From the Lectionary for 4 June 2023 (Trinity Sunday, Year A)

John 3:16-18 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

~

"Today is Trinity Sunday. It's the Sunday when after all the build-up of the whole of the Easter story, everything is then combined, if you like, into the doctrine of the Trinity: the understanding that God is Father, is Son and is the Holy Spirit. And all this is God. This is the proper combination of these two seasons. I'm a Trinity fan. And so I'm delighted with this. But I should also say the Trinity Sunday is the day when ... we say quite reasonably that we know nothing about God, quite rightly. ...

"The trouble about that is that it leads to two things: people either talking much about a mystery, which means ultimately, in the way they talk about it, something incomprehensible, which is not really worth talking about; or something so distant and mathematical and that it can be talked about as if one were discussing an extremely distant galaxy about which we know very little but from which we can make various deductions. I want to say: no, not going down that route. I love the doctrine of the Trinity because I think it's true, and I think it tells us something about being on the inside of God. So that's what I want to explore with you today: the doctrine of the Trinity, the joy, if you like, of the Trinity, being the fullness of the account of how we are insiders in God, God in whom we live and move and have our being. So nothing about intellectual construction up there.

"What I want to say ... first of all [is] that the notion of there being God at all rather than something about which we know refers to a certain sort of finding ourselves on the inside of something. It means that everything we know, everything we see, everything around us: that's all real, it exists, and there's an outside to it. That's what the word God means, basically: there's an outside to everything. The outside to everything that holds it all in being. It is a symptom, if you like, of God. ... [T]he doctrine of God means: there's an outside, we are not trapped. Everything that is is not some blind trap, some sort of plot against us, some source of ... bizarre cruelty. There's an outside to everything that is. That is what we mean when we say 'God'.

"And our only access of course to that is as insiders: we have no direct knowledge of the outside, merely that there is one. That's what belief in God means. It means: I'm on the inside of something that is held in being by something far bigger than I. In principle, I need not know anything about it. But I do because the same outside chose to come into our world as a human - to show us that there's an outside to being human, that being human isn't a trap, being human isn't simply a series of distempered fights, squabbles over who is stronger, putting of each other in places of shame so as to destroy each other, and survival of the fittest.

"Being human isn't that, being human is something much more than that. And there's an outside to our understanding of being human, therefore something about which we need not be afraid. Jesus is, if you like the instantiation of there being an outside to being human, that it is possible to live and to die as a human, not run by death and its consequences, not run by the need to protect yourself, to defend yourself, but able to give yourself. There an outside to being human.

"But even more than that: there's an outside to all the passions and desires, the contagions, the rivalries, which run us, everything which works in-between us. There's an outside to the desire. The outside to desires what we call the Holy Spirit. It means that all our passions, all the ways we run each other in more or less cruel and awful ways, ... there's an outside to that. That's not actually reality. The reality is when we are able to go beyond that, to be taken into what's real. So the outside of everything that is, the outside of what it is to be human, and the outside of every form of relationality and desire, reaches us, is available to us from within. This is the extraordinary power of the Gospel.

"The power of the Gospel is: this is not an exercise in power as the world understands it. Which is why St. John’s Gospel wonderfully today tells us, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.” All this is an exercise of love. God wants to show how much he loves the human creation, how much he loves the way we can build each other up, how much he wants us to be set free from fear and condemnation, from the sense that everything is closing down, that we’re trapped in something. That anyone who believes in Him starts to be able to say, “Yes, there’s an outside. Because there’s an outside, I can be free, I can feel free, I needn’t be run by it.” That is what it is to become a son or daughter of God, filled with the Spirit, finding that God is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves, as St Augustine says. He is able to move us from within, without displacing. Only the gentlest form of love can do that.

"So how do I bring this into a tiny little nutshell? God, the Creator of everything that is, not in rivalry with anything that is. But that makes it very easy for us to use and abuse the notion of God, unless God has a criterion for who God is. Well, God has a criterion for who God is, that criterion is Jesus. Jesus is God’s criterion for who God is. It’s how God lets us know who God is, what it looks like to live and die as God loves, as God is. It involves not hanging on - not hanging on to life, to possessions, riches, anything - but being able to give yourself away in love for other people. So that’s God’s criterion for God and we know that God’s criterion for God ended up crucified.

"So you might say, that’s nice enough, we’ve got God, we've got God’s criterion for God - alas no, as humans, ever since we stumbled into symbolicity there are no such things as simple facts. Everything has to be interpreted. It’s possible to look at Christ’s crucifixion and see it, as some people do, as a price paid to satisfy the vengeance of God, rather than seeing it as a sign of God’s love giving himself for us in the midst of our rage and violence. So a fact like the crucifixion without an interpretation doesn’t help us at all, because anyone can make an interpretation however they like, however perverse. So the Holy Spirit is God’s interpretation of God’s criterion of God.

"Please notice what we have: God, God’s criterion for God, and God’s interpretation of God’s criterion for God, each one of which is God. And the important thing is that each one of them: God, God’s criterion for God, and God’s interpretation of God’s criterion - are love. This is the astonishing thing, this is the Gospel: that there is an astounding power of love shown for us, just beyond, if you like, our grasp, but into which we are called. Which makes us capable of being participants in creation, in the opening up of reality. This is why, it seems to me, that the Doctrine of the Trinity is not an abstract statement. It’s what it looks like to live and move and have our being in the only God who is."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Trinity Sunday Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU5lEwrOEbk)