Trinity Sunday Year C (Part 2)

In our baptism, joined in hypostatic union with the Son who stood abandoned for us, space is found for us to regain our identity as children of God, united with the Father through the Spirit.

The Gospel of John can seem a bit confusing at times. It's because the language reflects the union of the three figures of the divine story, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (You can think of God as a story or a movement of love, into which we are inducted through baptism, sharing in God's life.) Take todays' Gospel reading:

He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. (John 16:14-15)

The three - Father, Son, and Spirit - are so intimately connected to one another that to speak of one leads to the others. None can be cut off from any other. Today, the Spirit reveals Jesus, but everything that the Father has is Jesus' also, so all are present in the revealing of the Spirit. But notice that in their mutual presence none of the three loses their particular identity in their union with one another, while, on the other hand, never falling into a crass individualism. Indeed, the more the Son is the Son - that is, deepening his relationship to the Father- the more he is the Son in his identity as Son. (One reason why the naturally relational language of Father/Son in trinitarian language won't go out of fashion.) This is personhood, not individualism, and without the great sea of undifferentiated being in the background for us to be dissolved into. Personhood implies identity and relationship.

Made in this image, we reflect God in our inter-personal nature as human beings, for others are always present to us, one way or another. When we receive another person others are also present with us, at least in some manner, or perhaps a variety of ways. This mutual presence to one another is a common human experience hinting at the fullness of our being and our lives, and the whiff of the future blessedness of creation. (The experiential antonyms of mutual presence are also common: loneliness, despair, anxiety, revenge, murder, self-loathing, self-conceit, etc.) 

Here we meet also a trinitarian basis for forgiveness. And I am not talking about the forgiveness that we receive upon repentance - most of us can offer that kind of 'forgiveness', at least sometimes. Instead, I am talking about the asymmetrical, pure forgiveness of God. (See here.) In forgiveness, the Father refuses to lose the other (the sinner) and the Son restores to us our true identity as children of God. (Rom 8:12-17) In the Son's abandonment on the cross and in his resurrection and ascension, we can never be lost. God remains present to us, even in our human weakness, failure, and sin. (Romans 5:6-11) 

This is why I have difficulty conceiving of hell as popularly understood. We are never alone, even the damned. In the abandonment of the cross, this holds true, especially so for the abandoned/damned.

Trinity Sunday Year C (Part 1)

Readings for Trinity Sunday (Year C)  Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15. 

‘He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:14-15) 

 The strange language of the Gospel of John: the three – Father, Son and Spirit – are interconnected in such a way that if you talk of one, it naturally leads to the others. So today, the Spirit comes and will take what is Jesus’ and declare it to the disciples. So if they have forgotten anything, the Spirit will teach them. But then, immediately, Jesus says that all that the Father has is his. Therefore, if the Spirit declares to the disciples what is Jesus’ then the Spirit will also be declaring what is the Father’s. 

The three are so closely connected that we speak of the union of the three. And before we get bogged down in working out the apparent complexities of the Trinity, let’s catch one of the practical and simple implications of this language. Wherever God is, there is Jesus. So you can trust Jesus. And the gospels tell us that this union is not after the resurrection, but speaks of who Jesus is all the time. So you can trust what he says and what he does. Giving yourself to Jesus is to give yourself to God. The salvation that is won in Jesus is God’s gift to us. 

 And the Spirit. You can trust the Spirit, for the Spirit speaks (of) Jesus, and what Jesus has is the Father’s. To be in the Spirit is to be in the Father and the Son. To receive the Spirit is to receive the freedom of the Son, the freedom of the children of God who cry out ‘Abba’ – a cry of intimacy and love. There is nothing complex about that. It is the simple message of the gospel. Jesus is the salvation of God, and to receive this salvation is to be part of the love the Son receives and gives to the Father. 

