With today being Trinity Sunday, it falls to me to say something to you about that great mystery of our faith. Human language inevitably stutters whenever it attempts to speak of God, precisely because he is so different from us: an invisible being, yet present everywhere. How much more difficult, then, to talk of the even greater mystery that is the Christian revelation: with God not just a unity but somehow three in one. Part of the problem is that we sometimes get fixated on particular images (the Spirit as dove, for example), and forget that they are simply aids towards understanding, not the actual thing itself. Perhaps some of you are among the seven million or so people that have so far read Paul Young's novel The Shack (2007). If so, you will be aware how he tries to shock his readers into re-thinking their rather static ideas of the Trinity. While Jesus remains a Jew in jeans with a rather big nose, God the Father is transformed into a big fat black mamma who is into cuddling in a big way, while the Holy Spirit becomes a wispy Asian girl who keeps on disappearing from view. From this brief summary it may all sound distinctly disrespectful, but that is very far from Young's intention. He is in fact a conservative Evangelical worried by the way in which so many of his fellow Christians tend to treat the Bible over-literally because of course for a start God is neither male nor female.
New images can in fact help us think outside those over-conventional boxes to which we all too easily get accustomed. So, that said, I want to do a similar thing for you this morning as Young attempted, not though as he did by inventing new images of my own, but instead by drawing on two images used for the Trinity in the past history of the Church. Both of these will eventually be available on the church's website, but in the meantime I will also make a couple of pictures available over coffee just in case you find my descriptions a little too hard to follow. The two images in fact pull in quite different directions, but that, as you will see, is part of the point, for we need to acknowledge both unity and difference within the godhead.
The first image stresses unity. It is of three identical heads united as one, two of which face to left and right and the third directly ahead. Although once a popular way of representing the Trinity, only rare instances survived the Reformation here in Britain, among them a fine misericord or monks' bench from Cartmel Priory in Cumbria. Many more are to be seen on continental Europe, including a beautiful fresco in Florence by the painter Andrea del Sarto. Even so, even in Italy many were destroyed during the fifteenth and sixteenth century because their use was attacked as heretical by two influential saintly bishops, St. Antoninus of Florence and St. Robert Bellarmine of Milan. The result was a papal condemnation in 1628, though there are Italian examples of this particular image's use even as late as the nineteenth century.
There is much for us to learn from the reasons given for their condemnation. Robert Bellarmine declared that the image made God look like a 'three-headed monster.' That in itself seems an odd response from a Christian whose religion commonly allows the Father to be represented by a hand stretching out from heaven, the Son as a lamb, and the Spirit as a dove! In reality, the grounds for the objection almost certainly ran deeper, and what gave particular offence was the fact that the image was in fact a borrowing from paganism. It is particularly frequent, for instance, in pagan Celtic art. Not that the Celts had a version of the Trinity prior to the arrival of Christianity; far from it! Rather, such threefold representations of a single god or goddess were their way of flagging up that something more than the merely material or human was present; in other words, the divine is a little bit like a human person but then also so much more: more not just in power but in every other human attribute including personality. Christianity of course means very much more than this by the doctrine of the Trinity, but we should not for that reason discount the basic insight contained in the pagan imagery. The Trinity is at its most basic an intensification or threefold repetition of one and same reality, for, as the Athanasian Creed reminds us, it is not that Father, Son and Holy Spirit assert different things about God; instead, they disclose more deeply, more intensely that same fundamental reality, of God as creative Love. As that particular creed puts it, 'Such as the Father is, such is the Son: and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate: and the Holy Ghost uncreate'; and so on. Or, in Christ's own words from John's Gospel: 'To have seen me is to have seen the Father' (Jn. 14.9).
Urban VIII, the pope who issued the condemnation, may then after all, it seems to me, have been less shrewd than either our medieval ancestors in the faith or even those ancient Celts who littered western Europe with such images. We cannot know for certain that St Patrick wrote the hymn we now call 'St Patrick's Breastplate', the hymn which begins: 'I bind unto myself today/The strong name of the Trinity'. What, however, we can know is that the advance of Christianity in Celtic lands must have been greatly facilitated by that shared basic insight, as to what a triple image of God might mean: not three gods, but divinity intensified, the message repeated and made yet more plain.
