The Image of the Three-Personed God: Trinity Sunday

The Church takes this Sunday to focus on the doctrine of the Trinity, which is God’s revelation of Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three Persons in one God. We call this the most basic doctrine of Christianity. What could be more fundamental, more important, than our teaching about Who God Is? 

Here’s the flip side, though: strangely, this first layer of revelation, this foundation of our whole religion, is one that we talk about little and understand less. Many Christians have never heard anything about the Trinity more helpful than a sort of shrugging “eh, it’s a mystery.” Well if that’s as far as we can go with it, why did God bother to reveal Himself in the first place? Or even worse, they’ve heard it explained as a paradox, a contradiction. Like “Well you’re supposed to believe that God is one and also three, and that doesn’t really make any sense, but that’s why you need faith.” Please understand this: that isn’t faith. Faith isn’t believing something for no good reason. Faith isn’t deciding to set aside Reason and believe something that can’t be believed without turning off your brain. And a Christian mystery isn’t something that makes no sense. It’s something that makes sense of everything else.


Actually, the Trinity is not a contradiction or paradox at all. If we said “God is one Person and also three Persons,” that would be a contradiction. We’d have a religion that couldn’t be followed without turning off our brains. You can’t say that something is one and three in the same way at the same time. And we don’t. We say that God is three Persons in one Nature. Is that easy to comprehend? No. Is it a contradiction? No.

Trinity is, according to G.K. Chesterton, a fancier way of saying “God is love.” We don’t just say “God has love” or “God does love,” but that Love is Who God Is. That means that even before Creation, in his eternal moment, God is not alone. God is not a solitude. 

One of the challenges of preaching the Trinity is to communicate why it matters. God has revealed Himself, has given us this glimpse of Who He Is. Why would He do that if all we could say was “um, it’s a mystery”? Or what good would the revelation be if it didn’t really matter to us? Either the Trinity makes a difference in our lives, or it’s just a bit of trivia, knowledge that may be interesting but is ultimately useless. How could the revelation of God’s inner Being be trivial? How could the most fundamental doctrine of our religion be something that made no real difference in our lives?

The answer to that question - the question of the difference it makes to worship the Three-Personed God - that is a question to grow into over a lifetime. Today I’ll leave you with just a beginning. The Beginning, actually, Genesis chapter one, wherein you and I are created in God’s image and likeness. If that’s true, and if the Trinity is true, then that means understanding the Trinity is essential to understanding ourselves!

Like God, we are not ourselves in solitude. To be alone does not just make us lonely, it makes us not truly ourselves. We tend to think of our relationships as things that are added to us. My relationship to my family, spouse, friends, even my relationship with God, are things that I have, things that are separate from and added onto the thing I call me. But that isn’t true for us who are made in the image and likeness of the Trinity. Our relationships aren’t things we have. They aren’t added bonuses hitched onto our nature. Relationships are our nature. Our relationships are who we are. This is true no matter how lonely or isolated you may be; a relationship with God isn’t something you have. Your relationship to God is who you are. And that is something that is eternal. That is something that, when you close your eyes in death, is only beginning.

Spend your life growing in understanding of Who God Is. But realize here today, that you are not alone. A human being who is alone is a contradiction in terms. Without your relationship to God, you don’t exist. Without your relationships to other people, you aren’t you. This is as true for the silent hermit monk as it is for the social butterfly. That’s something to remember when you’re tempted to shut others out. That’s something to remember when you’re tempted to withdraw into yourself and go it alone. That’s something to remember when you feel alone. You aren’t alone. No one is.

To take a Father’s Day angle on this, we could consider the typical way that people become Fathers. I’ll have to kind of get at this sideways for the sake of any parents that haven’t had “the talk” yet. And I’ll pause to acknowledge that adoptive fatherhood is a beautiful thing that reflects God’s nature in its own brilliant way. But if we consider the biological aspect of fatherhood, we find the image of the Trinity staring us right in the face. Two become one, and then two become three. It’s true in a quite literal and physical way that every one of us is born from love. It’s how we start. It’s the only way we start, biologically: one father, one mother, and a child. The rule of three is built into our very origin. Does that matter? The Catholic Church thinks so, even thought he modern world is very proud of having spent the last sixty years unravelling the connection between an act of love and the beginning of life. And so we find ourselves at war with our own humanity, our own bodies, at their most astonishing and miraculous and powerful. Here we have just one example of the way that we can’t forget who God is without also losing touch with ourselves (and leave it to me to choose the most controversial.) But it’s true on every level that we are born from love: it’s true on the basic physical level, it’s hopefully true in the sense that we’re lucky enough to live with loving parents, and it’s most definitely true in the highest, theological sense that God’s Creation of us, like the human cooperation in our creation, was an act of love. The image goes all the way up!


The principle is simply this: we are born from love and we return to love. It’s our alpha and omega. It’s who we are. You may be lonely, you may be isolated, you may be wounded or aggrieved or alienated, but one thing you aren’t - one thing you can never be - is alone.

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