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.