The Maskless God

Propers: Holy Trinity Sunday, AD 2021 B

Homily:

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

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

When one asks what Christians mean when we speak of God as Trinity, the most common answer is that we believe in One God in Three Persons: Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit. And this caused me no end of confusion as a child.

I could never quite get my head around how this was supposed to work. By and large, the best I could seem to do was to imagine God as a sort of board of directors: three guys who got together each morning around a table with some coffee to vote on—well, everything, I suppose. And they just always happened to agree.

It’s that word “person” that really threw me for a loop. Person to me meant three different minds, three different wills, three different gods. And breaking down the etymology didn’t help much either. “Person” comes from persona, that is, something that you “speak through.” Originally it meant a theatrical mask. Your persona is a mask that you wear, a role that you play for an audience. It isn’t who you really are; the character is not the actor. So then, are the Persons not God?

This would be a good time to warn you that Holy Trinity is often referred to by clergy as “Heresy Sunday” or “Bad Theology Day.” It’s when pastors typically attempt to explain our understanding of God by using just terrible metaphors. “Well, Johnny, it’s like how one man can be both a father, a husband, and a son.” No, it’s not. “Well, Francine, it’s like how water can be solid, liquid, or gas.” Again, no.

Most clerics are reluctant to speak directly about the Trinity for fear that their colleagues will accuse them of heresy; or worse, they won’t talk about it because they know that they don’t really understand it for themselves. So we end up with a religion whose central mystery is this notion of One God in Three Persons, along with scads of clergy who either won’t talk about what that means, or who really shouldn’t talk about what they think that it means. It’s all a bit farcical, really. God must have a great deal of patience and humor. Otherwise we’re all in trouble.

So today I intend to say three things about the Trinity, along with a prayer that the Holy Spirit guard me from false preaching and succeed wheresoever I shall fail.

The first is my regular reminder that whenever we speak of God we speak analogously. God Himself is infinite; He is beyond anything we could ever think or say or understand. And so whatever words we use for God, He is always greater, always better, always more. But this doesn’t mean that we cannot speak of God at all. We speak of God in analogy. And analogies are true. It’s just that analogies are truths that point beyond themselves to a greater Truth.

For example: we say that God is good. And this is true. But this does not mean that God is good in the way that you or I may or may not be good. Rather, it means that any goodness we have ever known, any good thing we experience here below, is but a pale reflection of the true Good who is God. When Jesus says that God alone is good, He doesn’t mean that everything else is bad, but that all that is good is only good because it is of God. Okay?

The same goes for when we talk about God as Goodness, Truth, and Beauty; as Consciousness, Being, and Bliss; as Subsistent Existence Itself; and as Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit. It is analogy. God is not a father in the way I am a father. Rather, any true fatherhood in me is but a reflection of the one true Father who is God. Make sense? God is also the only true Son, and the only true Spirit. We ourselves are analogies. Anything true in us points to the Truth beyond us, points to God.

This even works for numbers, mind you. We say that God is One, because logically, there cannot be more than one God. For there to be two or more gods, each would have possess some attribute that the others lack; else there could be no distinction at all. But to lack something would be finite, and God is infinite. Ergo God must be One. But He’s not one in the way that you or I are one. He’s not even one in the way that the number one is one. Numbers are also analogies whenever we speak of God.

So don’t get hung up on the fact that one does not equal three. We know this. The ancients were actually pretty darn good at math. And generally they were better than we are when it comes to logic, philosophy, and theology.

The second thing I want to say about the Trinity is that it is the logical extension of Christology. Now what do I mean by that? Well, believing in God doesn’t make Christianity anything special. Most everyone believes in God. And most every religious and philosophical system on the planet would agree so far with everything I’ve said: about God, infinity, analogy, all that. Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Platonists, even some Buddhists and Taoists, we’re all on the same page.

What makes Christianity unique is Jesus Christ: specifically the conviction that Jesus wasn’t just some prophet or great moral teacher, but was in fact God Himself on earth; God in the flesh, God become one of us; to forgive us and heal us and liberate us all from sin and death and hell and hate. In Jesus, God has died for us, for love of us, at our hands and for our sake. And in Jesus, all the world will be one day resurrected, when God at the last shall be all in all.

Belief in God is no scandal; it’s really default humanity. But to believe that God became Man, and that we murdered Him for it—well, that offends people still today. How could the infinite God in heaven be a rabbi crucified for all the world to see? What’s more, when Christ gave us His Spirit, when He put everything that He is into us, we now have God beyond us, beside us, and within us, all at the same time. Which one is the real God? How can God be all these things and still be one God?

The good news is that this wasn’t as new a thing as we might think. The notion of multiplicity within the Godhead, that God can be many things at once and still be one God, is found in every monotheistic religion, and in the Hebrew Scriptures. There’s always been this problem of how finite creatures might come to know an infinite, transcendent God. It only works if there’s an intermediary; it only works if God somehow comes down. In the Old Testament, this is the person called Wisdom.

Wisdom is God come down, the Creator entering Creation, as Word and as Spirit; as Logic and as Life. The Old Testament speaks of woman Wisdom as both God and yet from God; as both Creator, yet firstborn of Creation. She is the divine on this earth. Wisdom is God as His own intermediary. The Father in heaven does not send an angel; He does not send a prophet; He sends to us His own Holy Wisdom and She is who God is.

When John says that Jesus is the Word of God, when Paul says that Jesus is the Wisdom of God, we know that means He’s God, as surely as is the Father in heaven, as surely as is the Spirit within. All are One, and all are God: really, truly, fully God. Belief in the Trinity is simply the belief that Jesus is who He says that He is. Jesus is God’s Wisdom; Jesus is God’s Word; Jesus then is God.

Which brings us to the third and final thing I wish to say about Trinity this morning, and that is simply this: One God in Three Persons is a terrible translation. As I said earlier, “Three Persons” makes it sound like three guys in a boardroom. And if you take person literally, etymologically, then Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit become masks that God wears, characters that He plays, while the real God, the actor, remains hidden behind the scenes. This is an old heresy called Modalism.

But if you go to the Greek, the language of theology, the language of the Christian Scriptures, the Trinity has never been One God in Three Persons: it is One Essence in Three Hypostases. And “hypostasis” means underlying reality! Trinity is the belief that God is One Essence, One Godhead, in Three Underlying Realities; which is to say that the Father in heaven really, truly is God; that the Son incarnate in Jesus Christ really, truly is God; that the Holy Spirit within you, and throughout the whole of Creation, really, truly is God.

It’s not like one of them is God and the other two are sidekicks. It’s not like Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all false faces of the hidden God beneath. No. God is one of us, God is within us, and God is beyond us. All are real; all are One; all are God. And everything that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, have ever done, from Creation to Crucifixion, from Resurrection to Restoration, all of it is purely done from love of God for you. The Trinity is Love.

And you, O sainted sinner, with all of Jesus’ own, will be one with that love in eternity.

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