Many years I skip focusing on Trinity Sunday. It’s easy enough to skip it. It often falls on or near Memorial Day or Father’s Day or some other flashier kind of day. We talk about the Trinity regularly in prayers and confessions and hymns. I just don’t often preach on the Trinity.
Perhaps that goes back to my favorite professor, Charles Partee, who said the Trinity is a theological construct which we can confess, but not preach since the Trinity appears no where in Scripture. The concept is there, but there is no statement that God is three in one. He’s right, of course. I rarely found him to be wrong, though I disagree with him on a couple things. But actually wrong? Nope. Charles Partee is a super smart guy. So it is with some reluctance that I decided to preach on the Trinity today. Sort of.
See preaching is supposed to be about taking a Scripture passage and explaining, revealing, or in some other way helping people to understand it better or apply it to modern life. Since the Trinity really doesn’t exist in Scripture per se, I can’t really preach on it. Or them. Or Him. And so we encounter a very basic problem. If the Trinity is three and yet one, what pronoun do we use? I assume we use Him when referring to the Trinity directly since Trinity is a collective noun, but it when referring to the theological concept. It’s all rather confusing, though.
But let’s not get caught up in that part; let’s delve right into a bigger challenge. How did we come up with the concept of Trinity to begin with if it’s not in Scripture? Ironically enough, probably through preaching and teaching. The concept of Trinity is very present in Scripture. It’s simply the direct language that is missing. So probably some scholars and priests were trying to explain God to their students and new converts and that’s where the trouble started. You have to put various passages together to start to see the concept of Trinity in Scripture and it gets a bit complicated. But to try to give an example, we’ll look at how the passages we’ve read today highlight aspects of the Trinity.
Let’s start with eternal existence of the whole triune nature of God. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word is Jesus the Son and Scripture is clear that He was there from the start with creation and everything. Scripture is clear that the Word is both with God and IS God. So how can God’s Son be God and how can God, who created everything, have a Son who was not yet begotten but who already lived? Logically, that doesn’t make any sense at all. You can’t diagram it, you can’t explain it, you can’t take a picture or create a computer model of how that works because all those things require logic and there just isn’t any logic in that whole thing. At least, not human logic. But if we accept Scripture as the word of God (small w this time), then we must accept that what is in Scripture, no matter how difficult to understand or explain, is true. We have to take it on faith.
So God the Father and God the Son are one, but they are also distinct. “You believe in God, believe also in me.” This passage comes in the middle of the Last Supper. Jesus had been hanging out with the disciples in Jerusalem after the Triumphal Entry but before His betrayal and crucifixion. He had told Peter that Peter would deny Him, which Peter denied, of course. They were all reclining at the table as dinner wound down and Jesus was trying to calm them down after what He’d said had upset them. It must have seemed so obvious to Him that it shouldn’t be upsetting as it had been ordained since the beginning, but the disciples were upset so Jesus tried to soothe them. “Do not let your hearts be troubled” was followed closely by “You believe in God, believe also in me.” If Jesus were not God, then this would be blasphemy, but since Jesus is both the Son and also God, it is not blasphemy. Yet the very next sentence shows us that there is still some separation even though the Father and Son are also one. Jesus says “In my Father’s house…” He didn’t say “In my house” or “Back home…” He said, “In my Father’s house…” So there is still some sort of separation, but in just a few sentences later, He proclaims that “If you really know me, you will know[b] my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” And then “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?” As if that weren’t sufficient, He then adds, “Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” So Jesus tells the disciples that He is the Father and the Father is Him and they are One, yet they are also distinct.
What Jesus doesn’t do is explain any of it. He doesn’t tell us how this relationship works. He doesn’t say, “Okay, so I was part of God and then I was begotten by myself of myself with Mary, my Mom.” He doesn’t say, “I was created first and then helped create everything else.” He doesn’t say, “Here’s how it works…” and then diagram it on the nearest smartboard. Instead, Jesus says something different. He says, “Believe me.” He says that over and over. Believe. It’s about belief. It’s not about explain. It’s about show – “at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.” But it’s not about explain.
