Before we return to ordinary time we have another two major Feastdays. Today is the Feast of the Holy Trinity. We now move far away from feasts which commemorate particular events (the birth, death, resurrection, ascension of Jesus) to something much more abstract. In fact so challenging that it took the church about 400 years to come to an agreed statement about God as “three persons in one being” – and theologians are still digging into what this “really means”. This reminds me a little of the similar never-ending exploration of the nature of physical reality that physicists engage in. We never fully understand. But sometimes we just need to step back from the effort.
Our scripture readings for today say almost nothing about the Trinity. They are remarkably simple and straightforward. First we hear about Moses after he comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 34:4b-6, 8-9). This is actually the second set of tablets – the first set were broken by Moses in his fury at the Israelites for worshipping the golden calf they had made while he was previously waiting on the mountain for 40 days. Despite this he goes back again for another 40 days to collect a second set. Well might he say “This is indeed a stiff-necked people; yet pardon our wickedness and sins”.
This whole series of encounters is the primary source for the Israelite’s insistence on the one God – the single god they worshipped (or were supposed to), unlike all the other peoples who lived around them. So this does reflect the one being part of the Trinitarian formula.
From Paul we hear his signing off in his second letter to his church in Corinth: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you (2 Corinthians 13:11-13). So here we do have an early declaration of the three persons – but it’s not encouraging us to dig into any deep theology. And finally from John’s Gospel, where there are plenty of references to the Spirit, we get a passage that makes no mention of the Spirit (John 3:16-18). Instead we have something that is more reminiscent of the scenario that Moses faced – and again the assertion is that God is not looking to condemn us, despite the many reasons he might have to do so: God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.
The common thread here is that however God expresses himself to us, as Father, Son or Spirit, his objective remains constant – to save us (from ourselves, we might well imagine).
So for this Feast today we can rest in the simple faith that we have eternal life – regardless of how that is achieved by a God who will be forever beyond our understanding. Another day we can return to wrestling with how this God could be three and one, or one and three. Or maybe we just accept that sometimes God comes to us as father, sometimes as brother, and sometimes simply as something inside us. However it happens we know it is the one same God, the same God as revealed himself to Moses, as was revealed in his fulness through Jesus, and remains with us in his Spirit.