Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and Christ Church, Bulkington
Readings – Romans 8. 12-17; John 3. 1-17
“When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”
When we cry to God the Father, it is the Holy Spirit calling within us, rhyming with our own human spirit, and bearing witness to the fact that as children of God, we are His joint heirs along with Christ. That’s an attempt to paraphrase in more understandable language what St Paul wrote in today’s epistle reading from the Letter to the Romans. We are heirs of God, His legitimate inheritors, jointly with Jesus Christ, and the fact that we instinctively cry to God as our heavenly Father reveals that the Holy Spirit is at work within us.
A modern recreation of a medieval sculpture of the Holy Trinity, at Holy Trinity Micklegate, York. © Gerry Lynch, 1 April 2017.
We often hear the phrase that we are made ‘in the image and likeness of God’. This is not just a fundamental teaching of Christianity, but one that we inherited directly from the Jewish faith where this statement is made in the Genesis creation story during the ‘sixth day’. While Christianity has more in common with Judaism than it does with any other religion, we part company very dramatically in our belief in the Holy Trinity, that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
So when we say we are made in the image and likeness of God, we don’t mean that we are made in the image and likeness of the Father alone—although certainly in His image. But we’re also made in the image and likeness of the Son, Jesus Christ. That seems to follow logically, as Jesus is God made human. There’s something much more mysterious, however, about the nature of Jesus. Jesus is not just the babe of Bethlehem or the preacher of Galilee, but also the eternal Word who was with God before time began. We human beings are like God, Father and Son, perhaps most obviously in that we are begetters of life, as the Father begat the Son, and were also ourselves begotten by our earthly fathers and mothers.
We are also made in the image and likeness of the Holy Spirit. There are two ideas from the sermon I preached on the Holy Spirit last week for Pentecost that I want to repeat on Trinity Sunday. The first is this: the Holy Spirit is many things, many of them beyond human comprehension, but one certain thing is that the Holy Spirit is love. The Holy Spirit is the love that the Father and the Son each have for the other, love as a person in its own right, flowing not only among the Father and Son but outwards into the Church and the whole universe. The second is this: the Holy Spirit is in many ways alien and difficult to understand; it is unbiddable—as St John records Jesus saying in today’s Gospel, when we are born of the Spirit, the wind blows where it wills and we have not the foggiest idea where it comes from or where it goes. We are made in the image of this Holy Spirit as much as the Father and the Son, and therefore made in the image of love, of this wild, unbiddable, uncontrollable, freely moving being. Love and freedom are at the very heart of what it means to be human, and the points at which our human nature most obviously touches the nature of God.
The doctrine of the Church, that human nature reflects God the Holy Trinity, says by far more glorious, more liberating, and more beautiful things about us than the account of humanity produced by biology, psychology, and sociology which reduces us to walking bags of water, mainly concerned with feeding, fighting, and making babies.
Our true essence, the stuff of our spirit, is love—not a bunch of chemical and electrical signals driving us by instinct to eat and to breed and to go to the lavatory. We are not to keep that love for ourselves but, as agents of that Holy Spirit, share it abundantly, extravagantly, throughout the world, like the love that flows within the Holy Trinity.
It is in the power of the Holy Spirit, our Gospel reading tells us, that we are born from above in Jesus Christ. And here’s where the hard part comes. It is still early in Jesus’ public ministry when Nicodemus comes to see Him, but He is already controversial enough that this pillar of religious respectability comes in the night. One of the things that Jesus says to Nicodemus is that the Son of Man, in other words Jesus Himself, must be “lifted up” so that we who believe in Him may have eternal life. There are three “lifted up” sayings in John’s Gospel and they are early warnings that, in order to fulfil his mission from the Father, Jesus must die high on a Cross, humiliated for all Jerusalem to see.
We all know that love is a difficult thing. Romantic love, the type of love that is most often reduced to being slushy and sugary, actually involves, as most of us know, a great deal of sacrifice and forbearance, and forgiveness on the part of both partners if it is to work in the long-term. Some of the most profound forms of love we see in the world are deeply agonising things. We often see love most deeply, for example, in the love of a parent for a severely disabled child, or the love of a child for an aged and entirely dependent parent. As the old song by the Everly Brothers goes, “Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and mars any heart not tough nor strong enough to take a lot of pain.”
God’s love for the world culminates in God the Father sending God the Son into the world that both love so that God the Son can die this terrible death to open the way to eternal life for the human beings which are made in their image. This is necessary to heal the breach that human beings opened in their relationship by abusing God’s love. If that was the end of the story, it might all be a little depressing. The most wonderful part of our nature, love, is also the most agonising thing, even for God himself—but, as St Paul reminds us in our Epistle reading, “in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.”
For the Cross wasn’t the end of Christ’s story. The Cross was the means by which Christ opened eternal life to us. The moments when love illuminates the depths of our being are moments in which we perceive, just dimly, the love that is ever flowing within the Holy Trinity between Father, Son, and Spirit. In love we experience briefly and dimly how we will live in the nearer presence of that Holy Trinity in heaven for eternity.
If you take one thing from this Trinity Sunday, let it be this: the dogma of the Holy Trinity shatters the unpleasant tendency that we have to reduce God to some sort of remote cosmic headmaster. God is love, love that is free and shared outwards. The Father who created the universe and presides over it, greater than anything we can possibly imagine, is love. The Son who will return in glory to judge the living and the dead, who will judge us – be in no doubt about that – is love, and will judge us as love. The Holy Spirit, so seemingly alien and inhuman and wild, is love. And Father, Son and Holy Spirit were present at the Cross, when God was crucified by those He loved and so walked with us in the darkest parts of our lives here on Earth, so be with the Divine Love for which we were made for ever.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
Top banner image — Domenico Beccafumi, Trinity Triptych (1513), hangs in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena.
God is indeed and that love manifests itself, as the Psalmist articulates in the second psalm, as scorn, derision and anger towards the heathen, the people and their rulers, who choose vain things.