June 6, 2009

Glynn Cardy

Trinity Sunday     Isaiah 6:1-8     John 3:1-8

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone Harry and his friends face the imposing obstacle of a large aggressive dog called Fluffy who has three heads and is pacified by music. In popular Christian culture God is similarly portrayed as a three-headed deity called Trinity.

Each head, or face, of the Trinity has its own peculiarities. The First Persona [1] of the Trinity is traditionally called ‘God the Father’. It is the unbegotten source and creator of all, as well as the abba to whom Jesus prayed.

The problem with this First Persona is that as scientific knowledge has grown its head has shrunk. We now know that a creator did not make human beings as a potter makes a pot, or put stars in the sky like a parent hangs mobiles from a child’s ceiling. Life took billions of years and billions of mistakes to evolve. The evolutionary force is neither kind nor cruel, it is indifferent. The craftsmanship of a consistent loving creator is not obvious or verifiable.

Further, the gendered labelling of this Persona as ‘Father’ has brought its own problems. Initially the problem was that ‘Father’ inferred prior existence and superiority to, not co-eternal and co-equals with, the 2nd Persona ‘the Son’.[2] In the last century the problem has been with this God’s masculine gender and the tradition’s affirmation of patriarchy. As Mary Daly famously said, “When God is male, the male is God.” The notion of Trinity elevated and sanctified male power.

Yet despite these problems this first head of the God when stripped of some of its antiquated metaphor holds before us something spiritually important. Within our human experience there are glimpses of wonder, mystery, and unfathomable beauty both beyond us and yet, inexplicably, reaching out to touch us. We can look at, describe, and despair of the crude theological instrument called ‘the First Persona of the Trinity’. However its like being fixated upon a musician and their instrument as if they are of ultimate and eternal importance when what is really of value is the sublime music that can reach out and into the far corners of our soul.

The second head or face of Trinity is Christ. The early disciples experience of Jesus shaped their understanding of God. They experienced Jesus as a loving friend, as a prophetic boundary-breaker, as inclusive of women, foreigners, and other outsiders, and as courageous suffering. ‘God was in him’ they said. In Jesus they touched God.

The Council of Chalcedon [451 CE] asserted that Jesus was ‘truly God and truly a human being’ without attempting to say how such a paradox was possible. The philosophical debates around and following the Council all failed to affirm both Jesus’ deity and humanity. The combatants either came down on one side or the other; and have continued to do so down the centuries. Was he divine, human, a blend, or did he put on his humanity like an overcoat just for our weather?

Trinity was an attempt by the Early Church to put the Jesus of experience into the heart of divinity. Traditionally this has been portrayed as the earthly Jesus being elevated into the heavenly God. However it is more accurate to understand the incarnation as locating and grounding God in human experience. Instead of a King Jesus sitting on a heavenly throne, we have God suffering at Calvary, Auschwitz, Deir Yassin, and Guantanamo Bay.

God was fully God in humanity. God was not just fully God in Jesus’ humanity but actually and potentially in our humanity too. All those God attributes of love, power, creativity, suffering, forgiveness and grace were in Jesus and are, if we allow them, to be in us. Our relationships are the locus of divinity. God is earthed, as God has always been. There is no extra-terrestrial God.

Again music, poetry, and the creative arts are more and better able to express this dance of divinity and humanity, this blending and enrichment of love, this merger of heaven and earth, this majesty of humanity and commonness of divinity.

A brief comment about the use of the term ‘Christ’ in relation to Jesus: Jesus refers to the man who lived and died in Palestine some two thousand years ago. Christ refers to that essence of Jesus that transcended death and is in the heart of God. It’s not a male historically-limited being that is in the heart of God, but a transformative suffering love that can be portrayed [as artists frequently do] as a child, a woman, or a man.

In 1984 a sculpture called Christa was hung in the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York. It was a crucifix with a woman hanging on it. We need to understand the 2nd Persona of the Trinity much more broadly and radically than another male lording it over the earth.

The third head or face of Trinity is that of the Spirit. In the Bible She first appears as ruach hovering over the chaos. The bird imagery persists, but breath, fire, and wind are also associated with Her. In the Greek Her feminine tense is neutered as pneuma, but never made male. The Spirit darts in and out of biblical scenes and is never wholly tamed. On some She alights, on some She plops, and some She drives wild.

Not surprisingly She has been the most controversial of the Trinity threesome. Initially the Spirit wasn’t taken as seriously as the male duet of Father and Son. She was God, but not fully God. Thankfully those latter crafters of the Trinity doctrine, the Cappadocians [3], insisted upon her inclusion.

Throughout history the Church has usually wanted to restrain the Spirit with their biblical understandings and restrict Her to the dictates of Church councils. It is interesting though that within the make-up of what has largely been an authoritarian male God-head there has remained this free Spirit: creative, feminine and potentially anarchistic.

In 1410 the Russian Andrei Rublev painted a famous icon. On the one hand it portrayed the scene from Genesis 18 of Abraham and Sarah’s three visitors at the Oaks of Mamre. On the other hand it was an insight into the Trinity, three distinct androgynous beings communing together. Yet the mystics tell us that in this icon the Trinity is not what we see in the foreground. Trinity is not the three beings but a way of being. It is not the beings of Father, Son and Holy Ghost but the background ‘betweeness’ that is God.

I began with J.K. Rowling’s Fluffy the fictional three-headed dog. The way of thinking of God as a three-headed being is similarly fictional. Trinity arose from reflecting on a singular way of being [Jesus] and grew into three God-beings. Yet the Trinity is not about three beings but rather a way of self-giving being. It is a flow of love energy.

The three Persona [Source, Christ, and Spirit] are signs pointing to a way. They are not what is signified, or the destination. They are not God. A three-headed God-being is too static, too fixed, and ultimately becomes an idol. People are seduced into sitting and worshiping a stationary signpost.

On the contrary it is better to think of Trinity as a piece of music, a movement of grace, gift, and transformation. It is wild, passionate, forgiving and free. Trinity points to God as a verb rather than a noun, loving rather than the lover, giving rather than the giver, and shedding rather than accumulating power.

For too long Trinity has been used to maintain a patriarchal image of three hierarchical beings - two of whom were male - as the Christian presentation of God. For too long it has been used to justify the elevation of ‘fathers’ to reign over women. For too long it has been used to denigrate Jews and devalue the insights of people of other faiths. It has become a three-headed monster.

We need to remember, listen to, and play the music rather than look at old musicians and analyse their instruments. We need to pull our God back down to earth, toppling all the gods off their thrones of power. We need to pray our God into the pain of living and into the reality of love. We need to humbly dance transformative possibility with those of any faiths. When there is no difference between heaven and earth, between hope and reality, between the powerful and powerless, then the music will have done its work.

Endnotes:

[1] Note that the Greek persona does not translate into our English word ‘Person’. A persona was a mask that an actor/actress wore to play a part. Hence why I use the word ‘face’.

[2] I refer to what was called the heresy of subordinationism. The use of the metaphor ‘father’ inferred that the father preceded the son, begat the son, and was superior to his child [a normative ancient understanding]. St Paul clearly had this understanding in 1 Corinthians 15:23-28. Orthodoxy, in trying to assert that the 1st and 2nd personas of Trinity were co-equal and co-eternal were metaphorically impeded by the use of ‘father’ and ‘son’.

[3] The Cappadocians were Basil the Great, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, their sister Makrina, and their friend Gregory Nazianzus, Patriarch of Constantinople.