‘Trinity - overflowing love’ by Claire Lynch, 2 March 2025

What do we mean by calling God a “trinity”? Claire Lynch looks at the essence of one God as loving relationship, and explores how people have tried to express or explain this. Jesus talked about it in terms of his Father and his Spirit. If we can relate to God through knowing and trusting Jesus, can we do the same? What difference can it make to our lives to know that we are part of God’s loving relationship with creation?

Introduction

I’d like to start by reading a poem to you:

ONE alone

is not by nature LOVE

or Laugh

or Sing

One alone

may be Prime Mover

Unknowable

Indivisable

All

and if Everything is All and All is One

One is Alone

Self-Centred

Not Love

Not Laugh

Not Sing

TWO

Ying/Yang

Dark/Light

Male/Female

contending Dualism

Affirming Evil/Good

And striving toward Balance

At best Face-to-Face

but Never Community

THREE

Face-to-Face-to-Face

Community

Ambiguity

Mystery

Love for the Other

And for the Other’s Love

Within

Other-Centred

Self-Giving

Loving

Singing

Laughter

A fourth is created

Ever-loved and loving.

That’s a poem by William Paul Young, author of ‘The Shack’ attempting to capture what it means that God is three in one - the term we use for this being ‘The Trinity’ - or the tri-unity of God.

So in this series of exploring ‘What is God like?’, today we are going to delve into the subject of the Trinity. Now before you immediately switch off and think this sounds like something very bland and boring, discussing some theological thing that appears fairly irrelevant to our every day life, I want to suggest, quoting from Michael Reeves an author and theologian, that ….

“…. it is only when you grasp what it means for God to be trinity that you really sense the beauty, the overflowing kindness, the heart grabbing loveliness of God.”

That’s quite a big statement, it’s ONLY when you grasp what it means for God to be trinity, that you really get the fullness of God!

I wonder how well we think we understand the Trinity? How would you explain it to someone else? Can you explain it in terms that are relevant to every day life and and connects us to the beauty, overflowing kindness and heart grabbing loveliness of God?

For a moment, imagine you are speaking with your next door neighbour and then in your best words, think how you describe what it means that God is trinity, three in one. What would you say to them?

Might you draw upon some of the familiar images that have been passed on to you? Like God is like an egg, with a shell, a yolk and a white and yet its all one egg!! Or God is like shamrock leaf, that’s one leaf but it’s got three bits sticking out - just like the Father, son and Holy Spirit. Or maybe the 3 states of H2O, the Father is a bit icy until you warm him up and he turns into the watery son who then vaporises and becomes the steamy Spirit when you really crank up the heat!

I’m not sure any of those illustrations would lead us to speak of the Trinity like Michael Reeves did in that quote!

Whether God is one or God is three is something that the early Christians grappled with for centuries.

Is God one God who just turns up in different forms at different times, a bit like a shapeshifter that you might come across in some marvel movie?

- although that doesn’t really make sense of the Holy Spirit appearing when Jesus is already present, like at his baptism, or even the fact that Jesus prays to God the Father - he doesn’t appear to be pretending to pray to himself!!!

Or is God actually three individual gods, who just work very closely together?

but this doesn’t quite do justice to the way Jesus spoke about the oneness he has with the Father. You can read about it in John’s gospel, chapter 20-23.

And if God is one in three, are all three persons equal or is one higher than the other…like God the Father being the main guy and then Jesus and the Holy Spirit being subordinate or of a slightly lower status? And what difference does it make anyway?

Even today, belief in the trinity, that God is both three and one at the same time, is a challenging concept and is quite possibly the hardest characteristic of God to understand, that along with Jesus being both fully human and fully divine!

But as difficult as it is to get our heads around, this single belief distinguishes the Christian faith from all other faiths.

All the other theistic faiths, those that believe in God or gods, as far back as recorded history, fall into one of two categories. Either they are mono-theistic, which means they believe in one God, or they are polytheistic and they believe in many Gods.

And then comes the Christian faith, that wants to have it both ways - God is both, one and three!

This is the primary issue that other faiths, both past and present, have with the Christian faith, they think that we have a faith system built on an essential contradiction - God is either one or many, but can’t be both!

So today I want to spend a little time, looking at why Christian’s seem to have arrived at this belief and secondly, why it actually matters? What does it show us about who God really is? Why is it that Michael Reeves says it’s the trinity that leads to the ‘the beauty, the overflowing kindness, the heart grabbing loveliness of God.’?

