Growing up & something about the Trinity for Trinity Sunday

Preached 12 June 2022 at Christ Church, Billericay

Readings: John 16:12-16

How bad can it be?

When Jesus says to the disciples “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear.” my immediate thought is ‘How bad can it be?’

Farewell discourse

Our Gospel reading this morning is a very small part of Jesus’ Farewell discourse that covers John chapters 13-17. Chapter 16 is, at least partly, and expansion on chapter 14. So Jesus is repeating himself and expanding his message. He repeats himself because the disciples are a bit slow and don’t get it first time. It’s also very difficult for them to accept, that He is going to die, let alone be resurrected.

What Jesus has said

Let’s look at what Jesus has already said to them. I’m not going to look at the whole discourse, that would take too long, let’s just go back to verse 2 of the chapter:

Jn 16:2 They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God. ³ They will do such things because they have not known the Father or me. ⁴ I have told you this, so that when the time comes you will remember that I warned you. I did not tell you this at first because I was with you.

You might have thought that that was as bad as it could get, but clearly there is more.

The Disciple’s training

Over about the last three years, the disciples have been in training. Unlike Catherine and Sue, who knew exactly what they were training for, the disciples do not really understand what is coming. They are simply following Jesus because they have recognised him as the long awaited Messiah.

Going Away

Now He is going away. They have received teaching about His death and resurrection for most of the three years they have been with Him, and now is nearly the time. So Jesus is moving them on to the next steps.

Jn 16:7 But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counsellor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. ⁸ When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment:
⁹ in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me;
¹⁰ in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer;
¹¹ and in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.

… and then we get to today’s reading.

Which starts with verse 12 “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear.”

Linked verses

That verse is linked in my Bible to these two verses:

Mk 4:33 With many similar parables Jesus spoke the word to them, as much as they could understand.

and

1Co 3:2 I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready.

These two verses tell us that Jesus has taught them as much as they can understand now, and that they are still very young in their faith. They are not yet ready for the difficulties to come, but they will be very soon.

Revolution

They are about to start a revolution, they just don’t know it yet. Once a revolution starts, there is no way of knowing where it will go and how it will end – unless you are God, of course. If they are to be “The people who turned the world upside down” (Acts 17 AV) they will have to stop relying on the physical Jesus stood in front of them, and start relying more directly on the Father who sent him, the God He personifies.

The Holy Spirit

That’s why Jesus now goes on to talk again about the Holy Spirit. He assures them that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, will only tell them what He hears from the Father and the Son. That He will bring Glory to the Son by the things of God that He reveals. Everything that He reveals already belongs to the Son, Jesus.

Trinity: Intro

Now we will take a brief look at the Trinity, the doctrine that this Sunday is named after. I’ll return to these verses later.

Trinity – a question

Ian Paul, the writer of the Psephizo blog and a professor, among other things was asked the question right at the start of his ordination training: “What is the central distinguishing feature of Christian faith?” I wonder what your answer would be?

He was surprised by the answer, which was supplied by the theologian Karl Barth said

“The doctrine of the Trinity is what basically distinguishes the Christian doctrine of God as Christian…in contrast to all other possible doctrines of God (cited in Holmes p 4).¹

Today is Trinity Sunday, and I frankly, would have expected different readings. The New Testament reading gets us to a good, if short, description of the interaction between the three persons of the trinity, but the psalm is not helpful.

Where did it come from?

The word trinity is not mentioned in the Bible. So where did it come from? If we look at the history of the Christian church for a while, we will see that it was something that was arrived at quite slowly. Many scholars looking into the scriptures and trying to understand them for hundreds of years got us to the council of Nicea in AD 325. This was convened by the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, to get arguments about the, now established, faith sorted out across the Empire. The initial agreement sorted out the Arian controversy and only agreed that God the Father and God the son are of the same essence, the same substance. Arius believed that God, the son, did not always exist.

