In the Trinity, we have a doctrine of undivided unity. This is actually our roadmap for embodying Christ through the world.
The Trinity and our illusion of division
Trinity Sunday | Matthew 28:16-20
Our story begins with a gathering and a journey.
“The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. “
They gathered, what was left of them after the betrayal. After Jesus’s trial and crucifixion. After Peter’s denial. Yes, all that unpleasantness. And also after Mary told them that Jesus was alive.
They are going on faith to this place. Faith in Mary’s word as much as in Jesus; in God.
“When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.”
Hold the phone. This is how we’re telling the story?
Mary tells the disciples about seeing the risen Christ and they all get on the road. What do they have to lose? And they get there and Jesus just shows up and we’re not going to pause to see how amazing this moment is?
And even as we’re used to the idea that “seeing is believing” some of them are doubting even this?
We’re used to the other Easter stories—they’re more iconic. The walk to Emmaus and the fishing by the sea. This one has a different vibe to it. And besides, why are we even talking about a resurrection story on Trinity Sunday: the only principle feast based entirely on a theological concept?
Go back to that story.
They gathered again in Galilee, as Jesus had told them, through Mary. Then they climbed a mountain. And there is Jesus, coming to them like Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration; like God to Moses at Sinai. There he is.
And yet there is doubt in the hearts of some.
Matthew doesn’t dwell on the doubt. What it implies. It is merely there.
It’s also a remarkable rhetorical flourish because doubt would be present in everyone’s heart. It is impossible for me to believe that doubt was only present at all for some and not all. And much like the mischaracterization of Thomas as The Doubter in John’s gospel, that some doubted is not the entirety of their existence.
As Jesus teaches, even faith the size of a mustard seed can grow into a shrub taller than the trees.
Doubt, faith—they don’t work as all-consuming ideas or identifiers. Their presence, regardless of measure is assured.
That some doubted, even in the presence of Jesus, therefore shouldn’t be surprising. And yet, what surprises me more, is that people consumed with doubt would go to Galilee and climb the mountain at all.
Following Jesus
The fact that this is the only place in the gospels in which Jesus seems to evoke a trinitarian blessing may be the reason we read it on Trinity Sunday. But it is not the best reason for it.
We get a gospel about following Jesus in the midst of doubt the first Sunday after Pentecost. The day the Holy Spirit brought the Christ alive in their hearts and empowered them with tongues of fire.
In light of the Pentecost event, Jesus’s words to close out Matthew take a new potential:
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Our calling to be communicators of the gospel, sharers of the story, beyond ourselves is a huge undertaking. But in light of our communion with the Holy Spirit and our present commitment to one another, God invites us into a far more significant undertaking.
We usually treat this passage as the central call of the followers of Christ to evangelism. And we also almost always leave it at that. As the thing we’re supposed to do, rather than the event we are all empowered to join into.
And this is the great mistake we make in describing evangelism, and the doctrine of the Trinity. Which have at their hearts, not conversion or assimilation, but relationship.
For as God has always been God and the Triune God cannot be separated, we have never been anything but one people in relationship. We are always one, even when we believe ourselves divided.
Undivided
Last week, looking at the violence in the streets all over the country, many of us grieved our division, longed for unity, and decried the various manifestations of violence.
But in a God sense, this is a false vision. We are all God’s children. But not only as individuals, known and named and loved by God. We are also one children, never separated, never divided. Never separated from God’s love. Never driven away from God’s grace.
This is not a choice between slogans. We cannot merely say that we believe all lives matter and then brutalize our own community. We cannot expect unity when we do not build equality.
Our divisions then are as artificial and constructed as race is. The violence of police to protestors and journalists, of looters to property are not signs of an eternal, existential separation of different individuals, but the misaligned relationship of a single community.
Our world is crying out in pain! We are crying over the pain we are inflicting on us!
In a sense, we are rejecting our common life for the selfish desire of certain individualism. And therefore, we’re also rejecting the foundational nature of God. Because God is one as we are one.
Oneness
Siblings in Christ, Jesus promises us his presence, not because we are worthy of it, but because we are lonely. Jesus calls us into service because we must remember our oneness reflects God’s oneness.
And the Holy Spirit came in the Pentecost event, not to break eternal divisions, but the false ones we created so that we may be whole.
As in the beginning,
“Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness”
and gave us responsibility, to steward our creation. To fill it with vitality and life, to protect it from pestilence and negligence, to breathe new life into the cosmos.
It is not enough to say that we are never alone. Even as we may feel isolated from one another. But we are one. We are all connected. And our responsibility to each other, to the whole human family, and all of creation, is in this: I, you, we are always one.