A Reflection by Frances Flatman on the Readings for Trinity Sunday :
Our Readings, especially due to their brevity, do not seem particularly designed to help us appreciate this great doctrine; that God is a threefold entity, worshipped in Father, Son and Spirit distinct and meaningful each in themselves. It’s something as Christians that we all know and recite regularly, or hear in the blessings given by priests; but why is it important? Why not simply ‘God’, or indeed any number of words giving shape and meaning to deity? The story behind all this, as we shall see, is a long and tortuous one derived in part from the Old Testament and the progress in understanding and thought gained by the earliest Christians from Jesus, and then coming to fruition in the work of St Paul and the writers of the Gospels. Slowly, very slowly, the Christian communities stuck with this understanding of God, and, between the late 2nd- 4th centuries crystallised this teaching in faithfulness to the Scriptures and the teaching of Jesus until by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, presided over by the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, they had hammered out a Creed, a binding statement of belief. Of course, there were attempts by various churches to produce these earlier, mostly by Eastern communities, but this one became the uniform version accepted by most of the Christian world, though not without quite a struggle as thinkers questioned the implications of such a belief as they were to do later in thinking about the nature of Christ.
So we begin with our Reading from Exodus (34:4-6,8-9), looking at things from a Jewish point of view. It might all make a bit more sense if we had had a longer Reading, for prior to our text, we find Moses and Israel being given instructions for worship by God including the law of Sabbath worship. Moses went up Mt Sinai to commune with God, who appeared ‘in the form of a cloud’, and received the tablets of the law, clearly communing with the ‘divine presence’ in akin to the Spirit; but meanwhile in his absence Israel sinned and made the Golden calf. Despite this we meet God’s promise to Israel via ‘angels’, and we find that Moses places a tent outside the camp in which the presence of God dwelt. Indeed, Israel on its Exodus journey is guided by a fire by night and a cloud by day (God’s presence), and as Moses intercedes with God for sinful Israel he is told, ‘My presence will go with you.’ Clearly then, the travellers were guided and instructed by God, not in his figure nor as a man. So within all this, for elsewhere prophets might meet a heavenly ‘form’ or hear a voice, we have a sense that God can and does approach his people, to be with them and guide them. Indeed, in Genesis 1 God’s Spirit works on the face of the waters in creation. God it appears can communicate with us in more ways than one, yet Israel’s thought on the ‘How’ of this remained varied and unclear.
Then we seem to make a great leap forward to Christian times, with the writings of St Paul. Paul wrote before the Gospels were committed to paper, indeed he died in 63 CE. What is surprising is that his trinitarian formula appears very early. Thessalonians, the earliest, coming from about 49-50 CE, and as we think the crucifixion was in 33 CE that’s very soon. Many of his letters begin and end with the well known trinitarian formula we have here in 2 Corinthians (13:11-13). It’s there in Thessalonians, in Corinthians and Romans, his latest letter. Paul does not give us any understanding of the development of his thinking, for his writings are mostly about specific issues facing different churches, be it their awful morals, their faith especially during persecution, or simply encouragement to perseverance; yet all is done not by Paul’s own ‘rule’ of his churches but within the power and presence of the God he knew to be triune, Father, Son and Spirit; God, who here has sent the Son into the world for our salvation; Christ whose ‘grace’ is imparted by his presence and saving death for our redemption, and within the fellowship of the Spirit’ which is a living entity within the Christian communities. Jesus himself must have used precisely this kind of language in his teaching to the disciples so that it found a place in their continuing life and ultimately within the Gospels.
In our Gospel, (John 3:16-18), written around 80 CE we get a bit more clarity. We have to remember that the teenage John was very close to the earthly Jesus and in his long life and ministry had time to ponder Jesus’ teachings, for his Gospel is redolent with trinitarian thought – Spirit, Paraclete, ‘I will not leave you comfortless …’ Here this teaching is gently dropped in during Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, a Pharisee and secret visitor to Jesus, who is puzzled by Jesus’ ‘signs’ of divine presence and yet his apparent unorthodoxy. We have only a bit of the dialogue in which Jesus picks up on his Mosaic faith and takes it to its conclusion in his own incarnation and sacrifice on the cross for our salvation, and makes clear that only in his, Jesus own life and actions, can anyone enter ‘eternal life’ Here we join the text as Jesus speaks of God’s ‘love’ for the world in and through the Son. Now, as God is wholly other and without the attributes we have, such as intellect, will, happiness or perseverance, and was deemed especially so by Jews, clearly any sending of a Son, born fully human as we are, speaks of something more than the insight and abilities of prophets and seers who were never understood in this way but as God’s agents like the rest of us. God the Son, elsewhere understood in John as ‘The Father and I are one’, (14:8-11) speaks of a linked identity, on the level of the being of God the Father, and not of a gift acquired through training or experience. ‘For God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, (which prophets frequently did), but so that through him the world might be saved.’ As the fulness of God uniquely in the world, Jesus can achieve for us what no other man or woman could. Jesus, God the Son has divine powers, witnessed by his ‘signs, for within him the divine presence is unflawed and he therefore is the only path to eternal life, through, in and with Father and Spirit. Jesus works with Nicodemus to enable him to ‘see’ that the destiny of our so marred creation is to share the life of God, which must have come to him as a tremendous shock, for he and we have been taught to think of ourselves as infinitely inferior, grubby and unworthy. Jesus works to insist that contrary to our experience of life in a fallen world, the cosmos and we in it are created for glory, a sharing in God’s life.
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