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)

On God’s Love, Spiritual Discipline, and the Freedom of Patience

In Jesus and the Spirit the Father has shared with us God’s (the Holy Trinity’s) own life with us. Not just that God loves us, but much more than that. God is love, and we live in that love. There is not another face of God inconsistent with the face of Jesus. The Breath/Spirit of God is the Spirit of that Jesus shared with us. What we see in Jesus – this is what God is, really. Moreover, there is nothing more that the Father can give us. There is nothing more intimate than the Son and the Breath/Spirit of God. Everything we can receive has been given. There is nothing God is withholding, waiting for us to earn. Everything is given – what more can there be than the love that is God? The effect of what God has done in Jesus and given in the Spirit is still working its way through our lives and, indeed, the whole of creation. But we have been and are lavishly blessed by God. 

 To live into what has been so lavishly bestowed on us requires new habits of thought and feeling, and this means practicing the spiritual disciplines to allow the sense of the presence of God to blossom. That makes it sound like hard work. And while part of the Christian calling is to learn some new habits of awareness and gratitude, the answer is not always an intense discipline, but a freedom and patience that waits for God in our lives. This might sound strange, but often the less intense we are while faithfully engaging in the spiritual practices the more likely the presence of God will be unveiled in our life now and in our past. After all, joy can’t be manufactured, it is a gift.

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.

A Children's Talk on the Holy Trinity

It can be difficult to know what to say to kids about the Trinity. Try this next time:

Can anyone tell me why they think the love we give (and receive from others) is imperfect?
I reckon it is because human love is always given with a good splash of our own needs mixed in. And our needs - most often legitimate - shape our love so that it is not actually for the other person. It is for me as well. No parent can love their child perfectly, just as no child can love their parent perfectly. So too with our friends and anyone else for that matter.

But not so with God. God is love already. God doesn't need us to have someone to love, or need us to have someone to love God back. God is love. A communion/community of love. That is what the language of Father and Son, and their mutual love of the Holy Spirit, is meant to signify. God doesn't need us. But this is exactly why God loves us. It is for us, not mixed in with God's own neediness. (God is needless in this sense, not in a frigid sort of cold and distant sense.)

This is why it is so important to let God be God, and ourselves and everyone to be less than perfect. So many people bear a grudge against a parent or child or friend or someone they hardly know because that person was human, that is, couldn't love them perfectly. But that is to ask them to be who they cannot be. Why ask people to be who they are not? What they are not?

See also:
God Alone is Good
You can Trust God
Further Thoughts on Transcendence

God's Love and the Royal Wedding

The preacher at the recent royal wedding stole the show in a way. True to his roots, he preached a style of sermon that was refreshing and complemented the straight-down-the-line approach of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Touched off with a marvellous rendition of  Stand By Me gospel style. And with perhaps 2 billion people watching Bishop Michael Curry took the opportunity to speak of the transforming power of God’s love and the possibility of our mutual love seen in a couple about to discover this love in a life lived together in holy matrimony. It was a good sermon for a world of limited Christian understanding and showcased the Christian emphasis on love.

The bishop said many things, but here is my very short summary:

If we love each other we will transform the world.

As someone said, it was classic Progressive Christianity. Of course, if we could love each other the world would be different. A new creation. But the world isn’t different, so presumably (the awkward, unspoken inference of the sermon) we don’t love each other well enough. So try harder. And here we meet the soft underbelly of Progressive Christianity. Generally speaking, while so-called progressives begin with a concern for the excluded and for peace and justice, Progressive Christianity ends wagging the finger as much as its arch-rival, the conservative evangelicalism. “If only we loved each other more …” We don’t, so try harder. I find progressive Christianity as law-driven and critical of those who don’t measure up as anything it allegedly opposes. Progressive Christianity is adept at the backhanded compliment.

The readings for Trinity Sunday (Year B) have as the Gospel reading a great chunk of John 3. It narrates, among other things, God’s action in Jesus to change people and the world.  It is not a call for us to try harder, even to try harder with a good measure of aid from God. The traditional gospel affirms our neediness and inability to save ourselves, to contribute to our salvation at all. Our contribution is elicited, enabled, sustained, and fulfilled by God. We can’t even claim a tiny, little sliver of unaided contribution that was topped up by God.  Of course, we can call each other to greater acts of love. But how to do this without the implied criticism? Better to be honest about the criticism and see where you end up.

The preacher at the royal wedding got away with it because his ancestors were slaves and here he was preaching to the Queen of England. A good dose of irony in that, irony that sits very comfortably with Christianity. But, generally speaking, progressive Christianity has as much trouble with criticism and exclusion of those who don’t measure up as do any of the conservatives.

He Loved His Own to the End

As Jesus prepares to wash his disciples' feet, we are told that he loved his disciples to the end. But who is included? Who was there that night, those whom Jesus loved to the end? The Twelve? Or should we say Eleven? We are told (Jn 11:3, 5) that Jesus loved  Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. If they weren't physically in that room that night,  they were present as those whom Jesus loved to the end. They are included in those whom the Father gave to Jesus (Jn 17:6, 9), they are Jesus' and therefore the Father's (17:9-10), given a share in his glory so that they may be one with Jesus and the Father and all Jesus' disciples. (17:22-23) And what of Mary Magdalene, who knows the voice of her shepherd when he calls? (Jn 20:16 cf. 10:3-5) Surely she too should be included. The circle could keep expanding, as it should, to include all those who have come to believe through the testimony of those first disciples. (17:201-21)¹ The baptismal overtones of the foot washing (Jn 13:8-10) point to an inclusiveness beyond the circle of those who were physically present, as does the explicit link to the death of Jesus. (Jn 13:1)

Despite what might seem like evidence to the contrary (Jn 13:2, 10-11, 18-19, 26-30), does the text suggest that Judas remains in the circle of those for whom Jesus died, loved to the end by Jesus?  Is he still one with the other disciples, joined to the Father through the Son? We might hesitate to make such a bald affirmation, but the text is making us work toward it. An easy dismissal of Judas as traitor and a devil (Jn 6:70 and especially 13:27b, 30b) while suggested by the text, is also undermined by a sub-current within the Last Supper narrative of John. We should remember that, presumably, Jesus washed the feet of Judas, pointing to Jesus' death for all sinners and asking us to bear in mind the implied baptismal meaning of the foot washing. But more interesting is John's use of the Scripture quote from Psalm 41. (Jn 13:18) The usual word for eating (found in the LXX in the verse quoted) is replaced by John for the overtly eucharistic word to munch or crunch, used with eucharistic overtones in John 6:54, 56, 57, 58).² The Eucharistic overtones are hard to ignore. Judas, into whom Satan entered, receives bread from the Bread of Life. Moloney says that Jesus giving the morsel to 'the most despised character in the Gospel's narrative" indicates Jesus' love for all his disciples, including those who fall and fail, and in this "reveals a unique God." ³.

1.  Francis Watson,  "Trinity and Community: A Reading of John 17", in International Journal of Systematic Theology, 1/2, July 1999, pp. 172-173. Watson is also helpful in dispelling notions of male normativity if the Twelve were the only disciples present at the Last Supper, as well as John's use of two male intra-divine figures as paradigmatic of the nature of discipleship. see pp. 174-175.

2. Francis J Moloney, Glory Not Dishonor, pp. 20-21.
3. Ibid., pp. 22-23.