 And if we are in Jesus, then our destiny is to be with Jesus, wherever he is. And he is with God. And so our final destiny is, likewise, to be with God. But not just our final destiny. For if we are in Jesus, and Jesus is in God now, then we are in God now. We don’t have to wait. This is the work of the Spirit. Jesus has departed, but the Spirit is given to us, who makes Jesus known and present in us and for us. Our final destiny is true right now. This is part of the meaning of Jesus as the way, the truth and the light. He is not just the destination (the Father, or heaven maybe), but is also the way there. And we are on the way now. We are not alone. (Or as John’s Gospel says, we are not left orphans.) And this is intimately tied to mission. In the NT our inclusion in God results not in a passive enjoyment of our relationship with God, but, in the confidence and strength of it, going out into the world. ("As the Father sent me ..." John 20:21)

Am Important Detail at Pentecost

Acts 2:1-12 tells the story of the gift of the Holy Spirit to the disciples after the Ascension of Jesus. It is easy to miss the significance of a small detail embedded in the story. It is crucial that the disciples are given diverse tongues rather than the hearers enabled to understand the (single) dialect of the disciples. Imagine if it were around the other way, with the listeners enabled to understand the one language. Christianity would be another religion, a religion in which God's word is uncluttered with the varieties of human culture, indeed of human experience. A religion that perceived variety as an impediment to unity, or should I say, an impediment to uniformity.

    Christianity affirms that humans don't have to be translated into a monoculture.  We don't have to reject who we are, where we come from, how we have learnt to be human, to be Christians. Hence the church's commitment to translating the gospel into the language of the people. Christianity is a religion in which variety is celebrated, and this variety is not an impediment to our unity.  There still remains a gospel to be heard, and this gospel will change us and the languages and cultures in which we express ourselves. While retaining its integrity, the gospel is accommodated to the human family in all of its variety. We don't become who we aren't to be able to hear the good news.

Not that this little detail in the Acts story begins God's accommodation to the variety of the human family and all creation.  The pedigree stretches way back.  Most especially so in the Incarnation, with God becoming human in Jesus so that we can share in God's life as human beings. (John 1:14; 2Corinthians 8:9) 

    And this story is not the only example of Christianity's insight that variety is not the enemy of unity. Christianity likes bringing together that which is usually separated. A doctrinal example is the doctrine of the Incarnation. According to the belief of the church expressed in the creeds,  Jesus is not a mish-mash of divine and human, nor some divinised quasi-human. Think here, for example, of the Creed of Chalcedon, 

... without confusion or change, without division or separation. The distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union but rather the character proper to each of the two natures was preserved as they came together ... 

The union of that which is usually apart - divine and human. This union provides us with a glimpse of our future in God: union with God without our diminishment (or God's).  But if Jesus were in some way not fully human and fully divine the little detail in the Pentecost story would have to be the other way around. And we would have to change St Paul's reflection in 1Corinthians 12 (especially vv 4-7) on the variety of gifts given to the church. So too the Christian insistence that our final fulfilment is not to be dissolved back into some great sea of being, but to be who we are, in Christ united with the Father, through the Holy Spirit. (1Cor 15:20-28.) And we would have to change our doctrine of creation. In Christianity God not only permits 'the other'/creation, but loves creation, providing creation with its own integrity. (Christianity is not pantheism.)

    All of these examples speak of God's sensitivity to our particularity and personhood, and the variety of all creation in which God delights. So, of course, when the Spirit is given the disciples speak in diverse languages rather than the Spirit squeezing the listeners into a cultural straightjacket.

The Joseph Story

 The Joseph story is one of my favourites in scripture. It doesn't get much more real (except perhaps the cross!). A husband and his two wives ("And it was Leah!), favoured sons, bitter rivalry and envy, betrayal, forgiveness, conversion, and through and in all this God's presence.

I have posted some material before on Joseph. Check out this post on the conversion that Joseph leads his brothers to, and the way in which God's response to evil is not a moralistic separation of the good and bad, neither is God's response a gnostic ignoring of evil, but joining the story and putting the evil on a broader canvas of God's purposes. ("God intended it for good.") Or this post, a short reflection on how Christ is feels no envy toward us, and that through his Spirit we need not be envious of him, for everything that we can receive has been given to us.

Pentecost, Ideologies, and the Reversal of Babel

The story of the Tower of Babel occurs in Genesis 11:1-9.  United by one language, a monochromatic humankind builds a monument to its own glory, a great tower. God ‘comes down’ to see this arrogant attempt at greatness, and scatters the people giving them many different languages to disunite them. One could read the story as an act of grace in a way, because God’s intervention prevents humankind uniting under a banner of uniformity. (A parallel to the human arrogance of the story of Babel is the great projects of human arrogance in the twentieth century – Nazis, Bolsheviks, etc. – and the way in which they crushed the diversity of the people under them, literally killing off the diversity that would not yield to their ideology.)

