving and other-centered love, and mutual delight.
The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this
three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the
other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take your place
in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made. If
you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you
must get into the water. If you want
joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing
that has them. If we want love and we want community, we are called to get
close to the community of love that exists in the Trinity. For in the Holy Trinity we are invited to
join and become part of the intimate relationship of love.
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