Being laid up for a week or more after my recent bicycle accident gave me the chance to catch up on some reading. I was able plow through a stack of New Yorker magazines, and by that I mean, actually read them, not just look at the cartoons and read the Talk of the Town section. There was a great article in last week’s New Yorker by critic and essayist Adam Gopnik entitled “What Did Jesus Do?: Reading and Unreading the Gospels”. In the article, Gopnik takes a look at some recent books about the history of the gospels and the early church.
Chief among the books discussed is one by Diarmaid MacCulloch, the Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford. MacCulloch is a very well respected historian and writer who has won multiple awards for his biography of Thomas Cranmer, one-time Archbishop of Canterbury and chief author and architect of the first Book of Common Prayer and more awards still for his massive survey of the Reformation. His latest book which Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker article discusses is called Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. That’s not a typo or a flub on my part, MacCulloch begins his review of world Christianity one thousand before the birth of Christ. In particular, he writes of the one thousand years of Jewish thought and theology and Greek philosophy that preceded the birth of Jesus. These two intellectual strains, as MacCulloch puts it, “met in the person of Jesus” to be adapted and melded into the Christianity that comes down to us today.
Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years is 1200 pages long and weighs what feels like a ton. There is no way you can read this book with a broken collar bone. It’s a two-handed read if ever there was one. So, I’ve only gotten through the first 30 or so pages.
But in those first few pages, MacCulloch jumps right into a description of the intellectual history of our faith. He notes that we can find the influence of Jewish and Greek thought in the very name by which give our Savior. He writes, “To the very ordinary Jewish name of this man, Joshua/Yeshua (which has ended up in a Greek form, ‘Jesus’), his followers added ‘Christos’ as a second name… It is notable that they felt it necessary to make this Greek translation of a Hebrew word, “Messiah,’, or “Anointed One’, when they sought to describe the special, foreordained character of their Joshua.” (19) MacCulloch goes on to ask, “How, then, did Greeks become so involved in the story of a man who was named after the Jewish Folk hero Joshua and whom many saw as fulfilling a Jewish tradition of “Anointed One’, savior of the Jewish people?” (20)
These Greek ideas about the Jewish Messiah have contributed greatly to our understanding of Jesus. And they have contributed greatly to our understanding of the Trinity. Today is Trinity Sunday in the calendar of the church. Why is this Sunday set aside for the Holy Trinity? Well, it is the first Sunday after Pentecost, on which we celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit to Jesus’ disciples. And now the roster is complete, so to speak; all the players are on the field. Just like they’ll do in about an hour and a half up in the Bronx, when the Yankees take on the Cleveland Indians this afternoon at the stadium; the announcer will introduce all the starting line-up and then the crowd will give a big cheer. That’s sort of what we’re doing today, giving a big cheer for the whole team, proclaiming the glory of God in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now that all the players in our Trinitarian Godhead have come on to the field.
It’s easy for us to cheer on the whole team because our ancestors in the faith have done all the work of deciding the nature of our starting line-up. Much ink and even some blood was spilled in the early centuries of the church trying to work out how a triune God could be one God, and just what was the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What positions was each to play? Here the influence of Greek philosophy interacts with Jewish Monotheism. Through much debate and consultation, our predecessors in the faith decided that the persons of the Trinity could be described by using the Greek word homoousios which means of the same essence or being. The opposing position wanted the term homoiousios, of similar essence to be used in our formulations. That additional letter “I” caused a lot of trouble and a lot of debate.
The result of those contentious debates is our Nicene Creed which we will repeat in a few moments as the full definition of our belief and understanding of a Trinitarian God – a God that is one in keeping with the beliefs of our Jewish ancestors in the faith, but a God that exists as three persons, in a theological reality that was illuminated and explained with the help of Greek ideas and philosophy. Look, if, as they say at the ballpark, you can’t tell the players without a program, then the Nicene Creed is our program. Free to all, but you can’t get it with a bag of peanuts, like the programs they’ll be selling at the stadium this afternoon.
You read a lot about Trinitarian history and theology in seminary, or in my case, you skim a lot the readings assigned on Trinitarian theology. But there is one aspect of the Trinity that I didn’t find discussed at any length, an idea that is somewhat overlooked. And that’s the timing.
Now, it is a tenet of Trinitarian theology that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are co-eternal – and this was a big part of debates about the nature of Jesus in particular in the early centuries of the church. The theologians surmised that Jesus was extant from the beginning and the gospel of John concurs… “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us…” And the same co-eternalness is attributed to the Holy Spirit, who Genesis tells us moved over the face of the waters at the creation of the world.
But there is a chronological aspect to the coming of the Spirit to the disciples in our gospel reading today. Jesus clearly says, “If I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you, but if I go, I will send him to you.” (John 16:7) So, co-eternal or not, there was a time when our experience, our interaction with the Spirit of God changed, became more direct, became something different because of the Advent of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And this manifestation of the Holy Spirit to be sent by Jesus is to come to the disciples in order to teach them further, in order to guide them into all truth, and to declare the things that are to come.” (John 16:13)
And what do the disciples think of this, what do they feel about all this? Their favorite player is headed off the field and a relatively unknown rookie is taking his place. They feel sad. Jesus tells us in today’s gospel that sorrow has filled their hearts. (John 15: 6) Someone they know and love and respect is leaving – and though another will come, with a new understanding… nonetheless, the disciples are sorrowful at their impending loss.
We know this process, don’t we? We’re aware that the sequential coming and going of people and experiences in our life is a necessary part of life, and we know too, I think, that it is the going and coming that brings knowledge to us, that teaches us, that broadens our understanding of who we are and of God’s will for our lives.
Any parent who has ever dropped off a child for the first day of school or the first day of college has felt this. You have to let them go out into the world in order for them to learn what it is they need to know. Anyone who have ever loved and lost that love and loved again knows that the heart learns its lessons in time. Sometimes in a long time.
And any of us who have ever lost a loved one knows that though they are gone, their spirit lives on – in heaven, of course, but also in our own hearts. And that process can be a learning process at well. The loss of a beloved grandparent or parent can be so hard, but in the weeks and months that follow, when we contemplate their lives now completed on this earth, we often begin to see them in a new light. A mother’s worries and fears seem to make sense in a way, or a grandfather’s sternness can be appreciated as the expression of his caring love for us – as aspect of that sternness that we might have overlooked in his lifetime.
Any beloved disciple would loath having to witness the execution of his teacher and Lord, but how else could the ultimate meaning of his life be known, that within his death would come everlasting life to us, sinful though we be.
These understandings are hard to come to. But that is what God’s Spirit calls us to do. God calls us forward, toward new truths, toward new relationships and toward new ways of being in relationship with one another and with God. God created the world, then redeemed it in the person of Jesus Christ, then sanctified that which was redeemed with the coming of the Holy Spirit. And that Spirit of God calls us forward, toward the things that are to come. And God will make us ready for that future and the truths that lie there for us. Though we may not be able to bear them today, our Advocate, the Spirit of God will sustain us on that journey toward truth.
If you were to stop in to one of the 12 step group meetings that occur in our Undercroft during the week, you might hear someone repeat this aphorism: “Let Go and Let God…” “Let Go and Let God…” That’s one of the slogans of Alcoholics Anonymous and it’s the message of our gospel today, to let go of that which must pass away, and to let God bring into our lives what God has ordained is to come. Don’t hold on. Let go. Let go and let what is next come. It isn’t easy to do, but it is only in letting go that the newer, truer, fuller truth can take root in our hearts and lives. Let go and let God’s Holy Spirit come…
© The Rev. Mark R. Collins
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