“How can these things be?”
“How can these things be?” asks Nicodemus, not “what’s in it for me.” Therein lies all the difference, the difference between idolatry and true religion. Trinity Sunday is the great counter to all our idolatries, our idolatries of experience, of the practical and of our minds and imaginations.
There is really something quite wonderful about Nicodemus’ question. “How can these things be?” he asks. It is a real question, not unlike Mary’s question, “how shall this be seeing I know not a man?” A question about the Incarnation, Nicodemus’ question belongs to the Trinity. The two are inseparable; they go together, as John’s marvellous gospel reading makes clear.
What is wonderful about Nicodemus’s question is that he is open to the wonder and the marvel of the revelation of God. He is a learned rabbi in Israel. He comes, not openly, but secretly, by night to Jesus to ask him about the meaning of what he has heard and seen about Jesus. What can it possibly mean to be born again, he wonders? Can a man who is old be born again, literally as it were, from his mother’s womb. His initial perplexity has all of the characteristics of a kind of literalism. Jesus response is really quite wonderful. It is about opening out to him the meaning of the spiritual reality of the living God. Such, we might say, is precisely the mystery of the Trinity.
God is Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the holy and blessed Trinity. It is the central and most fundamental teaching of the Christian faith. Not just one doctrine among many, it is the central doctrine which gives coherence and credence to all of the other doctrines of the faith, expressed in the Creed.
What makes Nicodemus’s question so powerful is that it is not a subjective question primarily. He is open to the objective reality of Jesus Christ and to the living God who confronts him in Jesus Christ. It is precisely in this way that Trinity Sunday in the classical readings for this day confronts our modern idolatries of experience, of the practical and of the intellectual.
Our populist atheists claim that all religion is idolatry. God is our concept, therefore we have made God. Not only trite and meaningless historically speaking, it overlooks a basic and simple distinction. It is true that God is something which we, as it were, think but that doesn’t mean that God is simply the projection of our imaginations, a creation of our minds, as it were. To insist that it is so runs the equally absurd risk of claiming then that every thing we think (in whatever way) is simply a false creation of our minds. There is, to the contrary, all the difference in the world between a thinking that is our projection outside of ourselves and a thinking which is about our embrace of what actually lies beyond us and can never be fully grasped by us. God can never be a possession of our minds. It is more a matter of our minds being possessed by God.
How much more so in the definite revelation of God to us in Jesus Christ? That is what Trinity Sunday is all about.
Nicodemus’s quandary was about the claim that “ye must be born again.” Jesus is emphatic about that statement. You can neither see nor enter the kingdom of heaven without being born again. What he means is equally clear, I think, despite the idolatry of experience.
The phrase has been taken captive by those who demand that it refer to a immediate and charismatic or Pentecostal experience on the part of the individual. The whole point of Trinity Sunday is that something objective is being set before us which we then must subjectively appropriate and make our own. That is the counter to our idolatry which would make our assertions of our experience the truth and measure of God.
What does it mean to be born again? It means to be defined and governed by what comes from above. It means to live upward towards the things of the spirit, the heavenly things of the gospel in contrast to the earthly things. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “if I have told you earthly things and ye believe not, then what if I tell you heavenly things?” It is heavenly things that are being opened out to us in an objective and powerful way. It is the way of Revelation which takes the things of this world and imbues them with a spiritual significance.
For that is the point of Trinity Sunday. It is the strongest possible affirmation of the spiritual nature of all reality by way of the Revelation of the spiritual community of the life of God himself. It is about the fullness of Revelation.
The point is marvellously conveyed in the Lesson from the Book of the Revelation of St. John. It is all about worship. The worship is of God upon whom all things depend. The worship is by the whole of the redeemed order. The vision is that of the pageant of revelation which has its fullest expression, in the Christian understanding, in the figure of Jesus Christ. He is the one who teaches us the most and the most definitely and the most clearly about the Trinity.
In John’s vision there are four and twenty elders who cast their crowns before the throne of God. Who are these? They are symbolical ways of representing the witness of the Scriptures, of the pageant of Revelation, to the spiritual reality of the Revealed God. The twenty-four elders represent the books of the Old Testament and/or they can be taken (one meaning does not exclude the possibilities of another in this case) to be representative of the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles of Jesus, Old and New Testaments respectively. The four living creatures are, of course, symbolical representations of the four Gospels.
The point is that they are all involved in the same activity, the activity of praise and worship. The focus is on God, not them.
Indeed, as John puts it, “Come up hither and I will show thee what must be hereafter.” The vision is predicated upon that upward call.
To be born again is about that upward call. We are defined by that upward vision and by the means of our incorporation into it. This is the redemption of the experiential and the practical and the intellectual.
All of you have been born again in your baptisms. You have been named in God’s own naming of himself as Father, Son and Holy Ghost. You are baptised into the life of God, the very life of God which is the Trinity, the fons et origo of our spiritual lives and spiritual fellowship. Whether you remember it or not, that is the sign of the spiritual reality and truth of your actual being.
You were named at your baptism in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Not in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier (as some now quasi-Christian churches want to claim), nor in the name of the birds and the bees, the sun and the trees, the stars and the sea. No. In the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Where did that come from? From Jesus really. God as Father is not like any kind of earthly father (even on this Father’s day); nor is the sonship of Christ, exactly like any kind of earthly sonship. No. We are talking explicitly about heavenly and spiritual matters, the very truths which give meaning and purpose to the material and phenomenal world. When we forget that all our practical purposes and plans are for naught; they are all vain idolatries. They are entirely of our making.
No. Trinity Sunday bids us be born anew, to be born upward into a greater and more comprehensive understanding of reality and the human condition. It is altogether what our liturgy proclaims: the objective truth of God’s own revelation of himself as Father, Son and Holy Ghost. It is not by accident that in the recitation of the psalms, Christians make them their psalms, too, by the addition of the Gloria Patri. Our liturgy is nothing but Trinitarian, through and through.
The strong objectivity of Word and Sacrament are part and parcel of the revealed reality of God. The Trinity is not some abstract theological conundrum; it is the truth of the revealed God in whose image we are made and remade. We are made and remade in the image of the Trinity. That is the point of baptism and it is the point of Holy Communion. We have communion not merely with one another but with God. We enter into the communion of the Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. And this is what Jesus teaches us.
God as Trinity is the mystery of God himself. That mystery redeems our experience and our practical and material obsessions and our minds and imagination. We confront the reality of the living God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost and therein lies the truth of our experiences and the truth of our practical lives, too. For God is love and we can only live out of that love and make it visible in our lives by God’s grace. Love is of God. The Trinity is the communion of the love of God. We didn’t invent it. We can only enter into it in the same way that it has been made known to us: by grace. The grace of revelation and redemption meet in Jesus and in the Feast of the Trinity.
We are called upward. That is our new birth and our new life. We live for the God who lives for us, drawing all men upward to him in his sacrifice for us, a sacrifice which opens us out to the mystery of the living God, the mystery of the spiritual reality of all life itself.
And all through a question, a genuine and insightful question and one which opened him and us out to the mystery of God in Jesus Christ. For that may God be praised!
“How can these things be?”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity Sunday, 2011