The seminary Professor Wilbur Smith once said, “If you try and understand the trinity you will lose your mind. But if you deny the Trinity you will lose your soul.” Let me say that again, “If you try and understand the trinity you will lose your mind. But if you deny the Trinity you will lose your soul.”

I read Smith to be saying that the trinity is unknowable, but despite this, you still have to believe in it. It may be a doctrine that makes little sense, but it is true nonetheless.

Because of its mysterious nature, many over the centuries have chosen to abandon it completely, seeing it as unnecessary. In relatively recent times, the deists during the American Revolution were one notable example of those who rejected the trinity in favor of a doctrine of the one God. Unitarians and universalists of all stripes claim the same thing today. And there have even been Christians who have recently converted to Islam because they were uncomfortable with the doctrine of the trinity. 1

The mysterious nature of the trinity has puzzled orthodox Christians as well. Included in this company is the great fourth century Christian thinker St. Augustine. According to one legend, Augustine describes a time where he was walking along the seashore and saw a little boy playing by the sea. Upon closer inspection he noticed that the boy was using a shell to carry water from the ocean to a hole he had dug in the sand. As Augustine continued to watch with interest he asked the boy “what are you doing?” To which, the little boy looked up from his work and said with a grin “I am going to put the ocean in this hole!”

Augustine was struck by this, and later thought, could this be what I am doing by trying to put an infinite God into my finite mind?"

I humbly add my own voice to the chorus of believers who have affirmed God’s unknowability. Because of sin and our own finite capacity, our conceptions of God will always be insufficient.

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But I want to push back just a little today against the opening quotation from Smith, in particular, his reference to “losing your mind if you try to understand the trinity”, because I think this has led to a very unfortunate situation in our society and even in the church.

In our effort to do justice to the fact that God is a mystery, we have put up a barrier between this mysterious Trinitarian God on the one hand and a world that is completely knowable and transparent on the other. We believe that with a little effort we can understand ourselves, our relationships, our society, politics and economics, but the God part is a mystery. And so we leave that to those who want to deal with it (those who want to go mad), and we get on with the things we know about.

Just think about the countless hours we spend thinking about ourselves, who we are, what we want. How many posts on social media do we read about how to increase our productivity, how to be a better leader, how to eat healthy, what our personality type is, how to be more emotionally intelligent etc. Unlike the search to know God, we clearly see self3

knowledge as a possibility to be pursued.

It would seem that we underestimate what we can know about God, and overestimate what we can know about our world.

I think Augustine is a helpful corrective in this situation. He reminds us that not only is the Trinity a mystery, but we ourselves are a great mystery as well. What is the self? What is consciousness? How are we one and the same person if most of our cells are constantly being replaced? What is love? There is no simple separation between a God who is unknowable and our world that is transparent and knowable.

For Augustine the Self and God are two great mysteries, both of which can be plumbed for understanding. And both of which need to be held together to move forward in knowledge and wisdom.

And so the analogy of the boy by the sea does not mean that Augustine stopped thinking about the trinity, or stopped seeking union with the 4

triune God, but rather, he realized that however much he knew there was always more, and that any provisionary and partial knowledge we gain in this life must end in doxology and praise, in glorifying God for his greatness. We never come to the end, and we must always start again from the beginning.

And so we can never leave the trinity aside, perhaps hold to it as a belief, a truth, but ignore the pursuit of greater knowledge and communion with God who is Trinity.

Our texts today provide important glimpses of God’s triune nature, and of course scripture is where our notions of the trinity must come from.

In the Gospel text from John we see both the distinctiveness and the unity of the Father and Son. Jesus is distinct from the Father in that he honors the father, gives him glory and acts in obedience to his will. If Jesus were to seek glory for himself he would set himself up as another god, as a competing entity. 5

He also shows how he is united to God. In the text we see that it is Jesus’ word that has salvific power, a designation usually reserved for God. We also see that he is greater than the prophets, even the most revered prophet of all, Abraham. And finally when Jesus states: “before Abraham was I am”, he is alluding to God in the Old Testament who when asked by Moses for his name says, “I am who I am”. The Spirit is not mentioned directly in this Gospel text, though perhaps in the reference to the evil spirit we have a veiled reference to the Holy Spirit. In the New Testament it is characteristic for people to mistake Jesus’ actions and words for their total opposite. For example, for the Jews the cross was the ultimate abandonment and failure of Jesus’ mission, but for Jesus it was his glorification. Or perhaps we might take his words from Matthew that “whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” Paul echoes this sentiment when he says that the wisdom of Christ is foolishness to those who are perishing. And so what the outward sinful eyes see as the work

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of an evil spirit can, according to the logic of the New Testament, perhaps be read as a reference to the Holy Spirit.