But that can hardly be the whole story. There are on the Christian account differences between the persons, and so it is incumbent upon us to explain how these differences nonetheless do not generate three gods, but one. That can best be done by considering another image, this time one which the Counter-Reformation did favour and which in the seventeenth century became one of the most popular ways in Catholic Europe of representing the Trinity. If you go along to the National Gallery in London, you will see a particularly fine example by the Spanish painter Murillo entitled for reasons that will become clear in a moment, 'The Two Trinities'.
Mary and Joseph are each holding a hand of the infant Jesus. The child is looking up to the heavens. From there his heavenly Father looks down, while the Holy Spirit as dove hovers between them. As the painting's title indicates, the Holy Family is taken as presenting to us an earthly counterpart to the heavenly Trinity. Indeed, such a stress on the ideal model-character of the Holy Family was a common Counter-Reformation theme. Hitherto not much notice had been taken of Joseph, whereas now numerous writers saw in the family, and in particular in stress on male responsibility, one obvious way of furthering Catholicism in Europe.
But, while a new emphasis on the importance of family life partly explains the popularity of the image, we must not lose sight of its underlying rationale. For us today Murillo's painting can easily seem cloying and unduly sentimental. To the artist himself, however, and his contemporaries, it would have said something very different. Murillo had lost both his parents at the age of nine, and he himself was to outlive not only his wife but six out of his nine children. Nor was his experience untypical. At the age of thirty-two he had seen half the population of his native Seville wiped out by the plague. In mentioning such facts what I am trying to draw attention to is the way in which for his age, unlike ours, sentimentality about children was an unaffordable luxury. Tragedy struck again and again. So what, emphatically, Murillo is not offering us is any suggestion that the Trinity mirrors the idyllic character of family life. Rather, what we are being told is that, despite the tragedies inherent within them families have the capacity to transcend those tragedies into a sense of unity and identity that, like God's, transcends the purely temporal. Murillo had an identity with all those lost children which even death itself could not destroy.
And that sense of an unbreakable identity with another human being has at some time surely been the experience of all of us, however fleeting: parents taking pride in their child's achievements as though they were their own, a wife sacrificing herself for her husband's career and yet not feeling it a sacrifice for his joys and hers were felt as one, and so on. Whatever particular example we take - little or large - that awareness of our identity being more than just a matter of who we as individuals happen to be comes to us all. And so, when we turn to think of God, it becomes a matter of postulating this to an infinite degree: three persons indissolubly bonded by love. The analogy of the family is at least as old as the fourth century in the writings of St Gregory of Nyssa, who suggested that the Trinity should be compared to the close relation between Adam and Eve and Seth, the child born to them after Cain's murder of Abel. But, if any of you are still not happy with such a comparison with the family, as though it implied that the family is the only possible norm, then you might like to recall the earlier trio which preceded such a usage, of a rather different sort of family: Jesus with Mary and her mother, Ann: the infant Christ on the lap of Mary who herself sits on the lap of her mother, three generations as one. In other words, it is not the precise form of the relationship which ultimately matters, but its capacity for transcendence into some higher unity.
I began by declaring all imagery for the Trinity inadequate: God is infinitely beyond all our conceptions and imaginings. No single image by itself can ever be entirely adequate. The Trinity is thus both like and not like the identical three-headed figure of the Celts; like and not like the Holy Family of Murillo. So, while such images can take us part of the way, as the final verse of our final hymn stresses, all ultimately ends in mystery:
How great a being, Lord, is thine,
Which doth all beings keep!
Thy knowledge is the only line
To sound so vast a deep.
Thou art a sea without a shore,
A sun without a sphere;
Thy time is now and evermore,
Thy place is everywhere.
(from 'How shall I sing that majesty...)
Sermon by: David Brown