Trinity Sunday
The doctrine of the Trinity means that "God consists of three persons and one nature." This is a simple and quick 'catechism' answer. This is akin to having someone ask, "Tell me all about World War II" only to have the other person reply, "The Allies won." 'Three distinct persons; one true God'. That is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. It can be stated in six words, but these words hide both difficulties and riches.
Again, we believe the truth of that claim but as a matter of historical fact, what has become the orthodox teaching about the Trinity took well over 400 years to develop. The word Trinity doesn't appear in the bible. In fact, the word Trinity didn't make its way into the vocabulary of the Church for the first three hundred years of its existence. What's more, this teaching remains, even all these centuries later, famously difficult to grasp.
So where did we get this peculiar teaching from? Ultimately, the bible I suppose. But we're not talking about clear, explicit teaching. The biblical presentation of the Trinity is more like a scattering of puzzle pieces that need to be collected from many and various parts of Scripture, laid out on a table, and then assembled by fitting piece to piece until the picture of God begins to emerge. It was a torturous process that took over 400 years to complete. Very few scholars have dared attempt to dismantle and rearrange that jigsaw since.
What is the point or purpose of such an apparently obscure doctrine? How many of you know the inner working of your computer; yet you work away happily, finding ignorance of these matters to be bliss indeed. In the same way, you sit into your car and drive away without having a clue of what goes on under the bonnet. You don't understand very much of this, but it doesn't matter. What's important to you is how your car runs.
So it is with some of the main doctrines of the Christian faith. People do not have a clue about the doctrine of the Trinity, but they are not worried about it. They can still pray. They can still bless themselves, get their children baptised, recite the Apostles' Creed, sing Trinitarian hymns. They do not understand an absolutely central doctrine of the faith and they get along just fine.
But the doctrine does add a bit of dept to our faith. The God we worship is a community of persons. Our destiny lies in community here (the community of the Church) and in eternal communion in the life to come, we believe. That is our ultimate destiny. This represents a great challenge for us. This has implications for the way we should strive to live our lives: concern for the other must inform every individual action of ours. If we are to look like a God who is one while also being three, how well do we do in forming bonds of deep love and unity with the people around us? In our marriages, do we show that the two have become one flesh? In our church communities, do we show that the many parts of the body are still just one body? The God we worship is a community of persons.
Again, the feast of the Trinity is not a question of human understanding but of religious experience. I came across an analogy in a magazine during the week that some of you may find helpful in approaching this Christian mystery. It is a reflection by a mother on the many hats that she is forced to wear in the course of her experienced life. It reads as follows:
I am a daughter, a wife and a mother; three things, yet I am one totality.
To my parents, I would always be their child,
To my husband, a companion and mate,
to my children, the one who gave them birth and nurtured them to the adult state.
I seem to each of them a different person;
They each know a different type of 'me',
But I am one, within myself a trinity,
and each of them finds unity in me.