Relationships Are Who We Are: SALT's Commentary for Trinity Sunday
Trinity Sunday (Year A): Genesis 1:1-2:4a and Matthew 28:16-20
Big Picture:
1) This Sunday is often celebrated as “Trinity Sunday,” an opportunity to intentionally reflect on one of Christianity’s most important (and challenging!) ideas. Every church is — among other things — a kind of schoolhouse, a place where we move together through an annual curriculum of learning and contemplation, and this week, the mystery of the Trinity takes center stage.
2) As various difficulties ripple across the planet, the neighborhood, and our personal lives, the question is unavoidable: How can the doctrine of the Trinity help? As we’ll see below, though it may at first seem esoteric, the doctrine is actually a profoundly practical idea.
3) Next week the nearly six-month season of “Ordinary Time” begins, during which this year’s walk through the Gospel of Matthew will continue. Until November, the gospel readings will move chronologically through Matthew, week after week, with only a couple of exceptions. And by the way, in this context, “Ordinary” doesn’t mean typical or humdrum — rather, it comes from the word “ordinal,” meaning “related to a series.” Think of Ordinary Time as an ordered, deliberate, six-month step-by-step pilgrimage through the story of Jesus’ life, with Matthew as our guide.
4) The ancient doctrine of the Trinity arose out of early Christian reflection on scripture, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. For his earliest followers, encountering Jesus was somehow encountering God directly — and at the same time, Jesus spoke of God as both distinct from him (as when he prayed to God, or spoke of God as the One who sent him) and yet nevertheless “one” with him. There was both a “two-ness” and a “oneness” in play, and so Christians sought out ways to express this mystery with poetry and precision. Likewise, early disciples experienced encounters with the Spirit as encounters with God directly — and at the same time, Jesus spoke of the Spirit as a guiding, challenging presence distinct both from him and from the One to whom he prayed. And so arose, over time, the church’s doctrine of the Trinity, the idea that God is properly conceived as both Three and One. Not three Gods — for that would miss God’s oneness. And not merely One — for that would miss God’s threeness, and wouldn’t do justice to the sense of encountering God in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Indeed, rather than an arcane picture of God “up there” (too often the doctrine’s reputation today!), the teaching’s quite practical upshot is to cast a vision of God “up there, down here, and everywhere,” creating, redeeming, and sustaining creation at every turn, with every unfurling leaf and blossom. In brief, the doctrine is ultimately about a world saturated with divine presence, and a God “in whom we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
5) Since the mature doctrine emerges out of the first few centuries of the church’s reflection, it’s unlikely that Matthew had it specifically in mind as he wrote, and even more unlikely, of course, that the author(s) of Genesis did. Rather, the teaching emerges from the church’s retrospective reflection on scriptural passages like these, as our ancestors sought to make sense of their experience and what they subsequently interpreted as clues in even the most ancient texts in their sacred library. In this way, Christian theology always emerges out of the community’s dialogue over time, and accordingly, the church’s understanding often grows deeper and wider over the centuries than any given text’s author may have originally conceived. Put another way, we can think today about the Trinity through the lens of Genesis 1 without projecting today’s Trinitarian thought onto whoever wrote Genesis 1 (or Matthew 28, for that matter). This is part of what it means to have a biblical canon: texts and ideas born centuries apart can illuminate each other, regardless of what their original authors may or may not have had in mind.
Scripture:
1) The passage from Genesis is the first of the two creation stories with which the Bible begins. Christian interpreters have retrospectively discerned a trinitarian clue in God’s remark, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” — an apparent divine self-reference in the plural (Gen 1:26). Reading the passage this way brings the idea of the Trinity into close connection with humanity: we are made in the image of a triune God. Full humanity, we might say, is never in the singular, never merely “I” or “me”; it’s always in the plural, always “us” and “we.”
2) Similarly, generations of interpreters have zeroed in on Jesus’ instruction to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). From this angle, to be ushered into the community of Jesus-followers is to be ushered into the “name,” presence, and life of the triune God — or rather, ushered into greater awareness that we already and always exist within and among that presence and life, in whom all of us “live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). “I am with you always,” Jesus insists, “to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
3) Again, the point here isn’t that Matthew had a “Trinity” in mind as he wrote, at least not in the sense that later Christian teachers more systematically developed the idea. Rather, this passage features the sort of raw material out of which those later teachers undertook that development, like a lumberyard from which carpenters later build a house. For Matthew, Jesus is God’s child sent to save the world, a mission in which “the Spirit of God” is involved from the outset — indeed, from Jesus’ own baptism, where “the Spirit of God descends like a dove” (Matthew 3:16). Later theologians discerned in readings like this one a Trinity, three “divine persons” (the One doing the sending; Jesus; and the assisting Spirit) who are nevertheless co-equal and unified with one another. Here as elsewhere, the idea of the Trinity arises out of the early church’s lived experience with Jesus and the Spirit, and also with baptism. Viewed from this angle, the Trinity is like a trio of instruments harmonizing in a single, unified piece of music.
Takeaways:
1) This is a perfect week to reflect on the doctrine of the Trinity, a crucial teaching with which many Christians are unfamiliar — and which others understand to be too vague, esoteric, or downright weird to be of much use in their daily lives. Revisiting the doctrine as a valuable, decidedly practical teaching is therefore a pressing task, and a great place to start is to recover its origins in the lived experience of the early church. Encountering Jesus, early disciples found themselves face-to-face with Immanuel, “God with us,” the good shepherd who seeks and finds and saves the lost. Encountering the Spirit, early disciples found themselves heart-to-heart with God, the inspiring guide and advocate who sustains creation and makes the social movement we call “the church” possible. In the end, the doctrine of the Trinity is about a God who is living and active in our lives at every turn: creating and recreating, teaching and guiding, refining and empowering.
2) Accordingly, the idea of the Trinity casts a vision of God as deeply, irreducibly relational: the one God is constituted by three ongoing relationships. And if we take Genesis 1 seriously, and human beings are created in the imago Dei, then in our own way, we must be fundamentally relational, too, constituted by our relationships with God and one another. This is an important message to proclaim in an era too often dominated by individualism, loneliness, racism, and other forms of division. First, the doctrine of the Trinity insists that God is “up there, down here, and everywhere,” even in the shadows of grief and violence, calling all of us toward justice and love. And second, the doctrine of the Trinity reminds us all that relationships — even and especially relationships across differences — aren’t just something we “do.” Relationships are who we are. If our relationships — person-to-person, and also neighborhood-to-neighborhood, group-to-group — are healthy, then we’re healthy. If they’re not, then we’re sick, and require healing and restoration.
3) Here’s one more practical vision of the Trinity, this one from C.S. Lewis. Imagine “an ordinary simple Christian” at prayer, Lewis says — his voice crackling over the airwaves in one of his famous radio addresses (the same reflections he eventually collected into the book, Mere Christianity). Her prayer is directed toward God — but it is also prompted by God within her in the first place. And at the same time, as she prays she stands with and within the Body of Christ (recall how Christians typically pray “in Jesus’ name”). In short, as this “ordinary simple Christian” prays, God is three things for her: the goal she is trying to reach, the impetus within her, and a beloved companion along the way — indeed “the Way” itself. Thus for Lewis, “the whole threefold life” of the triune God “is actually going on” around and within her — and as she prays, she “is being caught up into the higher kinds of life,” which is to say, into God’s own life, three and one, one and three (Lewis, Mere Christianity, 4.2).