Trinity Sunday
Matthew 28:16–20
Like me, you may have stayed up late last week to discover the outcome of the General Election. The results were ‘mixed’. And perhaps later you heard the PM on the steps of No. 10 promising to provide certainty at this critical time. Of course, if one thing is certain, the future is always uncertain.
This is Trinity Sunday when traditionally the preacher attempts to clear up any uncertainty about the doctrine of the Trinity. Usually with mixed results. In Alan Bennett’s play Forty Years On there’s a scene that involves a brief conversation between a master and his pupil about the Trinity:
Master: Now you’re sure you’ve got the Catechism all buttoned up, Foster?
Foster: I’m a bit hazy about the Trinity, sir.
Master: Three in one, one in three, perfectly straightforward. Any doubts about that see your maths master!
The theologian Lesslie Newbigin, writing about the Trinity, recalled a trip to Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. The guide book said of the Chapter House ‘Here the monks gathered every Sunday to hear a sermon from the Abbot, except on Trinity Sunday, owing to the difficulty of the subject.’ Like Foster it seems the Abbot was a bit hazy about the Trinity.
I’ve sat through several brave presentations involving ice cubes, water trays and steaming kettles, cans of 3 in 1 oil, jaffa cakes and the good old clover leaf. Sadly, I’m not sure any of them have made me much wiser or more secure in my faith. If this were a service of Mattins today we would be called upon to recite the very long Athanasian Creed. Here’s a tiny snippet of it: ‘the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible… there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated, but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.’ We might sympathize with the choir-boy who whispered: ‘if you ask me the whole blooming thing is incomprehensible!’
I think he’s got it – we can’t reduce God to a definition or a clever demonstration. We can’t limit God to human understanding - for God is beyond it all – beyond time and space – God is eternal and limitless:
Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand…?
Who taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding? All … are as nothing before him.
Yet we don’t need to be hazy about the Trinity, we can be confident in it, indeed we should rejoice in it. Because if the doctrine of the Trinity did not exist it would be necessary to invent it, to account for ordinary Christian experience. C.S. Lewis described Christian prayer like this: ‘An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get in touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God - that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying - the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on - the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. The whole 3-fold life of the 3-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary act of prayer.’
God cannot be fully pictured, but can be known. God cannot be imagined, but can be experienced.
At the close of Matthew’s gospel Jesus gives his eleven remaining disciples what is called the Great Commission: ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.’ This is Jesus’ 3-fold way of ensuring that the Church plays its part in making known the God who is, by nature, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He calls us to be a missionary church that makes disciples. Not just converts but disciples. That is, people who are committed to life-long learning. Another word for disciple is ‘apprentice’. Someone who is learning from a master, in our case, Jesus. Jesus, the Son, is the only one who can teach us how to live well, to live the good life, by God’s values.
We are all called to be his disciples. It’s futile to try and make others what we are not ourselves. To do that we’ll need every encouragement and support – and that brings me to the second part of his charge. To baptize in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is more than words spoken at the font. It’s to immerse others in a community that knows God as Father, Abba; that loves Jesus and wants to be more like him; and is open to the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit. Such a community is immensely attractive and supportive to others and will make God known.
The response to the Manchester bombing and the two London terror-attackers have shown us that people in this country do want to come together and share love not hate. Christ calls the Church to be a community of prayerful love for Father, Son and Holy Spirit that others can join and experience.
Finally, we are to become people who routinely do what Jesus told us to do. His manifesto is summed up in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5,6 and 7). For example, Jesus commands us to forgive others from the heart, to love others, even our enemies. This is, no doubt, a hugely costly way to live. As G. K. Chesterton observed: ‘The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.’ But I suspect this is the only way that we will reach a world that is at best hazy about the Trinity, and at worst deeply opposed to it.
Are we up to the job? What I find quite amazing, and comforting, in our gospel text this morning is that Matthew doesn’t try to white-wash the truth about the eleven: ‘When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.’ After all their years with Jesus, all they had witnessed, including his resurrection, there were still some who doubted. In the midst of our uncertainty, our haziness, and our mixed results, we can still be commissioned by Jesus – because that’s precisely what happened with the first disciples – and think what God was able to do with them.
