Isaiah 6.1-8, Ps 29, Rom 8.12-17, John 3.1-17
Most people love a puzzle. Some do Sudokus, some do
crossword puzzles, some do jigsaws. We may not always be very good at them; we
may sometimes struggle, but that moment when the last piece falls into place,
the last square of the grid is filled in is profoundly satisfying. Last week I engaged
in a different sort of puzzle, but one which is just as absorbing. Philip and I
took a few days off and went down to the West Country to visit our parents, but
while we were there I took the opportunity to do some chasing up of family
history, which is basically a long line of dirt poor labourers and fishermen –
no illustrious ancestors, but a great deal of personal interest.
So I dragged poor Philip around assorted tiny Devon villages
in the back of beyond, and we traipsed around damp churchyards, despite knowing
that most of my ancestors were too poor to have had headstones. But at the end
I had managed to fit a few more bits of the family history puzzle together ,
and Philip still seems to be talking to me so there’s no harm done!
Just like those other puzzles it was good to be able to fill
in some gaps, but unlike the Sudokus, crosswords and jigsaws, the answers I
found, as ever with family history, simply threw up a new set of questions. And
while I may be able to find some more births, deaths and marriages to add to
the family tree, I know there are many things I will never find out. Some
questions will always remain unanswerable. What were these people like? What
did they dream about and hope for? If we had met, would we have liked each
other? I’ll never know.
What’s all this got to do with Trinity Sunday? Well, the
Trinity is a puzzle if ever I saw one. One God, three persons; you couldn’t
make it up, and frankly you wouldn’t want to. It’s a puzzle that has occupied
theologians for most of the Church’s history. The word “Trinity” doesn’t appear in the Bible.
It was coined by the Christian writer Tertullian around 200 years after the
birth of Christ. But his contribution was just the latest in a debate about God
which had been going on almost from the beginning of the Church.
Those who first followed Christ already knew of God as
Father and Creator, but then in Jesus, they had felt as if they were meeting
that God for themselves, God in the flesh, God incarnate. The Holy Spirit is
mentioned often in the Old Testament, but on the Day of Pentecost they had
their own very powerful encounter with the Spirit as well. They had met God in
three forms; Father, Son and Spirit. But how did they fit together? Most of the
first Christians were Jewish by birth. They’d grown up believing in one God,
and it was a distinctive part of their faith, so how could Jesus be God too,
especially as he had died on a cross? What happened to God when Jesus lay dead
in the tomb? Was part of God dead? And what about that Holy Spirit? Was that
the Spirit of the Father, or the Spirit of Jesus, or both, or neither? Their
arguments about these issues rumbled on for centuries, and frankly they are often
mind-numbingly boring, so I’ll spare you the detail. Suffice it to say that one
question led to another, and every attempt at a solution created more problems
in its wake.
Rather like my experiences with family history, the amount
we know about God, or could ever know, is dwarfed by the questions that remain
unanswered and unanswerable. Ultimately, both history and the divine are mysteries
rather than puzzles – things that can be endlessly explored, but never wholly
known. But in our tidy-minded human ways, we find it hard to live with that
sort of uncertainty. We want everything
sorted out, preferably in a neat package which we can easily grasp and explain.
We aren’t alone in wanting to find answers to the questions
that bug us. In our readings today, there are two people who are also puzzling
over things that are beyond them.
Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, in the dark. That’s
partly because he doesn’t want to be spotted. He is a Jewish leader, one of the
members of the Sanhedrin, the ruling council, and a religious expert too. What
will people think if they see him going to talk to this new young firebrand of
a teacher? Nicodemus thought he knew what God was like, what it looked like to
follow him, but something about Jesus has radically challenged him. God seems
to be using Jesus and blessing his work, yet he doesn’t keep the religious
rules Nicodemus has grown up with. How can that be? The darkness against which
the story is set is as much inside Nicodemus as outside.
