Trinity Sunday 2020
Exodus 34: 4-6, 8-9; 2Cor 13: 11-13; John 3:16-18
I suspect that I am correct in saying that every priest dreads having to preach on Trinity Sunday. The thought of having to find something new and inspiring to say about something which is, by definition, beyond our comprehension, fills most, if not all, of us with deep foreboding.
Perhaps, rather than attempting to explain the inexplicable, to analyse the deepest of all mysteries, we should simply sit or kneel in awe before the God who is three in one, opening our hearts and minds so that the Father and Son may pour into us their own personalized love which is the Holy Spirit.
At its heart, the Trinity is not a numbers game, a sort of celestial one two three O’Leary, but a relationship; the Father eternally generating the Son with a love which is itself a person—the Holy Spirit—and the Son returning that love in the same personalised manner. Having said that, I am aware of having said nothing, and I am becoming increasingly conscious that this is the point. What can we honestly say about the nature of God? We have our doctrinal definitions, but they, while true, are liable to strike us as dry and meaningless—what Rudyard Kipling makes one of his characters call “your cold Christs and tangled Trinities”.
All that we can do, in reality, is to allow the Trinity to live in us, and to inspire in us that same interpersonal love which is God’s nature. “God loved the world so much,” says Jesus to Nicodemus, “that He gave His only Son”, a giving accomplished by the Holy Spirit. We enter into that love in the Eucharist, where the elements are transformed by the Spirit into the person of the Son, who offers Himself to the Father, drawing us into His self-offering.
That Eucharistic self-offering, brought about by the love which is the life of the Trinity, should epitomise the way we live from day to day and from moment to moment. I think that it is time to stop woffling, and to do it.
