The uncomplicated truth of the Trinity
Trinity Sunday | John 3:1-17
What is the Trinity? she asked with such seriousness. I don’t get it. How can God be three and one at the same time?
I wasn’t a priest then. I just happened to be the one Christian she knew. I was 22. She was 20 or so. We were both working at Barnes and Noble.
And I want to punctuate the openness of this moment. People around, she’s asking a tough question, and also is showing willingness to figure it out. This wasn’t a gotcha moment or an expression of naivete. She was genuine.
My responses didn’t satisfy. But we shouldn’t expect it to. Not with the way we think of things now.
Why is the Trinity hard to understand?
Well, I don’t think the Trinity is the problem. The Trinity isn’t complicated. It’s actually quite simple.
It is simple, but it is paradoxical. Which means it treats two things as true at the same time. And always so.
And because we treat the Trinity like a straight-forward linear puzzle (if this, therefore that) we get stuck in the middle.
And when we get stuck, we get fearful or confused, thinking we missed something. Or that there must be more to it.
In short, we get stuck in a simple idea because we demand it be more complicated.
So what is so simple? And why do we make it more complicated?
Let’s start with that original question:
What is the Trinity?
The Trinity is God. And God is one God and three persons. That’s it.
Now, we always demand to know more. Offer our what if? scenarios. And so the church needed to settle on an essential character for this paradoxical arrangement. We might call this character eternal simultaneousness.
God is always one and always three. So there is no time in which God is ever three and not one or one and not three.
We can see where this goes, right? And why?
It primarily starts with Jesus. And trying to figure out how Jesus could be literally present as a dude and then also try to figure out where God the Father is in the cosmos.
But now we’ve unintentionally created two Gods. Nope.
This arrangement isn’t complicated. And our desire to understand it is natural. But we struggle to see exactly what we’re doing to God in an effort to understand the nature of God.
We want to trap God in time and space.
To literally locate God. Put God into a body. At a moment. And put existence, actuality, life itself into the same confines.
This is certainly a human desire. But it was the intentional goal of Modernism and the whole Enlightenment project we have inherited. We want to catalog and comprehend the building blocks of nature and existence. Literally pick apart creation, time, and life and then place it in a somewhat linear conceptual framework.
If I drop this binder, it will fall to the floor. We know this. And mathematicians can calculate the speed that it will fall and even tell us the way it will bounce, perhaps fall open, depending on the angle or if I toss it.
This all seems so normal to us.
When we try to do that with God, we get mad. Because God doesn’t work like that. God can’t be so defined. We can’t put God into these boxes because God is not defined by these boxes. God is behind these boxes and categories. God transcends these things.
In essence, these are human things. Human ways of thinking. And even then, they are new ways of thinking in human history.
In short, we are the reason we don’t understand the Trinity!
Because we always start with assumptions. About God, nature, existence. And we assume God is limited by all of it.
Now let’s talk about heresy.
I like to say that more heresies are preached today than on any other Sunday. Probably more than all other Sundays put together.
And we do this because we want to make things easy. We hate when people don’t understand. And so we must offer simple ideas. In other words, we think the problem is that the Trinity is complicated. So we offer a simple solution. But this is like giving medicine that won’t treat the symptom.
The Trinity is simple—our desire to classify it complicates it.
So we offer images and metaphors to help attach our thinking. But all of them represent the same kind of problems. And they are all limited to the physicality of the world. So none of them represents eternal simultaneousness! None deal with the paradox!
Instead, they introduce new complications. Like whether God transforms like Optimus Prime, or occupies three locations like Multiple Man.
All of this is our attempt to understand a puzzle of our own creation. It doesn’t actually help us understand God.
Why do we always limit God?
Of course we didn’t set out to do this. We just follow our own logic. But the entire field is our logic. It isn’t about reality. The trap is based in how we’ve constructed the problem.
There’s a famous puzzle about this. One that seems rational. At first glance.
Can God create a rock too heavy for God to lift?
Isn’t that a great question? Wow. Of course, there is no limit to God’s creative abilities, so that should be yes. But then that limits God’s power. So maybe it should be no…but that limits the other…
And now we’re trapped. Because both answers are wrong. And that is the point.
This isn’t a question—it’s a riddle. And one that intends to trap you. Because it necessitates limits on God. It bakes limitation into the very words.
So, in other words, it’s a trick question posing as logic. And we fall for it because our language shapes our understanding around these kinds of dialectic decisions. And it abhors a paradox.
So, if we go back to that riddle, the real answer is to remember the limitlessness of God and our desire to cap God’s ability. God’s creative power and might have no limits! But God can choose to limit God’s self. And that’s a whole other thing!
Now can we see our limitations?
How we hold ourselves back? Not because we intend to misunderstand, but because there is stuff we don’t want to think about?
It’s what Nicodemus does in the gospel this week. It is easy to follow what Jesus is saying, but Nicodemus makes himself play dumb. By taking it literally. Which, as a word, is itself losing meaning.
Nicodemus is complicating it for himself because he wants to locate this all in the physical world. At a time. He scoffs at the simple idea of being from God and starts talking about birth canals.
That’s what we do. But we don’t have to. Not if we listen.
We don’t need a simple solution to the complication we create. We need to simply see past the complication. To not be of this world.
A New Way
That is why Jesus came into the world and why the Holy Spirit is so often in our midst. Not to offer life hacks to make sense out of this chaos, but to show us that we make this chaos. And Jesus’s Way of Love is quite simple. God’s Dream for creation is quite simple.
And we know it is simple when we stop fearing the paradox at the heart of existence. Choosing to love the unloved and the unloving. To encourage repentance for those who exploit and wage reconciliation between exploiter and exploited. Even to trust when we feel the most scared and question our intentions when we feel most secure.
Our faith is paradox because life itself is paradox.
Let us get out of our own way and embrace our divine imagination so that we might hear in our calling a new way of life. One that is full of hope and generosity. That never settles for the easy answers of the world, but embraces a generous life in Christ.
And may we find peace in offering love, joy, and grace in heaping abundance.