Isaiah 6:1 – 8 / Psalm 29 / Romans 8:12 – 17 / John 3:1- 17
This is the
homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, May 30,
2020.
“GRAPPLING WITH THE MYSTERY OF THE HOLY TRINITY”
Some
things in life are mysteries, that is to say, they are elements of life which
we understand in part, but we don’t understand fully. For example, in my
earlier life as a professional singer, we used to say, “Trying to learn to sing
is a little like trying to grab hold of a cloud….by the time you think you’ve
gotten hold of it, it’s changed shape.”
(I suspect that many singers would agree with that statement!)
The
mystery of the nature of God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is – at least in part
– a mystery. Of course, one reason for that is that God is God and we are not.
We know what we know about God’s nature and God’s ways because God Himself has
revealed that to us. If God hadn’t revealed those things to us, I imagine we’d
know very little, if anything, about God at all.
On
this Trinity Sunday, the Church Year invites us to reflect on God’s nature, the
fullness of God’s nature as One God in Three Persons. (That’s the classical way
of describing the Holy Trinity.) The focus, liturgically, on this day is on the
very nature of the God who has called us into relationship with Himself. We do
this because we are poised now, on this day, to venture forth into the world as
the season after Pentecost unfolds. That season after the great feast of Pentecost
invites us to grow our faith (hence the liturgical color is green, the color
that denotes growth and life). So we venture forth into the world, recalling at
each step of life as it unfolds in this season the God who loves us, who
inspires us, who guides us, and who fits us out for ministry in His name.
As
we read the pages of Holy Scripture, the Old and the New Testaments, it’s clear
that the understanding of God’s nature changed radically with the coming of our
Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, many theologians maintain that it is the Christ
Event (a term which describes everything related to Jesus Christ, His teaching,
His love for people, His suffering, death and resurrection, His ascension into
heaven, etc.) that is the signal event which prompted a new reflection on God’s
nature, and the resulting fuller understanding of God as Father, Son and Holy
Spirit.
It
might be helpful, therefore, to reflect briefly on what we know about the
concepts of God’s nature as they existed before the coming of Christ, that is,
in Old Testament times. Then, let’s look at the changed understandings as they
came to be (over a period of some 400 years or so) in the Church.
We’ll
begin with the ancient understandings of God.
The
Old Testament provides us with a picture of a God who had, in very ancient
times, an intimate relationship with human beings. God is said to have walked
with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, for example. God spoke directly to Abraham and to Moses.
God,
in Exodus, is the giver of the Law (Torah). God is a righteous God, one
who punishes wrongdoing and sin. God is both protector of the people He has
claimed for Himself, but also the God who reproves and punishes them when they
disobey or when they fall into idolatry.
Over
time, God’s relationship with His people had grown distant. The voices of the
prophets ceased to proclaim God’s truths. God had come to be seen as the God
who blessed those who kept the Law of Moses, but who punished those who didn’t.
The
Spirit of God was seen as something that emanated from God, as in Genesis,
chapter one, where we read that God’s Spirit hovered over the chaos of the
unformed creation. So the Spirit had creative powers, but those creative
powers, I think we can say, were seen as a reality in the distant past.
With
the coming of Christ, a radical change took place.
Jesus
related to God by calling God His Father, something that the Jews of His day
reacted to quite strongly. To claim such a relationship was to claim a share in
God’s divinity, after all. Such a thought was anathema to those who heard it
2,000 years ago.
Moreover,
Jesus kept reminding those who heard Him that God’s essential nature is one of
love. God is the holy and righteous God, to be sure, but God’s nature is also
to love, to love abundantly and freely. Somehow, the people God had claimed for
Himself had forgotten that truth.
Jesus
also kept saying that God’s kingdom is close at hand. That kingdom isn’t
something that is in the far distant past, nor is it in some far off,
wished-for, future. God’s interaction with human beings is immediate and
ongoing, Jesus said.
Then,
the Lord said that God was going to send His Spirit in a new and palpable way,
which that Spirit did at Pentecost. Here we might pause for a moment to remind
ourselves that God’s nature is unchanging. But our human nature is in need of
reminding when it comes to understanding that divine nature, and our human
nature needs, from time to time, a jolt to get us to see God clearly again.
No
longer was the Spirit seen as something that went forth from God, but the
Spirit was God in all of God’s fulness and power. In a real sense, the human
understanding of the divine nature elevated the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, to a
fuller and more important place in our appreciation of the Holy Spirit’s
relationship to the Father and to the Son.
Whenever God reveals something of His nature to us, it often
takes us awhile to grasp the full meaning of what God has done. So it was that
the Church wrestled with the nature of the Godhead for over 400 years. The
church wrestled with the nature of Jesus Christ as both God and man, whose dual
natures were totally intertwined without confusing either one. The Church
finally articulated the understanding we’ve come to accept about Jesus Christ’s
nature in the Council of Chalcedon, in the year 453 AD. (You can read the
statement from the Council about our Lord’s nature in the Book of Common Prayer at page 864.)
And so, we go forth into the green season of Pentecost,
carrying with us the Good News (Gospel) of Jesus Christ, He who is one with the
Father, but also with the Spirit. One God in three Persons, the blessed Trinity:
God in all of God’s fullness, God who is completely united in the
distinctiveness of one God, but in three Persons.
AMEN.