But even if we are not convinced of that reading, as we turn to the Acts text we see a concrete reference to the Spirit whom Christ has received and poured out on the believers in Jerusalem. Acts also affirms the movement we see in John, in that Jesus is sent and appointed to glorify God, to serve him, and in doing so is glorified by God above human beings, David in this case. The Spirit acts as the empowerment of Jesus’ mission as he offers his work back to the father.

And so to sort of rough out the Trinity further, we have the Father who sends his Son forth in love, and the Son, who acting in response to the Father, and in his Spirit, returns this love in this same Spirit to the father. We see a descending and ascending movement of love, and also the interconnectedness of love.

The trinity is really a shorthand for the gospel, a message of God coming 7

to us and descending to our level, defeating sin, and returning us by the Spirit to God the father. This is our starting point and also the point to which we must continually return.

But it is also from this remarkable story of God’s love for us that we can begin to make some sense of the great mysteries of God and the world, we can in faith, seek understanding, hopefully without losing our minds.

Augustine was a firm believer that since this was God’s world, it would have his fingerprints so to speak. He sought high and low in his book de Trinitate for these fingerprints, which he called vestiges of the trinity. A common and perhaps not so subtle example of this is St Patrick’s shamrock analogy of the three leaves from the one plant. Augustine had more elegant analogies, such as unity and diversity of the memory, understanding and the will. I want to look at two other vestiges that relate closer to our text:

The first is about the nature of time. In our text we see that Abraham 8

rejoiced at the thought of seeing Jesus’ day. But, how could Abraham rejoice at seeing Jesus if he existed many centuries before him? Some scholars think it’s a reference to the promise God made to Abraham that through him the whole world would be blessed, others think that Abraham had a clear view of the promised Jewish Messiah and there is even a Rabbinic interpretation that says that the reference to Abraham’s death where he is said to be ‘full of years’ refers to literal time, as though he could see into the future.

But I think Christ’s words offer a hint as to the interpretation of this text. In relation to the great prophet he says “before Abraham, I am.” This of course sounds grammatically incorrect if the reference is made to an ordinary human, but our Lord is not merely human and not simply locked in time. As Augustine claimed, the Trinity is timeless; God stands outside of time and unites time together in all its variances. Christ gathered up all things in his “I am”, and so Abraham can ‘see’ him because Christ is present to all times.

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This view should challenge how we approach time. For if we only have a flattened picture of time we will miss its true depth dimension and purpose. Instead, by faith we know that when we participate in the Eucharist and we commune with our Lord in a real way, we are immediately in the upper room, and at the foot of the cross; and when we sing the Holy, Holy, Holy we join in with the angels of heaven. We of course still need to keep appointments and go to work or school on time, and we accept what science can tell us about nature of time, but our notion of time is also interrupted by a God who holds all time in his hands.

The second vestige I want to talk about is about the nature of the self. Ever since the philosopher Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century we have often thought of ourselves as independent, closed off creatures. Minds trapped inside bodies. Separate from one another and from God

In our text Jesus portrays the relationship of the Jews to the divine in a similarly distant state using the impersonal term God. He contrasts his 10

own relationship by using the much more intimate term Father.

This is significant for the term father implies a very unique bond. Jesus elsewhere in John states “I am in my father and my father is in me.” The professor Peter Leithart has offered an image of this father-son vestige in his book Traces of the Trinity

He writes: My brothers and I noticed sometime in our youth that our father always said “um” when he first answered the telephone. We joked riotously, as only preteen boys can. [But] I find myself today doing precisely the same thing. When a student asks a question I have to get the family ‘um’ out of the way before I begin an answer. I once caught a student counting up the number of ‘ums’ in a lecture. The total was embarrassingly high.

Leithart later concludes that one of the disquieting experiences of parenting is discovering yourself saying or doing to your children what your parents did and said to you. 11

In Leithart’s example we see that the bond between a Parent and a child is much more intimate than we often notice. It is so close that we are truly in one another. This is the type of union that Jesus has with God the father, it is not one of distance but one of intimacy.

And to our great fortune God has asked us to share in this union of intimacy as we are called into the fellowship of the Holy Trinity. In doing so our eyes are opened to see that we are not individuals closed off from one another competing for resources in a resource scarce world. It is not a war of all against all as Thomas Hobbes claimed. Just as the trinity depicts a Godhead of communion and the exchange of honor, service and glory, we can now see our world anew as one of gift exchange, service and honor towards one another.

I end with this, The trinity has a great deal to say about our lives in this world. It is not something to be left to the side while we seek after more useful knowledge. 12

And so I ask you today to continue to see God’s work in the world around you. To not give up on learning about God or about yourself, only remember that it is out of our salvation in Christ, out of his love for us, and in faith, that we are emboldened and enlightened to glimpse the ways this world is the work of a loving God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

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