A reflection on Trinity Sunday

Trinity Sunday celebrates the triune nature of God, a concept with a long and difficult development in the early Christian community. The idea that God is three persons united in one “being” is tough. There’s no passage in the Bible where God announces, “I am actually three different persons, united together in a single nature. Just thought you’d like to know.” Rather, the New Testament provides imagery of God the Father and God the Son, plus Jesus’ promise to his followers of a mysterious agency that would comfort and guide them in their mission. The idea that these three “persons” were somehow one nature in God grew gradually in the early centuries of the Christian tradition.

Even so, the idea of a triune God was so difficult and mysterious that some people were led to say that it couldn’t be understood — which of course did not prevent people from talking about it.

In fact, one of the core statements of the Christian faith, the Nicene Creed, goes out of its way to employ technical philosophical jargon to state what needed to be understood about the nature of God. This formula will be familiar to most Christians:

We believe in one God, 
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
begotten from the Father before all ages,
God from God,
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made;
of the same essence as the Father.

The final sentence above is also translated “being of one substance with the Father,” making the jargon more visible. The Nicene Creed was one of the first explicit and “official” pronouncements of the idea that God was actually three different things united in a single nature, whatever that might mean philosophically.

This year’s readings for Trinity Sunday include the story of creation in Genesis 1, and in particular, the creation of human beings:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Gen 1.26-27

I can’t hear this verse without thinking of Irenaeus, the second century bishop of Lyon, who noted that these two different words, image and likeness, signify different aspects of the “complete” human being. Perhaps Irenaeus wondered what it might mean that God was motivated to create beings like us both in his image and in his likeness; I wonder what it means that, when it came to the business of creating in verse 27, only God’s image is mentioned — twice. What about God’s likeness?

In Adversus Haereses, Irenaeus seems to be thinking of human nature as body, soul, and spirit, and he associates body/soul with image and spirit with likeness. Taking Irenaeus’s distinction as a cue might lead to a startling possibility: Perhaps we aren’t finished in the moment of creation. Perhaps the point is that we are, in some sense, made to be like the Maker from the beginning, but that Maker’s genius was to include us in the process of creation — by stopping before we were fully formed “spiritually.” What if God puts us in charge of shaping ourselves according to God’s likeness? This would solve the problem of how to explain two Hebrew words collapsing into one, but it places on us an awesome — even frightening — responsibility to participate in the work of creation.

Think about what it might mean to be made in God’s image. What if God meant to make us like God not in the superficial ways we often employ to domesticate God’s image: What if God meant to be telling us that, like God’s triune nature, we, too, are a multiplicity that is somehow united in a single “being”? Isn’t Irenaeus’s thought that body/soul is the image a hint? What if revealing God’s nature as three-in-one was really a metaphor for community — a genuine pluralism, nevertheless unified by bonds of purpose and love and agency and justice? When God says, “Let us make man in our image”? what if God was talking both about human nature individually — the interdependencies that make us who and what we are — and also about us as a single collective reality?

What would it mean for us if God’s motive was to make beings separate in personhood and agency but single in community — and then turn them loose to finish the job?

Consider another, harsher image: The Father’s knee, pressed into his Son’s neck, stifling the Son as he pleads for mercy.

If you find that image jarring, even alarming — and most believers, I expect, would viscerally repudiate such an image — how can we accept that image as our Image?

I’m not sure what Irenaeus meant, but one implication of his hints about these two terms is that complacency with our nature as the image of God is not what God calls us to do. Jesus’ parable of the talents may help us understand: A homeowner leaves his wealth in the hands of servants. Two of them take dangerous risks, and the wealth grows. One “plays it safe,” safeguards what he was given, and is ready to return just that much, and no more, when the homeowner returns. But who is condemned? The one who merely preserved what he was given and kept it safe.

Years ago, I taught a course on Jesus’ parables for a group of seminarians. In our exploration, I noted that, in the parables, Jesus has a way of turning expectations back on the expectant. We think we know where this is going, and suddenly — we’re opposite where we thought we’d end up. One of my students asked, “What is Jesus teaching us, then?” I replied that I thought Jesus wasn’t so much about teaching as about doing. If we saw Jesus outside our classroom window, he’d be “going about doing good,” wearing a t-shirt that said, “If you aren’t living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room.”

Perhaps God’s image is meant to be understood as a center, as what grounds us: empathy and compassion. Does God call us to safeguard and defend only what we got in that first moment of creation? What if God calls us to get beyond empathy and compassion, and do something?

What if God’s likeness is the edge?