But as a caveat, I do just want to manage your expectations here! When speaking about the Trinity, I will not be able to answer all your questions today! God is a mystery and not a mathematical equation to be solved! However, just because we can’t understand everything, doesn’t mean we can’t understand somethings and it’s on that premise that we will continue.

Background to the doctrine of the trinity

So first of all, where has this strange belief come from?

You may already know, but the word trinity never actually appears in the Bible?

But don’t panic, the reality of the trinity is certainly spoken about in the New Testament, by the Apostles, those who were eye witnesses to Jesus’ life and resurrection and by Paul - they just didn’t have a term or a name for this understanding yet.

Interestingly the Old Testament Scriptures were never written with the belief in the trinity in mind. It’s only in light of what the new testament writers tell us, that we may retrospectively, see the trinity within the texts of the Old Testament - for example in the creation story.

You see one of the central planks of Jewish belief in the God of Israel was that he is the one, true God - which was in contrast to the surrounding pagans who believed there were multiple gods.

The core Scripture for that belief, is reflected in the Jewish daily prayer, the Shema, found in Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

The idea of a second god of any sort was a complete anathema, and still is in Judaism today.

So one of the first things the early followers of Jesus had to figure out was who Jesus actually was and how exactly did Jesus relate to God. In the book of Acts, we see how Paul’s relentless mission was to convince people that Jesus was not only the Messiah, but also the Son of God - because this would have been far from obvious to them.

John, Jesus’ closest disciple, who probably would have known Jesus better than anyone else, tells us in chapter 20:30-31 of his book, The gospel of John, that his purpose for writing was so that the readers would believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.

And it’s the same for the other three gospels written by the Apostles Matthew, Mark and Luke. The intention of writing these was to confirm and to convince people that Jesus of Nazareth is in fact God’s son, because people needed convincing - this was not what they would have been expecting.

As I said the early church, in the first few centuries, grappled with understanding the nature of God and how Jesus and the Holy Spirit related to God the Father and in response to conflicting opinions and ideas, they sought to bring clarity by agreeing on a set of basic minimum beliefs that someone might hold about God to call themselves a Christian.

This set of beliefs was called a creed, and over time a number of creeds were written, each time adding a little more detail in response to misunderstandings about God.

The earliest creed, was called the Apostles’ Creed. Called that, not because the Apostles wrote it but because the early church perceived it to reflect the beliefs of the apostles that had been passed down to them.

The Apostles Creed was brief and succinct and so in 325 AD, a more detailed creed was agreed upon at the council of Nicea, known as the Nicene Creed, which was further revised in 381 AD at Constantinople, so known as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed but is often shorted back to the Nicene Creed for obvious reasons!

This revised version of Nicene Creed is still shared and upheld by all Christian Churches today, trusting that those hundreds of bishops who once gathered to agree on these creeds, due to their careful study of the New Testament and beliefs handed down to them, and being closest in time to the Apostles are therefore best placed to make these statements.

So this is some of what the revised Nicene Creed says. I don’t have time to read it all right now, but it will be in the notes on our website if you want to look at it:

We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty, maker of heaven and earth…. (The creeds begun with a statement that was already considered to be true and not in dispute - in the following 2 sections, it’s aim is to clarify the divine nature of both Jesus and the Holy Spirit)

We believe in one Lord, ( Lord speaking of royalty/divinity, just like God the Father)

Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,

begotten, not made,

of one being with the Father.

Through him all things were made…..

We believe in the Holy Spirit,

the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son. (This was to clarify another misunderstanding, that the Spirit is the Spirit of not just the Father, but of both the Father and the Son together).

With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified….

(And hence he is also fully God as well)

So here’s some important things to take notice of:

Eternally begotten

Firstly, notice the phrase “eternally begotten” which is reinforced later by “begotten, not made” -and here it’s speaking of the origin of the divine Son.

It’s further amplified by the words “true God from true God” and “of one being with the Father” - meaning that Jesus is not created but of the exact same substance as the Father.

‘Eternally begotten' is affirming that there was never a time when there was no divine son.

Jesus being both begotten and eternal is affirmed by the apostle John.

In John 3:16 we read that “God so loved the world that he gave “his only begotten Son”

And in the opening verses of John’s gospel we read:

“In the beginning was the Word…”

Now when we read “Word” this is translated from the Greek word Logos which was a Greek philosophical concept borrowed by John to attribute to Jesus so that the Greek audience could easily relate to it.

Logos was understood to be the active divine life force permeating the cosmos and holding all things together. John uses this word to communicate that this divine life force, is the pre-existent divine Son, whom we see in Jesus, that not even Jesus was created. John says..

