Trinity Sunday: Celebration of God who is love.

My friend sent me a joke. “One fine evening Jesus was walking down the streets of heaven and he met St. Peter and a theologian at a café having a cup of tea. He joined them at their request. As a part of the conversation Jesus asked them the same question which he asked Peter when he was on this earth. ‘Peter! Now that you are with me so many years: Who do you say that I am?’ Peter gave the same old answer ‘You are Christ, son of the living God.’ But the theologian interrupted and said “Wait! that is not complete answer” and he continued "Thou art the Logos, existing in the Father as His rationality and then, by an act of His will, being generated, in consideration of the various functions by which God is related to his creation, but only on the fact that Scripture speaks of a Father, and a Son, and a Holy Spirit, each member of the Trinity being coequal with every other member, and each acting inseparably with and interpenetrating every other member, with only an economic subordination within God, but causing no division which would make the substance no longer simple."
And Jesus seems to have said “What?”….. (The joke is over, laugh if you can)
Friends, today we are celebrating the feast of the holy Trinity.
I tell you this story only to let you know that the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be fully understood in all its fullness. That does not mean that the doctrine is wrong but our human minds cannot comprehend divine realities fully. Human words fall short of concepts to describe divine realities.
Somebody asked me last year “do you find the doctrine of the trinity in the Bible?” The doctrine of three persons in one God and in fact the very word “Trinity” is not found in the Bible. But that does not mean that it is not in the Bible. Father, son and the Holy Spirit are very much part of the Bible. Unity of their purpose and existence is very well described in St. John’s gospel Chapters 14 to 16. And the church is commanded in all the gospels ‘to go and baptise in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.’ Not just of any one person. So trinity is not and invention but revelation.
The importance of this doctrine for me lies in this: we are made in the image of God, therefore, the more we understand God the more we understand ourselves. Therefore, the more important question for us to ask today is: What does the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity tell us about the kind of God we worship and what does this say about the kind of people we should be? On this, we have two points to reflect upon.
(1) God does not exist in solitary individualism but in a community of love and sharing. God is not a loner. Our God is not an hermit who loves being lonely but he lives in community. What does it mean for us? This means that a Christian in search of Godliness (Matthew 5:48) or holiness must not run away from the world. The ideal Christian spirituality is not that of flight from the world like that of certain Buddhist or even old Christian monastic traditions where the quest for holiness means permanent withdrawal to the Himalayas or deserts away from contact and involvement with people and society. One thing that strikes me in the life of Jesus is that he was not living in the desert asking people to come there but he went to them because he found the kingdom of God in them.
(2) True love requires three partners. God is love. Love always involves others. Taking an example from the human condition we see that when a man A is in love with a woman B they seal their love by producing a baby C. Father, mother and child -- love when it perfected becomes a trinity. Here again I am using inadequate terms to define divine reality.
We are all made in God’s image and likeness. Just as God is God of ‘Trinitarian relationship’, so also we can be fully human only in a relationship of three partners. The self needs to be in a horizontal relationship with others and a vertical relationship with God. In that way our life becomes Trinitarian like that of God. Then we will be able to come our of our shell of individualism. I and I , nothing else. No. The doctrine of the Blessed Trinity challenges us to adopt rather an “I-and-God-and-neighbour principle.” I am a Christian insofar as I live in a relationship of love with God and other people. May the grace of the Holy Trinity whom we honour today, help us to banish all traces of self-centeredness in our lives and make us live in love of God and of neighbour.
Amen