John 16:12-15 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
“The Truth of the Trinity”
Holy Trinity Sunday, June 16, 2019
C. S. Lewis famously described the Trinity as beyond personality. God, he described, is not less personal than people, but more. And the analogy he used to describe what he meant ran across these lines: Imagine that we lived in a world not like ours, but in a world that was just two dimensions, like a flat sheet of paper. We can speak and act in terms of length and width, but we know nothing about depth. And then imagine how it would sound to have someone come from another world, one of three dimensional space into that world of two. Imagine how difficult it would be to explain how another dimension exists, and how there are entities that exist in those three dimensions. We could listen to our three dimensional visitor and gain vague notions of what a cube or another solid might be, but we could never really understand it. We could never fully appreciate what it would be like to live in a world beyond our own and to exist in dimensions beyond what we have known. Lewis’ explanation is a far cry from the weighty historical treatise on these matters that we know as the Athanasian Creed. It is more an attempt to answer the person who hears all of the descriptions and claims made by that creed and dismisses them as impossible, as nonsensical, as contradictory. God has spoken to us about himself. That is amazing enough. He has described himself to us in ways that challenge not just our thinking, but even the way in which we think about things. And so he reminds us to keep in mind that his ways are higher than our ways and his thoughts than ours—and necessarily so. Yet he reveals himself in such a way that we can think about him, and we can marvel at him, and we can stand in awe not only of what he does, but even of who he is. Because of that awe, that marvel, the Church has set in its calendar an observation centered not so much on one particular event, like a birth or a death or a resurrection to life, but on this concept, this doctrine. The First Sunday After Pentecost, Holy Trinity Sunday, invites us to stand in awe and marvel over the fact that God has revealed to us the truth of the Trinity. He has done so for our benefit, and he has done so to his glory. The words of our sermon text are the words of Jesus to his disciples, among many other words he spoke on Maundy Thursday evening. They are promises made by the Son of God, promises concerning the Spirit and the Father. They are the truth of the Trinity in assurances given to followers of the triune God. And Jesus begins by explaining how necessary these assurances are. He says, “I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now.” After three years of teaching and instructing, performing miracles, rebuking doubt and unbelief, and teaching some more, Jesus says to his disciples that there is even more. That very night as John describes it for us, is full of Jesus teaching those men what they could expect, what was going to happen, what they were going to experience. And then he says, “there is so much more, but not now.” It was going to be enough, it was going to be more than enough for those men to watch their teacher be taken away and tried and executed. It was going to be more than enough for them to hear the news of an empty tomb days later and to see the same Jesus standing in front of them alive. It would be too much to bear for Jesus to tell those disciples everything at that time. And no wonder. The problem wasn’t, as some might assume, that many of these men were simple fishermen. The problem was not that they didn’t have the capacity or the language or the intelligence that Jesus required of them. The problem was deeper and inborn. The problem was universal. The problem was sin. It was not just, to borrow again from the analogy of C. S. Lewis, that they were living in a two-dimensional world compared to the three dimensional world of Jesus. The problem was that their two-dimensional world had been crumpled and torn and stained and dirtied by their rebellion. The problem was that they were a part of the race of beings that had crossed their creator, defected from him, and kept fighting every step of the way and every generation to the next. Their problem was the same problem that we share with them. Of course spiritual truths are too much for us to bear because we have run as a people so far from the Creator who wishes to share them with us. Of course they are too much to bear because we could not figure any of them out on our own. Of course they are too much to bear because we have too frequently spurned and rejected them.
And I do not just mean the truths about a triune God, one who is three persons and yet one divine being, one divine essence. Could that have been among the holes in the understanding of the disciples? Perhaps it was. But the point is this: the disciples wouldn’t be able to put it all together, they wouldn’t be able to get straight in their minds and in their hearts everything that Jesus had taught and was teaching about him, about them, about the events that they would witness, until the Holy Spirit would be poured out on them. And there we stand, too. Unless the Holy Spirit had been poured into our hearts, we could not understand any spiritual thing. We could fathom none of the mysteries of God. We could find no comfort in what Jesus has done. But this is what Jesus has done: he stepped, as it were, out of his three dimensional existence to be found among us. He veiled his true complexity so that he could deal with us in our world and be understood by us. He faced the mangled world that sin had made of the perfect creation, the stains and the tears, so that he might smooth it and clean it and mend it. He did so by being torn apart himself for us, on our behalf, for a whole world that could not love him until he loved them first. And he made a promise. He made a promise that said that there is a world beyond that which we know. There is an existence that is higher than ours. He made a promise that one day he will take us out of this world to be with him in the next. And he sealed that promise with an empty tomb and by ascending into heaven before us. And the triune, beyond-personality God reveals all of this to us. He speaks in his Word about who he is and about what he has done…for us. We’ll speak about it this way: the Father had a loving plan from eternity to save that which was lost. The eternal Son set about that mission and fulfilled every part. The Holy Spirit reveals the good news through Word and Sacrament to hearts and minds. And, Jesus in our verses tells us and reminds us that while these persons are distinct, they are not separate. Everything that the Father has belongs also to the Son. Every truth that the Spirit speaks comes from the Son and the Father. Every truth that the triune God is and reveals to us is for our benefit, for our salvation. And every truth that the triune God reveals to us is to his glory. It would be easy, perhaps too easy, to strain and stress over the details of what it means that God is both one and three in order that the ultimate glory might be ours. We could pat ourselves on the back for finally using the right analogy or explaining the doctrine so thoroughly that no one could possibly misunderstand. We could shake heads at those who adhere to various errors or weep over those who keep returning to inadequate explanations. We could draw diagram after diagram and memorize creed after creed. And while those exercises may have some merit, none would quite reach the point that the doctrine of the Trinity would have us realize: God is God, and we are not. He is higher and truer and more complex and more awe inspiring. He is the one who sits on a heavenly throne. He gave to Isaiah a glimpse of that throne, and Isaiah heard angels, angels who hid their faces from his glory, utter the words of our verse of the day, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; heaven and earth are full of his glory” (Isaiah 6:3). He is not just holy, but “holy, holy, holy.” He is the one who instructed Aaron and Aaron’s son to proclaim his name over his people, “The Lord bless you…The Lord make his face shine…The Lord…give you peace” “The Lord…The Lord…The Lord” (Numbers 6:24-26). In the face of his glory we need to step back and realize that there are truths that defy our reason and logic. They are known only through God’s revelation to us. And therefore, the only right response is to simply drink in that revelation. Yes, it is to tread carefully as we talk about and think about these truths, but not in order that we might be right about it, but that we might stand in awe and wonder. That is, that we might see the glory of God in the truth that he reveals. We began with a description that C. S. Lewis used concerning the Trinity, that of two dimensions or three. We will continue shortly with the formulation, solidified by years of study and discussion in the Christian Church about these matters, in the Athanasian Creed. God is three, and yet one. We marvel, we rejoice, we give thanks for his love. Another writer summarizes it this way: “This is not something we figure out like a riddle. There is no earthly thing we can set beside God for purposes of easy comparison. We hold God by faith in mystery and awe—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit loving one another, each permeating the others in a oneness so profound that it strains reason and resists analogy.” May God grant that we always hold him in such faith and share the truth of the Trinity with others.
The Text: John 16:12-15 12“I
still have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now. 13But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. For he will not speak on his own, but whatever he hears he will speak. He will also declare to you what is to come. 14He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. 15Everything the Father has is mine. This is why I said that he takes from what is mine and will declare it to you.