Trinity Sunday 1997

Being intimate with each other

It may well be the mark of incipient senility, or it may be a sign of spiritual growth, but this is the first Sunday I can remember in my life when the prospect of preaching on Trinity Sunday did not exasperate and terrify me. I think it is because in the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about this feast and it has now become friendly to me.

What are we celebrating when we celebrate the God who is triune, the God who is communitarian? I didn’t get a chance to check the readings for the other two years in the cycles of readings, the so-called years "A" and "C", this is year "B", but I would hope that at least one of them would have a passage from the great Farewell Discourse, from the seventeenth chapter in the Gospel of John. It is probably one of the most stunning statements in the entire New Testament where Jesus is depicted as praying that we human beings be as intimate with each other as God the Father and Jesus are. That’s the key. That’s why all of a sudden to talk about God as triune, as the early Greek theologians talked about it, is not to think about God only in terms of God’s own self, but God for us. That is the great distinction that was regularly made in the first two centuries of Christian Theology.

What does it mean to say God is triune and God is for us? Well, that passage from John says everything. It means a kind of intimacy wherein we are brought into, again as the Greek theologians liked to say, a deified state. They literally used that word, we are to be deified, we are to enter the Godhead. And the shape of that entry is precisely that kind of radical transparency that not only the Father, Son, and the Spirit have with each other, but into which we are drawn. And, as the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible say over and over, you cannot talk about God out there sharing that profound intimacy without talking about us being included. For us to say that we believe in a triune God is at that very point to say I believe in the possibility, the inevitability, that that is the final condition of us human beings. I think this line of thought is safe as long as it stays on an elevated level of generality and until we begin to see what that kind of intimacy would entail.

Here I think we can take a cue from that famous passage that was read from Paul’s Letter to the Church at Rome: "We did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear." This is echoed of course in the First Letter of John where the great enemy of love, the great enemy of all intimacy, is precisely that: fear. Our lives are permeated by fear of each other, of our own unreliability, and of life itself, because I think the experience of many of us for much of the time is that the environment within which our existence is played out is not a particularly hospitable one. And so that fear is ramified and articulated in any number of ways. I really do believe it reduces to fear of ourselves, fear of the other, and fear of the world. I mean, the great FDR told us," The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, " and everybody nods sagely, "Oh, that’s very good, that’s very good..." But I propose that it is only when we see our relations against these Trinitarian interrelationships, that kind of intimacy, that kind of interpenetration, that the real shape, and depth, and pervasiveness, of the fear within which we live becomes apparent. I mean it is always possible to go whistling past the graveyard and say, "I’m not afraid of anythin’, nobody bothers me..." The assumption is that I can terrify anybody who attempts to bother me. So we’re radically shrouded, and the word is chosen advisedly, in fear, this living death which marks so much of our so-called living.

What we’re doing today is what we always do when we gather with that vision of Jesus and the life that he lived: we are celebrating an impossible vision. The difficulty may well be, I think, precisely to apprehend the degree of its impossibility because I think we always tend to grossly overestimate what we can manage, and therefore curtail the vision that Jesus embodied in his own living and dying. So the Feast of the Trinity calls us to some kind of introspection as to who we really are and how we really operate. And maybe, since this is the last Sunday in the Marian month we can look at that figure so ambiguous in Christian history, the figure of Mary. When I was a little kid Mary was a kind of mother figure behind whose skirts I was to hide when approaching God. God’s pretty tough so you just go to Mary: she’ll sort of soften up the old man. That’s disgusting. That is profoundly disgusting because it is a radical trivialising of the demand, and the real prospect to which we are called when we say we believe in God, the God Almighty, etceteras, etceteras, etceteras. The new image of Mary which bit by bit is being allowed to transform our consciousness is that of a woman absolutely enabled to act with extraordinary audacity, to risk herself altogether precisely because she took that vision of intimacy with the utmost seriousness and consequently was liberated to act in that fashion.

So Trinity Sunday doesn’t scare me anymore, at least not in the kind of infantile way that so much of my religious upbringing abetted and even demanded. Now I am able to begin to assess the truly demanding, and exhausting, and exhilarating, extent of what it means to follow Jesus. And so it is very useful to have a Baptism today...

To other sermons

RT 8/5/97