“In the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made.”

This is a little tricky to get our heads around because to us humans, a father must always precede a son- So why then is God presented through scripture in Father and Son terms? Doesn’t that just confuse things?

Let me share a quote form CS Lewis in his book Beyond Personality :

“The New Testament picture of a Father and a Son turns out to be much more accurate than anything we try to substitute for it.” He continues, “Naturally God knows how to describe himself much better than we know how to describe him. He knows that Father-and-Son is more like the relation between the First and Second Persons [of the Trinity] than anything else we can think of.”

It’s worth remembering that to use metaphorical language doesn’t make the meaning any less true or real. The Bible is overflowing with metaphorical language to describe God. Through metaphor is the only way to describe a God who is beyond what we can fully comprehend.

It’s also worth mentioning, for some of us, the image of a Father is not a helpful one, apart from the fact that God isn’t actually biologically male, (but we’ve covered that in an earlier talk!) but also because our own experience of a Father may have been far from perfect! But it’s important not to get things the wrong way round here, we should never put onto God our understanding of what a Father is, instead it is that human fathers are supposed to reflect the love and goodness of God.

God only makes sense in relationship

Secondly, as we consider the Creeds and the trinity, God only makes sense in relationship. The Father is Father to the Son, the Son, Son of the Father and the Spirit is the Spirit of both the Father and the Son. Each individual person of the Trinity would not be who they are, without their relationship to the other two. It’s their relationship that defines them.

Let me expand on this a bit more…

Take for a moment, that instead of Father, Son and Spirit, that we chose a different starting point for understanding God. How about we take Creator. That we look out at this incredible world we live in, the stars, the mountains, the wildlife and we consider that God is first and foremost Creator of the universe.

If God’s very identity is to be The Creator, then he needs a creation in order to be who he is. Rather than God being self-sufficient and all powerful: God would actually need us in order to be who he is. God would be needy and in contrast weak.

Or what if God’s very identity is to be the all powerful Ruler, what can God offer me? If God is The Ruler and the problem is that I have broken the rules, as Ruler his ultimate offer is to forgive me and treat me as if I had lived within the rules.

But think about that for a moment…

Have you ever been caught speeding? I have a couple of times! But over my 33 years of driving though!

I was so grateful the last time I got caught, rather than having 3 points on my licence, I could pay £90 and attend speed school and escape those points on my license, it was like I’d never done it!

I would have been even more grateful if they’d let me off completely! Of course that would never be the case, but let’s just imagine for one moment that they did!

If they just let me off with no speed school and no points either, I would feel extremely grateful to which ever kind person made that decision. That gratitude might have been really deep, but that would be the limit, it wouldn’t evoke love in me. Love is not the same as gratitude.

And so it is if God was first a Ruler, like a divine policemen, if the best he can offer me is letting me off and counting me as a law abiding citizen, then gratitude would be my greatest emotion, but not love. I would be so thankful, but it wouldn’t make me love God particularly, that he had let me off a punishment he might have chosen to give me in the first place.

But what if our starting point for understanding God, is the way God chose to reveal himself to us - through Jesus

Just the fact that Jesus is “the Son” really says it all. Being a Son means he has a Father.

The God Jesus reveals is not first Creator, or Ruler, but Father.

Have you ever considered what God was doing before creation??

Jesus tells us explicitly in John 17:24. “Father,” he says, “you loved me before the creation of the world.”

Before God ever created, before God ever ruled the world, before anything else, this God was a Father loving his Son.

And because Jesus is eternally begotten, God has always been a father loving his Son! That’s who God is.

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6).

When you start with Jesus, the Son loved by the Father with the Spirit, it is the triune God you get.

God only really makes sense in relationship.

So what does it mean that God is a Father?

Well in contrast to the impersonal terms like creator and ruler, a Father implies intimacy and relationship and a giver of life. And because God has always been a Father, all his ways are beautifully fatherly. It means He creates as a Father and he rules as a father.

If God is eternally a Father, then God is an inherently outgoing, life giving God. From eternity God has been life-giving.

And in the same way, from eternity, God has been loving. Because God has always been a Father loving his Son, God cannot be anything other than life giving and loving, it’s his very essence.

“ A spring of living water” is how the prophet Isaiah says God describes himself.

And just as a spring to be a spring must give out water, so the Father, to be Father, must give out life. That is who he is. Love and Life are fundamental to who He is.

St Bonaventure said that “God is a fountain fullness of love.”

In the Bible we see how the Father loves and delights in his Son.

John 3:35, “ The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands”

John 5:20, “ the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does.”

