Homily for Trinity Sunday

Homily delivered by Fr Nicholas King SJ

Scripture readings: Proverbs 8:22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

It is practically impossible to speak about the “Trinity”, the mystery of God as both three and one, without committing heresy. Putting it starkly, you can either be a tritheist, proclaiming that there are three gods, or a modalist, believing that the one God appears under three “masks” or “modes”. You might like to listen to any sermon (including this one, of course) this Sunday, asking yourself, “which of these possible heresies is this priest committing?” Answers on a post-card, please.

So the interesting question is this: why do Christians insist on the threeness of God, when is it so clearly dangerous to life and limb? The answer is that this was the only way our forerunners could do justice to their experience of God. They were all originally good Jews, of course, and therefore committed to the view that there is one and only one God; but what they knew about Jesus, especially after the Resurrection, meant that, in order to do justice to his reality, they had to address him as “Lord”, which in the Greek translation of their Bible was the way of translating the sacred and unpronounceable name of God. Then they were very aware of that powerful reality, to which they found themselves driven to give the name of “Holy Spirit”. So they spoke of the One whom Jesus addressed as “Father”, and called him God; but they also knew perfectly well that the Father was not “bigger” than Jesus. As Jesus puts it, “the Father and I are One”. So Jesus was also accurately to be described as “God”. And as one of my teachers put it, long ago, “if you want to know what God is like, just look at Jesus”.

So their talk about God became increasingly rich and deep. You can see something of this in the readings that the Church has chosen, for the feast of the Holy Trinity, which always takes place the week after Pentecost. In the first reading, from Proverbs 8, we get a first hint of how good monotheist Jews could find a certain richness in the way they talk about God; for the poet is singing about a being that turns out to be the personification of Wisdom, one that is not quite the same as God, but is also the beginning of God’s creation: “from everlasting I was firmly set, from the beginning before the land was existing”. Then there is the lovely picture of Wisdom as involved in creation: “when he laid down the foundations of the Earth, I was at his side, a master

craftsman, delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence, delighting to be with human beings.” This is beautiful, of course, not yet the picture of what came to be known as the “third person of the Trinity”, but you can see how the idea is developed from prayerful reflection on the Scriptures and on their experience of God.

The second reading offers a further development of this idea, with its wonderful picture of how the “love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us”. And Jesus is in there, too, as Paul proceeds “it is by faith and through Jesus that we have entered this state of grace in which we can boast about looking forward to God’s glory”. The Holy Spirit, you see, was a powerfully experienced reality in the life of those early Christians, one that they simply could not deny; and Paul knew the importance of talking correctly about the Spirit, if he was to talk successfully about Jesus and about God.

Then the gospel for today takes us even deeper into this mystery. We are in the Last Supper Discourse, as Jesus helps his baffled disciples to learn how to cope with the appalling reality of his absence after the crucifixion, which is to take place on the very next day. One of the great contributions of the fourth gospel is the extraordinary idea of the “Holy Spirit”, for which the evangelist uses the term the “Paraclete”, which means something like “comforter “, or “counsel for the defence”. It is the idea that the absence of Jesus does not mean that everything is lost; God is still at work in the story, and we are given this beautiful image: “when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will lead you to the complete Truth, since…he will glorify me…everything the Father has is mine”.

So what we are to do on this feast day is not to try too hard to understand this; just sit prayerfully with it and reflect on the richness of the mystery of the one God, who is all lov