Sermon at Parish Mass, Trinity Sunday 2014

14th Century Fresco of the Trinity, Church of St Gothard, Carmine Superiore, Lago Maggiore

Isaiah 40.12-17,27-31            

2 Corinthians 13.11-13           

Matthew 28.16-20

A week ago I had some concerns about my cat, who was behaving strangely and, I suspected, might have eaten something he shouldn’t. However, a couple of days of careful observation, which I won’t go into, showed that all was well. But I did at one point catch myself saying, “cat, if only you would learn to speak, you could say what’s going on inside!” In response to which he just looked at me in that superior way that cats do.

Speech, or communication of some kind, is invaluable in telling someone else about what’s going on inside. Cats don’t have that so we rely on subtle clues, guesswork and X rays.

People, human beings, do have speech, and so we can tell people when we think we might have eaten something we shouldn’t. And we can also speak about the deeper and more mysterious things: emotions, feelings, thoughts, desires. Through the gift of speech we are able to let other people know about our interior lives. And if we don’t talk about these things other people can find us quite mysterious, not knowing what makes us tick, what drives us, why we react and respond the way we do.

And what is true of us creatures must be even more true of God. God is the creator, the act of being underlying all things that exist, through whom all things exist. If we try to understand how God creates the universe out of nothing we are reduced to awe and wonder, as the beautiful poetic passage from Isaiah this morning so well expresses. How then can we possibly hope to know anything of what goes on inside God, so to speak, how can we know the interior life of God? Unless God speaks, and tells us.

Well we are here this morning as Christians, gathering for the Eucharist on the Lord’s day, the day of resurrection, because we believe that God has spoken. He has spoken in Jesus. Jesus is the Word of God, as John’s Gospel tells us, God’s revelation of himself. Jesus is God’s speech; but speech in a language we can all understand, the language of a human life.

It is Jesus, the speech of God, who opens to us the interior life of God, and tells us what is going on. And what he tells us is that God is love.

Now you can’t love all on your own. Love requires that there be someone to love. Love can only exist in relationship with another. And love, if it is truly love, has to be mutual, and self-giving: each pouring out to the other in generosity and joy. So when Jesus reveals that God is love, he tells us that relationship is the heart of God. If God is love, then God is relationship.

Who is this relationship between? Jesus tells us, it is the love that exists between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Jesus, in John’s gospel, says that the Son abides in the Father and the Father in the Son, in mutual love. And it is the Son himself who tells us this. Jesus, the human being, is God come among us. He has been and is God the Son from all eternity, but in Jesus he has come among us as one of us.

And the reason why he has come among us is so that all human beings can come to call God “Father”. So that all human beings can enter into the love that the Father shares with the Son in the Holy Spirit. So that human beings, in Jesus, can be partakers of the divine nature. And to enable this to happen he has sent his Spirit into the hearts of believers.

Now the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are in God, and so are God, because whatever is in God is God. God is relationship, and Jesus names that relationship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

This does not mean that there are three gods. God is one, absolutely and indivisibly. Christians need to be clear about that, especially when our friends and neighbours may be genuinely curious about the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. God is one. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the relationship that is the interior life of the one God. Traditionally, these are called the three “Persons” of the Trinity. But “Persons” does not mean “people” or separate individuals. It names the participants in the relationship that is God.

The Greeks, as usual, have a long and complicated word for this: perichoresis. But don’t worry, perichoresis just means “dancing in a circle”. God is a dance. The three Persons of the Trinity are God, but there is only one dance, in which Father, Son and Holy Spirit eternally give each other in love and delight.

The Trinity is not an explanation of God. It is a mystery, which doesn’t mean that it is a puzzle to be solved. A mystery is a truth revealed to us, a disclosure from the heart of God which surpasses our understanding.

This same God has created us to enter into the relationship of self-giving love that we call the Trinity, and in union with Jesus, who is fully human and fully divine, has made that possible.

This takes us back to the mysterious saying in Genesis that humanity is created “in the image and likeness of God”. Now of course God has no physical form. We shouldn’t imagine that God has two eyes and ears and a nose, for example, as the nations that surrounded Israel tended to do. God is not in our image. What Genesis 1:27 says is:

So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

It is humanity, plural, in all its diversity, male and female, that is in the image of God. Jesus reveals that God is a relationship of love, a dance of delight. That is the image of God that humanity is called to reflect, many persons in a perfect communion of love.

But we acknowledge of course that humanity so often fails to show the image of God. This world of sin, disfigured by war, terror, violence, greed and hatred, is far from being a relationship of self-giving love.

But Jesus, who reveals God, is also the saviour. By his living a human life, by his death in this world of sin and his resurrection to eternal life, he has saved us. With our sins forgiven, reborn into the life of God, we can begin to reflect the image of God once again.

We are baptised into the Trinity, as Jesus instructs the disciples in today’s Gospel reading. That is the task of the Church: to draw people into the communion of love with God who is love. By Baptism we are reborn into the life of God. By the Eucharist we become one communion of love. And so we become the Church, which is humanity being renewed in the image of God.

St Paul this morning sums up this new life in his final greeting to the Church at Corinth:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

The love of God which surpasses all human knowledge draws us, in Jesus, into God’s very life, and restores us in his image. In Jesus we have received the Spirit of adoption by which we, too, can call God “Father”, and by which God calls us sons and daughters.

We cannot understand God. But love goes where understanding fails. God opens the heart of his love to us and invites us in. In Jesus, God calls to us as our Father. Jesus is God’s speech saying to humanity, not only that God is love, but that we are loved. Loved by the heart of our loving God, our creator and redeemer.

Loved so that we can become loving. Loved so that we can be drawn into the communion of love that is God. Loved so that we can by grace be transformed into God’s image. So that these words are addressed not just to Corinth but to the whole Church, which includes us:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.