Matt 3:16-17, “As soon as Jesus was baptised, he went up out of the water. At that moment, heaven was opened and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. And a voice from heaven said. “This is my Son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased.”

But Jesus also says,

“ the world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what my Father has commanded me”. Jn 14:31).

So it is not just that the Father loves the Son, the Son also loves the Father and so much so that to do his fathers pleasure is like food for him, he says on John 4:34

The fellowship of the trinity (a fourth is created)

Now I just want to draw our attention back to the final section of the Nicene Creed. It says:

We believe in the Holy Spirit,

the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified….

In every way the Spirit is presented in the Bible alongside the Father and Son as a real person. The Spirit speak and sends (in Acts 13:2, 4), he chooses (Acts 20:28), teaches (jn 14:26) gives (Is63:14), he empowers, (Acts 1:8) he can be lied to and tested (Acts 5:3) he can be resisted (Acts 7:51) and grieved (Is 63:10m Eph 4:30).

Because the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are persons who have real relationships with each other, theologians refer to this as the fellowship of the trinity.

Each person would not be who they are without their relationship to the others. They are distinct persons and yet they are absolutely inseparable from each other. They are who they are together. They always are together, and they always work together.

Another way that theologians have described the relationships between the, Father Son and Holy Spirit are as a divine circle dance.

Where each person of the trinity knows and loves each other and glorifies each other. They commune with each other and defer to one another. Each person envelops and encircles the others. A continual outpouring and infilling from each person of the trinity to another.

Nothing can stop the flow of divine love between them.

And this flow of love is not limited to the three persons of the Trinity.

To quote Michael Reeves again…

“ Creation is about the spreading, the diffusion, the outward explosion of that love. This God is the very opposite of greedy, hungry, selfish emptiness; in his self giving he naturally puts forth life and goodness.”

Because the very nature of the triune God is to be effusive and bountiful, to be loving and life giving, to be other centred and not self centered, this overflowing love for each other overflows to us.

A fourth is created. We are the product of the divine circle dance. But this dance is not a closed circle, we are all invited in. All creation is invited into the dance.

Carl McColman a contemplative writer and teacher puts it like this:

‘God is in us, because we are in Christ. As members of the mystical body, Christians actually partake in the divine nature of the Trinity. We don’t merely watch the dance, we dance the dance. We join hands with Christ and the Spirit flows through us and between us and our feet move always in the loving embrace of the Father. In that we are members of the mystical body of Christ, we see the joyful love of the Father through the eyes of the Son. And with every breath, we breathe the Holy Spirit.’

Conclusion

So back to the question at the beginning, I’d like you to think again about how you’d describe the trinity to your neighbour now?

And as we think on that and reflect on some of what we have been discussing today, I’d like to lead us in a reflection and to do that I want to show you a piece of religious art from the 15th century by a Russian Iconographer Andrei Rublev. It’s called the ‘Hospitality of Abraham’ but is also known as ‘The Trinity.’

There’s a story in the Old Testament, where Abraham and Sarah are visited by three men, but clearly Abraham sees something of the divine in these three men. He bows low before them and refers to them as Lord. He provides an elaborate meal for them, but he doesn’t join them, but instead observes them from a far, standing under a tree. As if a place at God’s table is too much to imagine.

This icon, the ‘Hospitality of Abraham’ or ‘the Trinity’ is still on display in the Tretyakov gallery in Moscow. I don’t have time to go into all the detail within the painting now, but to just say that we have to the left, the Father, Jesus is in the centre, his two fingers are understood to signify that he is both divine and human, and then on the right, we have the Spirit in green. The three persons of the trinity, eating and drinking, sharing from the same bowl, in infinite hospitality and utter enjoyment between themselves.

The hand of the Spirit on the right is pointing to the open and fourth space at the table. Is this the Holy Spirit inviting, offering this space?

If you look at the front of the table, there appears to be a little rectangular hole there. Art historians report leftover glue on the original icon and suggest that perhaps once there was a mirror glued to the front of the table?!

Can you imagine what it’s meaning might be?

It’s stunning when you think about it - there was room at this table for a fourth.

The observer.

You and me!

So I’m going to give you a moment to ponder this image and as we do, I’d like to re read the poem I began with at the beginning. And then I’ll close in prayer.

Resources

Delighting in the Trinity - Michael Reeves

The Divine Dance - Richard Rohr

Blog - How many Gods are there in “God”? - Steve Burnhope

The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed

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

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages.

God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made.

For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.

He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. And His kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.

I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

Amen.

More talks in this series