Well Yes But No

Holy Trinity, by Dawid Zdobylak

Midweek Vespers

The Second Week of Easter

A Reading from John’s Gospel:

I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

The Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

There is no “I” without “you.” And this, it seems, is true even for God.

Preaching on the Trinity is always a minefield. One easily stumbles into the pitfall of bad metaphor. “God is like this; God is like that.” Well, yes, but actually no. And this is a necessary limitation of language. God is infinite, eternal, limitless, beyond all categories, beyond all words. And so we cannot in a strict sense say what God is—not if we’re being literalistic. We can only use analogies. And analogies impart truths, just not ultimate Truth.

So we must always be humble when speaking of God, lest the images we conjure become idols of our own making, competitors to the mystery of just who and what God is.

Trinity is mystery. It seems to make no logical sense. How can something be one and yet three? Yet I promise you that the biblical authors and Fathers of the Church had a strong grasp of mathematics and of logic. They did not tolerate nonsense. The Trinity is the way we speak of God in light of Jesus Christ. We possess this conviction, this inescapable revelation, that Christ is somehow God; and that His Father is God; and that His Holy Spirit around and within us is God; yet there is, necessarily, only One God.

You see, there cannot be two Gods, because if there were, each would have to possess something which the other did not, in order to distinguish them at all. This would mean that each would have to have a limitation, a lack. And God, by definition, is infinite. He has no lack. He alone is pure actuality. He alone is subsistent existence itself: not a being, but Being itself, with a capital B.

Yet here’s the trick: there is no “I” without “you.” Trite but true. Dumitru Staniloae wrote that “an ‘I’ without another ‘I’ and without an object, that is, a subject sunk within itself, is robbed of all reality.” The notion of identity, of knowing who I am, loses all meaning if I am all there is. Personhood, however defined, is only possible in community. So where does God’s Personhood come from? What gives meaning to the “I” in “I AM”?

It can’t come from Creation, because then Creation, in some sense, would have created the Creator, and thus there could be neither Creator nor Creation in any meaningful sense. God’s Personhood must come from within God’s own Self. God must know Himself. And if He knows Himself perfectly—if the Image of God within God is a truly flawless reflection—then the Image is God as well. Thus God Himself is Subject, Object, and Verb within the Godhead: He is the Knower, the Knowledge, the Knowing; the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love.

We can imagine this, because our own minds work in this way. All of us have an image of ourselves inside of our own head. And we are in relationship with that image. We both love and hate ourselves for who we think we are. But the image of me in my head is not perfect. It is constructed. It is obscure. It’s more about who I want to be, or fear to be. Yet this is not so with God. God’s Image of Himself is perfect: perfectly known, perfectly loved. The Image of God is God.

And so only in this way can God be truly One: if God is also Three. Otherwise God could not know God, and thus not be God. There’s a paradox for you.

This means, of course, that God does not need the Creation. He does not need us. We don’t give to Him anything that God did not already have. We don’t make Him anything that God was not already. And this is wonderful news. Because it means that God did not create us out of necessity, but out of love. He does not need us; He chooses us. How wonderful to know that all God suffered in the Person of Jesus Christ—the lash, the thorns, the cross, the spear—none of that was necessary. None of that was for Himself. All of that was His choice.

We are His choice. God chooses to love us all the way to hell and back.

Again, all of this is analogy. All of this is mystery. God is not a mind; but He’s more like our minds than anything else we know. God is not a person as we are, but has more personality than we ever could. God is not One or Three in the sense that things on earth are one or three. He is beyond even our concept of numbers. So why talk in this way? Why use words for the God who transcends anything that we can say about Him? Simply for this reason: that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Jesus is all we know of God. Even the Father and the Spirit we know only as Jesus’ Father, Jesus’ Spirit. So don’t get hung up on the headiness or the terminology. Know that God is beyond us, around us, within us, and one of us. Know that in Jesus, we are one even as He and the Father are One. The community of the Church is yet a pale reflection, as in a glass darkly. We do not know each other perfectly; we do not love each other perfectly. What we will be has not yet been revealed. And any fool can tell you that our oneness appears aspirational at best.

Yet we are called to be Christ’s Body, to be images of the Image of God. And that must mean that Christians ever strive to understand one another, all peoples, all Creation; and to love one another, all peoples, all Creation. And the form that love will take must be a mirror, however tarnished, of the love that the Father pours into His Son, and that the Son in His Spirit pours out for this world.

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.