Spiritual childhood overcomes youthful rebellion
Abiding in the Trinity is to share in the life of God who is love
Readings for Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2021
Deuteronomy 4.32-34, 39-40 | Psalm 33 | Romans 8.14-17 | Matthew 28.16-20
The way I saw it, I was raised in a society and Church that wanted me to be a slave. That is a typical adolescent’s point of view. You’re growing to maturity, and the world seems as though it is a system of barriers geared to prevent you from exercising the freedom of an adult.
But it was more than that. The Church in which I was raised was a clerical, hierarchical one. The high school I attended was massive; I felt like a number, a kid whose efforts to assert my autonomy were systematically stifled. The work world looked no better. I feared that my future would be one like the proverbial hamster running endlessly on a wheel, going nowhere, achieving nothing.
The biblical image in this Sunday’s Second Reading from the Letter to the Romans that we are children of God didn’t help. I wanted an end to childhood, to always being subjected to someone else’s purposes and expectations.
The only reasonable response to such a repressive order was to rebel against it.
Now, I plumb the image of spiritual childhood more deeply. To be a child of God is not to be God’s fearful slave but to become an heir to the divine in Christ. As heirs, we have dignity and responsibility.
The quest for autonomy turns out to be a false path. By taking it, we become little gods, idols of our own making. Pretending that I am God is to live a lie. It is a lie that, rather than empowering oneself, leads to dissolution, the crumbling of the idol and all its works. Without reliance on divine providence, entropy takes over. Entropy is the lack of power and the gradual decline into disorder.
Entropy is overcome by a reliance, not just on a higher power, but on the ultimate power. That power is the God who is love.
Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel describes God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This God cannot be three gods who are all omnipotent. Three omnipotent gods would be total chaos with each of the three in an infinite competition with the other two for dominance.
Instead, the three persons must be completely one, an unimaginable mystery which we paper over with the word “Trinity.” The First Letter of John explains this mystery with the simple words, “God is love” (4.16). More than the love of desire or friendship, God’s love is purely self-giving, self-emptying. Each divine person gives so totally of itself that nothing would remain if not for the love the other two persons give to it.
John goes on to say, “Those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” God chooses to let God’s love overflow the divine unity to create a cosmos permeated with love. To abide in God’s love is to defy the law of entropy. It is to be a new creation, always growing and re-creating. Self-giving love is expansive. It puts an end to chaos and disorder.
The lonely freedom of autonomy is a death spiral. The alternative is not slavery but giving of oneself so that others may live more fully. Death has no dominion in such a cosmos. Entropy gains a foothold only because we turn our backs on others and on the opportunity to be united with God.
Trinity is the ultimate revelation of divine goodness. In the eternal Trinity, slavery is abolished. The hamster is liberated from its wheel, and fulfillment is always available if we but abide in God’s love.