Romans 5: 1-5; John 16: 12-15
If you don’t love, then you’re dead. And if you truly love, then they’ll probably kill you. According to Herbert McCabe, a Dominican Friar of the twentieth-century, this is the fundamental message or story of the New Testament. If you don’t love, then you’re dead. And if you truly love, then they’ll probably kill you.
And at the end of the Church’s liturgical celebration of this story of love we finally come to this moment, the feast day of Trinity Sunday.
In Advent, we were transported back to those long years of expectation in the Old Testament, as we re-learned what it means to wait upon God, with the patriarchs and prophets of old, so that our hearts might be prepared to truly receive Love Incarnate himself, who descended to the earth in the little baby in Bethlehem at Christmas.
In the season of Epiphany, we rejoiced as the gift of Divine Love was revealed to all peoples of the world, and his glory manifested in cosmic signs and compassionate miracles, as also during Lent we walked the path of discipleship with Love, and learned his ways, as we were reminded of his challenge to our apathy and pride, and his fierce commitment to purify the priceless treasure of our human nature.
In the days of Holy Week, we watched as Love gave itself so totally, that it even poured out itself into our death – even death on a cross! – so that the indestructible life and light of Love might burst open all that shackles, imprisons, and enslaves God’s children, as he rose from the dead, and brought to birth the new horizon of the new creation.
And in these past few weeks, we have been caught up in Love’s exaltation of our very humanity, as he ascends in the flesh he has taken to himself for all time, rising upon clouds into the heavenly temple as our mediator and priest – the most beautiful, the most sweet-smelling sacrifice of love and life that earth could ever offer to heaven, so that in response the Holy Spirit may be sent from heaven to earth, and unite us in the circle of infinite love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This is the story of love which the Church tells. As Herbert McCabe says, it certainly involves death, but this is not the last word. Because it is only as life is given away, that it is truly received; it is only after the grain of seed has fallen to the ground and dies, that it then brings forth a fruitful harvest.
On this Trinity Sunday I want to offer you another insight from Herbert McCabe, who asks us to think of this great story of love, this drama of salvation history, as the projection of God’s life in eternity into the world. Imagine, he says, that the inner life of God is like a film reel.
If this film reel is projected upon the silver screen of heaven and eternity, the image one would see would be that of the perfect harmony and bliss of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It would be the image of an infinitely dynamic circle, in which all that each of the divine persons has, is only ever possessed as given away in love.
The Father, only ever possessing the divine nature, only ever being God as God-given-away-to-another, entirely communicated and expressed in the Son, who, likewise, only ever receives this infinite gift, by entirely returning it to the Father in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, the bond of divine love. None of the three stands apart as an individual, jealously guarding what they might claim for themselves. They only ever exist in that relationality whereby they are fully poured out in one another.
As the Athanasian Creed puts it: For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one: the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.
And like an owl is dazzled by the brightness of the sun, that is as much as our small minds can take in of the infinite God. Not because the Trinity is a contradiction of logic, or lacks intelligibility, but because it is too full of truth and meaning for us to comprehend.
However, now imagine that the projector, which is playing the film reel of God’s inner life, is then directed downwards upon the earth; then we will be given a glimpse of what God is like in terms that we can understand.
However, as McCabe puts it, when the life of God is no longer projected upon the perfect surface of the silver screen of heaven, what we see is the story of Jesus, which is what the Trinitarian life looks like when it is projected onto the rubbish dump that we have made of the world. The perfect life of God remains one and the same, but now projected upon the world it is seen through the violent contours and dark shades of the human betrayals of love.
Because the divine Son simply is the gift of the Father’s love from all eternity, when he descends into the world in the human nature of Jesus of Nazareth, all he can do is offer himself to others as love, for that is who he is, even if that means giving himself into the hands of those who want to harm him.
But because the divine Son, from all eternity, simply is also the return of the Father’s gift in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, the grave cannot hold Jesus, and so in his resurrection and ascension the circle of divine life is completed, and the sending of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost weaves the story of earth into the story of heaven, so that we are not merely spectators, but participants.
Today, we come to the end of the liturgical telling of this story of love, and the Church moves into the period of ‘Ordinary Time’. Ordinary, because our task now is to go out into the world and witness to the story of love, so that the ordinary lives of those around us may be united with the story of the extraordinary God of love.
How might we do this? By way of an answer, I want to conclude with a brief story told about St John, the Apostle and Evangelist.
St John was the last man alive out of the eleven disciples who had accompanied Jesus from the beginning of his ministry. Ten of them had died martyrs’ deaths, but John alone remained to live into old age.
St Jerome, the famous commentator on the Bible, tells the story that John continued preaching in the city of Ephesus well into his nineties, and that when he became so frail with old age the people had to carry him into the church in Ephesus on a stretcher. The time came when he could no longer muster the strength to say many words, so every week he would prop himself up on his elbow and simply say: ‘Little children, love one another.’
This continued every week, the same, short sermon, ‘Little children, love one another.’ And then he would be carried back home after the liturgy.
The story goes that one week, someone asked him why he preached exactly the same thing, week after week. John replied: ‘Because it is the Lord’s commandment, and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.’
Little children, love one another… in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.