We always say that God is not a puzzle to be solved, but the unfathomable reality within and beyond everything that is, ever has been or ever will be. Yet people do find the doctrine of the Trinity puzzling: somebody recently said to me that it seems as though the Church, at least in the West, is “a little fuzzy about it”. While we should not feel worried if we think we have not fully grasped the reality of God, at the same time we are encouraged to want to understand more deeply. This, after all, is what theology is: faith seeking understanding.
And since the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed to us in and through the life of Christ, and especially the paschal mysteries whose celebration is capped, as it were, by Trinity Sunday, we have to assert that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us – and died and rose again for us – precisely so that we would know God as Trinity. This is true even though the incarn- ation does raise yet more puzzles about the Trinity: when Christ was eng- aged in his earthly ministry, ought we to say that he left two thirds of God behind him in heaven? (Hint: no!) Now that the risen body of the Son is in heaven, does the Trinity have a mat-erial component (again, no, but…).
The best place to start thinking about all this is, of course, the Bible. While it might be true, as many biblical scholars insist, that we cannot read the doctrine of the Trinity straight out of the pages of scripture, we come pretty close to it in chapters 14 to 17 of St John’s Gospel. These words, spoken by Christ at the Last Supper, and culminating in his high-priestly prayer to the Father, may be seen as the first ever homily – by which I mean a sermon preached at Mass – and the first ever Eucharistic Prayer.
And it is fitting that this should be the text from which, more than any others, the Church has discovered and elaborated the truths about God and the relations between the three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
These words of Christ explain the meaning of what is about to take place when he offers his life on the Cross for the salvation of the world. The self-sacrificial death of Jesus is at once an offering to the Father and an offering to us, and it shows us that the love that lies at the heart of the Trinity – we might say, the love that is the Trinity – is identical to the love that drives Jesus to offer his life for his friends.
To put it another way, the Cross shows us the nature of God, and the nature of God is self-giving love. God did not start loving in this way when he became flesh for us, but has loved us thus from all eternity, as the Father loves the Son with a love which is the Holy Spirit. But that love, we might say, spills over into the world. In fact, it is the spilling over of divine love which brings about the creation of all things. It is not that God created the world, or humanity, out of some need in himself. God, by his very nature, lacks nothing, needs nothing. Everything he does as Creator he does not for his sake but for ours, and yet he truly delights in creating us and holding us in being.
That love culminates in the Cross and is most clearly and definitively express-ed there because on the Cross Jesus can offer everything, his very life, visibly and tangibly, within his creation. As he offers his human life to the Father, Jes-us offers his divine life to us, and so St John tells us not that he died but that he “handed over the Spirit”.
The Spirit – the life of God – is given over from the Cross, and received aft-er the Resurrection when the Apostles are commissioned to preach the Gospel and offer forgiveness.
All of this means that, while we can’t say that the Trinity now has a material component, the Ascension and Pentecost taken together do mean that, through the risen body of Christ, the Triune life of God is made known, spread and shared through our material hum-an lives, because in a sense God has raised us up into his own Triune life.
The Trinity is a mystery not to be solved, but to be shared.
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