Matthew 28:16-20 (NRSV)
Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 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.”
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"What we have... is a gradual process of the re-casting of God in the light of the resurrection of Jesus, such that it becomes seen that the previous discourse, within which Jesus had operated, and within which his victimary self-understanding was forged, was in fact a provisional discourse.
"In the light of the resurrection it gradually becomes possible to see that it was not that God was previously violent, now blessing, now cursing (Deut. 32:39), but had now brought all that ambivalence to an end. Rather, it became possible to see that that was all a human violence, with various degrees of projection onto God.
"God had been from the beginning, always, immutably, love, and that this love was made manifest in sending his Son into the midst of the violent humans, even into the midst of their persecutory projections of God, so that they might treat him as a human victim, and thus reveal the depth of the love of God, who was prepared to be a human victim simultaneously to show the depth of his love for humanity, and to reveal humanity as having been locked into the realm of the Father of lies [John 8:44].
"The process we have seen in the Pauline writings and in the Johannine epistles is then the definitive demystification of God and human beings, such that it becomes possible to look again at the crucifixion and the resurrection and develop a perception of God only as derived from that event.
"So, it becomes possible to see the crucifixion as the meeting point between, on the one hand, a human act of violence, and, on the other hand, the love of the Father, who sends his Son into humanity as an act of love, the Son who gives himself freely to being victimized by human beings as part of his imitative love of the Father, and the Holy Spirit, who is the inner dynamic of the relationship between the two of them. Jesus on the Cross gives up his Spirit to the Father. The Father at the resurrection gives back the Spirit to the Son, and the two of them are then able to give this same Spirit, the Spirit of the crucified-and-risen victim to humans as induction into a new way of being human - becoming children of God, quite outside the violence of the “world.”
"The understanding of God as Trinity then is the understanding that the Cross of Christ, made alive in the resurrection, was in fact a relational reality - a reality of giving and of self-giving that was saving as revealing and revealing as saving. The Trinity is revealed as the salvific density of the Cross."
- James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, pp. 108-109
[Source of quote and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/trinity_a/]
[See also the post for Trinity Sunday Year A from 2023: https://daveroberts.blogspot.com/2023/06/from-lectionary-for-4-june-2023-trinity.html]
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