Armadale Uniting Church

Sermon for  Trinity Sunday

God as Trinity

Sermon for Trinity Sunday

Martin Wright

Armadale Uniting Church, 18 May 2008

Genesis 1:1-2:3; John 14:8-17; the Rublev icon

God is love—so how can God be alone?  As I said to the children just now, God is not a lonely old man up in the sky.  Love depends on sharing.  If there is no possibility of it being shared, how can it be love?  The essence of love is being directed towards someone other than yourself.  Now in our broken lives, the best we can manage may sometimes be the memory of shared love, or the hope for it.  But God is perfect love, and the communion or sharing of that love is an integral part of who God is, since before the beginning of creation. 

And this is the essence of our proclamation of God as Trinity; that most difficult of Christian doctrines, that stumbling-block to the modern mind, by which we declare that God is three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and yet one.  It is easy to write this off as a quaint fairytale—but such an understanding of God is at the absolute centre of our Christian faith. 

Nowhere has it been more beautifully depicted than in the famous icon by Andrei Rublev, from the Russian church in the fifteenth century.  At one level, this icon depicts the visit of three angels to Abraham and Sarah, to tell them that they will produce a child in their old age.  As the dialogue progresses, it seems strangely that Abraham is talking with only one person, not three.  In Christian understanding, this story has been interpreted as a foreshadowing or imprint of the revelation of God as Trinity, which is more fully made known through Jesus Christ. 

That is certainly how Rublev interprets it.  Each of the three figures in this icon represents one of the persons of the Trinity.  In the centre, behind the table, is the angel representing Jesus Christ.  His hand is extended in blessing over the chalice, the gift of his own body and blood in the eucharist.  He is dressed both in blue, the colour of the heavens and therefore divinity, and red, the colour of flesh and blood and therefore humanity; the combination of these robes represents the union of divine and human in Christ.  (It’s quite a common way of depicting him, you can see it in some of the windows in this church.) 

On his right is the angel representing the Father, dressed in divine blue, but under a shimmering gown of shifting colour.  As John tells us, no-one has ever seen the Father, and this garment represents his invisibility.  His hand is extended in blessing towards the Son, and the two are gazing on one another in an eternal embrace of love. 

This is very like the relationship between Father and Son depicted in John’s gospel, a relationship so close that Jesus can say “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father”.  We get only the faintest echo of that, if we see a child who resembles their parent, and say “I can see your mother”, or “I can see your father in you”.  That sort of representation of one person in another is the merest shadow of the way in which the Father is present to us through the Son. 

So close is the relationship between Father and Son that each is incomplete without the other.  Even the names “Father” and “Son” show this—the Father is only a Father because he has begotten children, the Son is only a Son because he has been begotten.  But even more intrinsically, neither person would be who they were apart from the other; their very being is defined by their relationship.  And it is actually like that with us too.  We are none of us “islands”, but only become the people we are as a result of the communities and relationships that form us. 

This gives us a hint about the meaning of that part of Genesis 1 where humankind is created.  “In his own image God created them—male and female he created them.”  It is a basic part of how we are created that we are different from one another and depend upon one another.  And it is only as we are part of a community with those different from us that we can be said to represent the image of God.  That image is not complete in any one of us as an isolated individual. 

It is on this basis that the church is able to take marriage so seriously.  For all the weakness and brokenness of our marriages, for all that some of them fail, marriage shows that it is possible for difference to be reconciled—for two people who are basically different, in the most fundamental way we know, to promise mutual love to the point of death.  This matters because it shows us something about what God is like.  It doesn’t mean that you have to be married to represent the image of God, but it does mean that marriage has a unique and central place in showing us that image, a community in which difference is reconciled in love. 

Now you may well be wondering, Where is the Holy Spirit in all this?  So far I have only really talked about the relationship between the Father and the Son.  To return to the icon, the Holy Spirit sits to the left of the Christ-figure, to our right.  He is clothed in the blue of divinity and the green of creation, because it is the Spirit who constantly moves over the face of the earth, sustaining the creation with the possibility of new life.  It’s impossible to see whether the Spirit is gazing at the Father or the Son, but he is included in that relationship, with the Son’s hand blessing the chalice also reaching out to indicate him. 

In one sense the love between Father and Son is complete, but in another it is not complete, until it is opened out by the Spirit—we might say the Spirit takes the two-dimensional love of Father and Son and opens it into a three-dimensional love; or that he draws the linear relationship between two people into a circle, without beginning or end.  To step back to the marriage analogy—and we have to be tentative here—the love between a man and a woman may be complete in one way, but if that relationship produces children, that love is opened out into a whole new dimension through the inclusion of new life, and finds a new sort of completeness. 

Once again this is like the pattern of John’s gospel.  In the long talk Jesus has with his disciples before his death, he tries to prepare them for his coming “departure”, and you can sense his anxiety for this fragile group of followers that he must shortly leave behind.  His prayer is “That they may be one, as you and I, Father, are one”—that the love between the Father and the Son might be opened up to include them.  And the way this will happen, he tells them, is through the coming gift of the Spirit, the Counsellor or Advocate or Paraclete.  The Spirit will draw them into the communion of God, so that they might show the world what that communion looks like. 

This is the purpose of creation—this is why God made the heavens and the earth on that first day—as an overflowing of God’s communion of love, so that all creation might be drawn into that love and share in the endless heavenly feast.  That is the purpose for which Christ came, to open for us the way into that communion. 

The last thing to say about the Rublev icon is that the perspective is all wrong.  The things closest to us should be widest, the things furthest away should be narrowest, but it is the other way around.  The angle of the bodies and the chairs all converges on the person gazing at the icon.  We are invited to take the empty place at the table, to be drawn into the deathless embrace of the love of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.