So so far we have the Father and the Son as One yet separate. So where does the Holy Spirit come in? How do we get the Trinity? We keep reading. After all the Father-Son talk, there is talk of the Advocate. More specifically, “another advocate.” For there to be another, there has to have been at least a first. Yet we know that it is not about sequence, either because way back in Genesis we already hear about the Spirit of God blowing over the face of the earth (there’s that eternal existence again). In Ezekiel we read about God breathing life into the dry bones by putting His Spirit into them. The Spirit was there from the beginning, whispering to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, guiding Moses in the desert, inspiring the prophets and guiding the people. Later in this same chapter of John Jesus says, “That Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you.” So while the Holy Spirit is always present, there is a special sending to live in the people of God. And while there can be no real separation between spirit and person, there is some degree of separation since Jesus refers to the Advocate as ‘sent from’ and ‘another.’
Just in these two passages we begin to see how the concept of Trinity exists in Scripture yet is not explained. And that’s an important part of our belief system as Christians. Because faith is about believing, not about explaining.
Faith is about demonstrating, not explaining. No one I’ve ever known or heard of has been able to logic anyone into faith in God. You can explain how you came to faith. You can explain some particulars of your religion (perhaps). You can maybe even explain some of your faith – why you believe - but you probably get to a point in the explanation where you have to admit you can’t explain it all. And that’s okay. Even Jesus didn’t explain it. Not that He couldn’t, after all, He’s God and can do pretty much anything He wants. But Jesus didn’t explain. He didn’t say “understand this and be able to explain it to others.” He said believe – in Him, in God, in the Advocate to come.
That’s where the theological construct of the Trinity comes from. It’s not flat out explained. It’s not even confessed in Scripture, except in the Great Commission where the Trinity is named Father and Son and Holy Spirit. But the evidence is there. The evidence of what each person of the Trinity has done and is doing and will do is clear in the Scriptures. Each one has a role to place, yet the roles are impossible without the knowledge existing in all three. If there was total separation and distinction, - three Gods rather than one, then there could not be shared knowledge, shared memories of creation, shared sending. Yet if there was no distinction, no separation, then there would be no way that any One could send or beget or refer to any Other. So there must be three and yet one. But we still can’t explain it. We can only try to believe it based on the evidence of Scripture and trust that one day it will be made clear.
And that is the beauty of a confessional faith. We don’t have to be able to explain it. We only have to confess that we believe it and trust that God will do the rest of the work for us. We don’t have to prove by logic that God is real, that He exists as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We don’t have to prove our faith by logic. We don’t even have to understand it completely ourselves, though faith seeking understanding is generally a good thing. We just have to state our faith as best we can then go about living it out.
God doesn’t ask us to believe without some evidence – the evidence of His love. The evidence of His love is there on the pages of Scripture and in the history of the world. God saved His people over and over from the time of Noah and the Flood through the liberation of the Israelites under Moses, through all the battles and dispersions all the way into the New Testament physical human manifestation of God’s love in the birth of God’s Son and the person and works of that Son we know as Jesus the Christ. God loved His people enough to come to us as His own Son and to stay with us after His own crucifixion and to return to heaven so He could return to us as His own Spirit, guiding us to do good and comforting us when we face troubles. And none of it makes a bit of sense logically, yet it is all undeniable for anyone who has experienced it.
Scripture never actually states that God is Trinity. The closest we come is in the Great Commission when Jesus names the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But today’s passages give us some good evidence to believe. In John 14, Jesus talks about being one with the Father and also manages to talk about returning to the Father who will send the Spirit who acts in Jesus’ name. The word Trinity isn’t used, but as Kevin said, “He gets them all in…If you were playing Trinity Bingo…” So until we know fully, even as we are fully known, we can only confess, not explain.