Today is Trinity Sunday, early June, a day when everybody’s ready for something upbeat and short, and instead the homilist, and you, face the Trinity.
Let’s take the issue head on. Pick up a first-class theological textbook, and you’ll find sentences like this, and this is from the idiot’s summary at the end of the chapter on the Trinity. There are four relations among the Persons of the Trinity: paternity, filiation, active spiration, and passive spiration. Ah, but then we are told, there are only three subsistent relations, since active spiration is not really distinct from paternity or from filiation. Again, I don’t mean to go over old ground, since I know PREP covered this thoroughly last year, but it does raise the question: Who really cares? Isn’t this at best talking about some behind-the-scenes technical matters that don’t really matter when it comes to relating to God?
It’s important, of course, we begin every liturgy naming the Trinity, when they pour the water on us at our baptism they do it three times, but why can’t we just think about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit individually, without thinking about why we have one God in three persons, and not just one God period, or three Gods sort of? We’re Trinitarian, but how bad could it be being Unitarian, after all? They seem like really nice people.
If you want a theological answer to this, you’re not getting it today. Believe me, deacons do not get an advanced theological education. But three very brief observations, a good number for Trinity Sunday. And the only common suggestion is that the Trinity is not all about what goes on under the hood, about God’s internal affairs, but something that actually does matter to us. First something a little speculative about the disciples in today’s Gospel, then something about God, and last, about us.
First, staying with this spirit of frustration for a moment, I wonder if the disciples didn’t get there before us. This gospel reading from John doesn’t record the reactions of the disciples. It’s mystifying enough to us, but to them — think for a moment. This is the end of Jesus’ public ministry, it’s from the long final discourse with them before the last days of Jesus begin to run their course. They have spent their time with Jesus trying desperately to assimilate everything he was trying to tell them about what is important, about who Jesus was and who the Father was. And of course, especially in the gospel of John, they are always missing it, regularly misunderstanding his role, the stories he told, who he said he was. They took this course in theology and barely passed.
And now what he tells them is, there’s more. If you think you were only getting half of what I was saying before, there’s more that you can’t even begin to understand now. God still has more things to say, and different ways to say them. They could be forgiven for being a little exasperated, since it might seem that an extraordinary burden was being placed on them: We can’t even understand this man Jesus, and there’s still more than this, more to understand, more to do?
That leads us to the second point, about God. What kind of a God does something like this, talks like this in terms of these multiple persons and presences, one after the other? Only one thing, when all is said and done, is really clear about any of this. Everything we hear in this gospel, and really everything we know from the Scriptures about Father and Son and Holy Spirit, reminds us that all these persons are here for us. This is not some internal technical matter that matters only to God, God has these different persons because for the disciples and for us they play different roles in our lives and our history, no one of them fully describes how God works. The Trinity seems to be here to give us different ways of seeing God, different ways of trying to figure out who God is. It certainly suggests that God’s first priority is not neatness, although we can try to describe how it works with terms like “active spiration.” God’s first priority is us, and what we need, and what we must need is not one message, one king and master, but also a Son who is our brother, and a Holy Spirit that is a part of each of us, more and more ways and voices and messages.
So on to the third point: us. The Trinity is not here to confuse us completely, but to remind us that God exists as a relationship, not as a thing or even a single person, but a relationship that wants only to reach us and communicate to us, as Jesus said in the Gospel today, there is constantly more that we need to hear. There are lots of implications of a God that reaches out to us in all these different ways, in all this diversity, but one is certainly that we tend to forget that God is diverse, that he works in so many different ways, and that we are different too in the ways that we relate to him and hear him. Neatness is not our first priority, either. Perhaps God has different ways of being God because we are all different. We sometimes imagine that there is one way to relate to God, one way of being religious, one way of being Catholic, one way of being a family, one way of being a person. We hold ourselves up to a model of unity that doesn’t allow for our own differences. Unity is the gift of the Holy Spirit, we heard that last week, but the Spirit also gives us the power to do what we were meant to do, each of us different from the other.
So there is one of the messages of the Trinity: We have a God who exists not just as a king or a lord, but a God who wants so much to be in relationship with us that God exists in relationship. Confusing, but endlessly interesting, and most interested of all in doing whatever it takes to reach each one of us.