The account of the coming of the Holy Spirit on the disciples at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-11) is, among other things, the reversal of the Tower of Babel. Pentecost was a Jewish feast day, and Jews from different lands (and languages) came to Jerusalem to celebrate the festival. The Holy Spirit allows the disciples to speak to the listeners in the tongues of the listeners. The Gospel unites the listeners not by squeezing them into the language of the disciples as though the gospel were an alien ideology, but the gospel comes to the listeners from the inside of their thinking and culture. It is a gospel for all people without uniformity.

This last point is very important in a world of ideology. The Holy Spirit did not work on the listeners to allow them to understand the language of the disciples. That would be squeezing the listeners into the culture of Galilee. And the church from then on would have had the licence to squeeze everybody into an original language and culture. Instead, the natural impulse of the church has been to enculturate the gospel wherever the gospel went by, for example, translating the Scriptures into the common tongue. In fact, if the Holy Spirit had worked on the listeners instead of the speakers, this would have been contrary to the Incarnation of God in Christ. God became human, entering into our very humanity, to be one of us, to speak ‘our language’.  This original mission of God in Jesus continued on the day of Pentecost, continues to be the driving force of Christianity.

What About the Spirit?

A Guest post by the Revd Ron Keynes.

Shoot me down if you like, but I have quite some difficulty with much of how some Christians understand the Spirit of God. There are rather too many who somehow manage to ‘make God in their own image,’ and require others to bow the knee to their views and aspirations. I guess that tends to be the nature of ‘religion,’ which is where and why I tend to part company with ‘religion’. Not the Faith, to be sure, but ‘religion.’ However, if you think I go too far, all I ask is that you think about what follows. You may like to compare this approach with that of a certain Jesus of Nazareth. He rarely required ‘belief’ though He often challenged people to think and then to choose.

Like so many other older people, I was brought up in an atmosphere of ‘shut up and believe’ – and to question one’s elders and betters was tantamount to heresy. Those were the days of the ‘Holy Ghost’ which tended to set the agenda anyhow. But look back over Scripture, if you will, or, better still, ponder your own pilgrimage as a person let alone as a Christian, and ponder a little deeper.

If ever you wonder how many other ‘Abrahams’ that God called, you will gather what I am on about. The real Abraham did not follow because he understood right away that Yahweh was touching him on the shoulder. If the truth is known, it was more likely to be a sense of dissatisfaction with the religion of his time and day, there in the valley of the Euphrates River. He sensed the need to go searching after more real and tangible truth, for his moon worshipping had left him somewhat out in the cold. And it was no narrow direction he was heading, but a far more fascinating and even risky one. And if he – or someone else – had not taken that journey, it is interesting to wonder where we would be now.

My real point is that rather too many Christians have reduced the powerful and relevant story of the Spirit of God, limiting the impact to ‘those who believe.’ The reality is otherwise, and it seems to me that our present age and stage is not a bad time to underline that fact. For the coming of the Holy Spirit is not so much a narrow religious experience, as it is a fundamental challenge to all of humanity to be like Abraham, and that is to search for truth in whatever area of life, and to follow wherever that search takes us. In Biblical terms, the Spirit is the Spirit of truth, and surely the rather wonderful and broad picture of the Spirit’s activity in the Acts of the Apostles is that He was at work in the most unexpected of people. Sure, the Apostles were affected, but so were that Roman centurion and the Ethiopian eunuch. In conventional terms, those men had no place whatever in the New Creation.

So the challenge that Christian Faith offers to all humans of all ages is to be open to and to respond honestly to truth in whatever situation one finds oneself. Perhaps this position has been reached – from my perspective – because in our cultural heritage, conscience has always been held in the highest esteem. That does not mean that mistakes, sometimes monumental, have been made. But it does mean something rather more significant.

First is, that this search for truth – and balance in all situations and confrontations – is the only way forward in any human society or culture. There are illustrations absolutely abounding of the truth of the opposite, are there not!!! When I am unsure of your veracity and/or integrity, then life becomes really quite tenuous. And right here lies the very basis of the Christian contribution to life, pointing to reconciliation and away from disintegration.

And the second is that, unless a person or people are so degraded as to have silenced their conscience - and really have to be aware of that fact - the veracity of this human experience is available to all humans, regardless of time, culture or history. So, for heaven's sake, release the Spirit from bondage!