2^nd Council of Nicea

It took another council, again at Nicea in 381 add to add the Holy Spirit to the God Head, and the definition of the Trinity as we know it was established. It is still the only thing that holds the Protestants, Roman Catholics and Orthodox churches together with a common belief.

Creed

This is a part of what was agreed. For Jesus

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;

and for the Holy Spirit

We believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.

Councils

There were, of course, many other councils for other theological disagreements.

If you think that these great councils were civilised affairs, that forgave the losers, you could not be more wrong. At least one ended in a mass brawl. After the first council of Nicea, Arius was banished from the Empire. They make the discussions at General Synod look very civilised indeed.

Trinity

I’m getting side tracked, what we should be looking at is the case for the trinity and where the ideas came from.

Old Testament

In Genesis chapter one, we find the first clue:

Ge 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” ²⁷ So God created man in his own image,

Did you spot the change from plural to singular?

Let us make man in our image

So God created man in his own image

Is this the first clue, or is God just using the royal ‘we’? Maybe that’s only an English concept.

New Testament

There are, of course, better clues in the New Testament. There are frequent passages where Jesus equates himself with God, “I and the Father are one” in John 10, it was enough for the Jewish authorities to understand that He was claiming to be God. They were about to stone him. When he asked them why, their answer is “We are stoning you for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.” (John 10:33)

Then there are passages like our reading today, which tells us that the Holy Spirit gets everything from God the Father.

Other Examples

At the end of 2 Corinthians, Paul blesses his community by invoking “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit” (2 Cor. 13:13), and at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus commissions his disciples to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:18).

So the idea of the trinity goes back to the gospel writers and Paul, it is not a later invention.

Doctrine for what

The doctrine was developed to provide a common language among all Christians across the empire. To ensure that all are being taught the same thing. It provides us with a way of discussing the nature of God, and to some extent understanding that nature.

De-construction

There have been many attempts to explain it. All of them lead ultimately to some form of heresy.

Cloud

Have you ever looked up in the sky and seen a cloud that reminds you of something. I have a new camera, and have been taking pictures of all sorts of things, including clouds, but even the picture doesn’t remind me of the thing that the cloud reminded me of. And a cloud is definitely not the real thing, if you were up there with it, you would just be in fog.

It’s all a matter of perspective. We only see God from one point of view.

So before I take us all into the fog, here are two of the attempts to explain the Trinity.

Explanations

The three leaf clover is 1 piece of clover, but has three distinct leaves. Each leaf performs the same function, and already we are getting into trouble.

There are the 3 states of water, ice, liquid and steam, but it is the same substance. It’s all water, but each state has a very different effect on us, and already we are getting into trouble.

These explanations are best avoided, but they can provide some basic insights.

I’ll give the last word on the trinity for now to Augustine, who described it as “the Lover, the Beloved, and the love that flows between.”

Message from Today’s Reading

While the New Testament reading helps us with the Trinity, it’s real message is about the disciples faith maturing, and them growing up and leaving their dependence on the physical Jesus behind. Once they have the connection to God, through the Holy Spirit living in them, they will be able to bear all the hard things that Jesus is not as yet able to say to them.

Scripture is incomplete?

Incidentally, the fact that Jesus has more to say, does not mean that scripture is somehow incomplete. Jesus has plenty to say to the disciples, much of it is recorded in the book of Acts, but Jesus also speaks through the epistles and through the revelation.

To us

The spirit of truth came at Pentecost. We heard about that last week. He is still here. He is still guiding us into all truth. He is still only speaking what He hears. He is still bringing glory to Jesus through what He says. He is still telling us of things to come. We have never had the physical Jesus to have a conversation with, but we have Him as our example of how to live in an evil world, and we have the Holy Spirit as an intimate connection to Jesus and to God our Father. So we can experience a little of the love that flows between them and overflows upon and out of each of us.

Amen

1https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/the-trinity-and-john-16/