And Jesus doesn’t make it any easier by his response to
Nicodemus’ questions. If you are going to see what God is doing, how he is
building his new kingdom here on earth what you need, says Jesus, is a
whole new life. You must be born
from above, born again. That confuses Nicodemus even more. How can he go
back into his mother’s womb? Jesus’ words seem ridiculous, and he is justified
in thinking that. For him to start following Jesus would mean leaving behind
everything that has given him security; his place in the establishment, the respect
of his community. No wonder it feels impossible. It is very hard to change our
lives and our minds as radically as Nicodemus would need to,so I can understand
his reaction. Perhaps it’s no surprise that he slips away without taking it any
further. But the questions don’t go away. Nicodemus pops up twice more in
John’s Gospel – the only Gospel he appears in – and it looks as if this
conversation has made a difference, even if it takes a long time for him to
realise it. In Chapter 7 we find him arguing with the Sanhedrin, saying that
they shouldn’t condemn Jesus without giving him an opportunity to defend
himself. But Jesus is crucified anyway,
and it’s only after this that Nicodemus appears for the final time finally coming
out of the shadows and committing himself, providing the spices and oils to
anoint Jesus’ body at his burial. Finally, and apparently too late, the penny
has dropped. Fortunately, the resurrection is just around the corner, and while
we don’t hear of Nicodemus again, from
the fact that he is included in the Gospels we can assume he became a Christian
and was known to the early Christian community.
In the Old Testament, the new start the prophet Isaiah needs
comes much more quickly, but his puzzlement is just as deep at the outset. He
has a vision of God. He wasn’t anticipating it and he doesn’t feel ready for
it. He can’t understand how he is even surviving the experience. But unlike
Nicodemus, his response to this terrifying sight is profound obedience and love.
“Here am I; send me!” he cries out. He can’t stop himself. He doesn’t know what
God is doing, wanting, thinking, asking, but he knows he wants to be part of
it.
Neither of these readings is directly about the Trinity,
because, as I’ve said, it’s not mentioned in the Bible at all, but in a way
both of them express the most important truths at the centre of this mysterious
doctrine. They underline what those who came up with the idea of the Trinity
were trying to tell us by it, things they thought were vital for us to know,
not to satisfy our intellectual curiosity, but because they make a real
difference to the way we live.
Firstly the doctrine of the Trinity says that although we may
get glimpses of God through Christ and through his Spirit, God is also always
going to be mysterious to us, beyond our understanding. “God cannot be
grasped by the mind,” said one ancient writer called Evagrius of Pontus, “if
he could be grasped, he would not be God.” The mystery which so confuses us is part of the
message. If we think we’ve got God sorted out, as Nicodemus does at the outset,
we usually go on to assume we know what he thinks. Then we start making rules
to defend our view of him, rules that all too often exclude and hurt others as well as ourselves. If we
try to put God in a box of our own understanding, we are bound to find that the
box is too small, because our minds will never be able to contain the infinite,
and the result will be that the life and love are gradually squeezed out of our
faith, and the box becomes a coffin.
Secondly, the doctrine of the Trinity tells us that rather
than being some rigid divine hierarchy, or worse still a lone figure on a
distant cloud, at God’s heart there is a community of love. The early
theologians described the relationship between the Father, Son and Spirit with
the Greek word perichoresis, which means “dancing around each other” –
we get choreography and chorus line from the same word. There’s a dance going on
at the heart of God, says this doctrine, a dance of love which is seen in the
trust Jesus has for his Father and his openness to the prompting of the Spirit.
And thirdly the doctrine says that this dynamic, active,
dancing God wants us to be part of what he is doing. “Whom shall I send, and
who will go for us?” asks God in the Old Testament. And in the Gospels Jesus
invites Nicodemus to be blown along by the Spirit, going where it leads, part
of the new creation God is making. Not
only is there a dance going on in the heart of God, but it’s a dance we are all
invited to.
Whatever the mysteries my family history might reveal or
hide, the most important identity we can all find is the identity God gives us.
As Paul puts it, “We are children of
God and if children then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” We are called to be part of the dance of God’s
love, caught up in its glory and leading others to join it too. That’s not
something we will ever understand, but it is a mystery and a joy we can never
come to the end of, and if we have any sense, we would never want to.
Amen
For a good summary of the
doctrine of the Trinity see: www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/beliefs/trinity_1.shtml
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