Trinity Sunday 

John 16: 12-15

Rev Andy Braunston 

Introduction 

Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday – it is a day to think about the nature of God – whom we experience as a Trinity – three persons in one being.  The festival is placed after the Easter season as it draws together the main themes of Christianity: God the Father who loved the world, Jesus God the Son who died for the world and God the Holy Spirit who comes to renew the world.   

But there is a problem in trying to understand the nature of God – we try to put into fallible human words the indescribable, the ultimate, the infinite and the mysterious.  It is no wonder that the Trinity is Christianity’s most difficult doctrine – Jews and Muslims reject this idea of God being known in three persons, and many sub Christian churches like the Unitarians and Jehovah’s Witnesses reject it too.  Yet the doctrine of the Trinity has been at the heart of Christian truth all along, and we have to get to grips with the doctrine if we are to really to start to experience and understand the mystery which is God.     

Doctrine of the Trinity – what is it? 

The doctrine of the Trinity is not found in the New Testament. It was formulated by the Church. No doubt, Gregory of Nyssa and the Early Church fathers needed lots of Neurofen as they laboured over the definitions of the Trinity which baffle us to this day. But the doctrine was not spun out of thin air. It was the conclusion about God to which Christians were driven by their experience of mission and worship.  The doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to make sense of what the earliest Christians experienced, worshipped and felt about the nature of God.  It is born out of prayer and our human experiences of the Divine presence.   
 
For all the problems that arise if you say that one and one and one make one, they could find no other adequate explanation of their encounter with God in Christ by his Spirit. Nor, they insisted, was the formula of God being Three in One — even if never defined in the Bible – unscriptural.  A Trinitarian understanding of God, they held, is already implied by such passages as we read in the Gospels. 

Christians have long turned to the “farewell discourses” of John’s Gospel as a commentary on the doctrine of the Trinity. The fluidity of John’s language in these discourses conveys something of the “circulation of divine love” that — so the Church came to hold — constitutes the triune relationship of Creator, Redeemer, and Inspirer. Whoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father (John 14.9). Jesus is in the Father and the Father in him (John 14.10). Jesus is coming (John 14.3); the Spirit is coming (John 16.13). 
 
Ideas surface, then submerge, and then, subtly modified, drift to the surface again. The strange elusiveness of the language — “Soon you won’t see me; soon you will” (John 16.16) — suggests a mystery to be expressed only in paradox. So, in today’s short Gospel reading, we learn from John that when the promised Spirit speaks, it is the word of Jesus we hear, and that all that the Father has Jesus has made his own.  It’s the idea that behind these different persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit there is one being.   

Rublev’s Icon 

Now you may be wishing you had brought your own Neurofen to church with you!  However, pictures are often better than words to express an idea.  In your order of worship you received a print of Andrei Rublev’s 15th century icon depicting the three angels who visited Abraham at the Oak of Mamre.  The picture is based on a passage in Genesis (18.1-8).  It has long been interpreted as an icon of the Trinity.  

This sublime image does not “illustrate” the Trinity, although there is clearly more to be seen here than the meeting of three strangers at a table. There are “Trinitarian dimensions” to the icon 

• the relationship of the three figures: they show deference to each other, no one is reaching out to the cup, they all incline their heads, their hands seem to be blessing.  

• the likeness of the faces — they look different yet essentially the same.

 
Then there are other images of God in the picture.  We can see the rock under the table.  God is described in the Psalms as a rock upon which we stand fast.  There is the wine used in churches each week as a sign of, and which also conveys, Jesus’ blood poured out for our sins.  Then there is a tree – perhaps a symbol of the Holy Spirit which speaks of growth and renewal. 

Yet icons do not give up their secrets quickly. Reading an icon is not simply an exercise in decoding in the way that the protagonists in the Da Vinci Code try and decode famous paintings.   We must stay with Rublev’s icon, allowing it to lead us beyond ourselves and to lead us into prayer.  Take the card home and use it this week as you pray.  Look at it and use it as a way into God’s presence.  See the dynamic community which is God, where there is love flowing between the persons, an equality of relationship a balance and equilibrium which is an example for how our human relationships should be structured.   

Conclusion 

We don’t as much think about but experience the Trinity, as we experience and encounter God.  We are drawn into the dynamic relationship of God as Lover, God the Beloved and God as Love.  We are drawn into the life of this force of love that we call God and find that we then spread that love which we experience to others.  So as you pray this week, rest in the love of God which is dynamic, fluid, all encompassing and which draws us into the life of the Trinity. 

(Andy Braunston)