Trinity Sunday – Mark S. Winward
Beyond Our Two-Dimensional Thinking
One God
Today is Trinity Sunday, the only day on the Church calendar dedicated to celebrating a specific understanding of God—or, perhaps more accurately, a common misunderstanding of God. If you were to ask how many gods Christianity has, a lot of people would answer “three”: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But this ignores the fact that the foundation of the Hebrew Scriptures is the Shema: “Shema Israel Adonai Elohinu, Adonai ehud”—Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One. This profession of monotheism sets the Jews apart from all other ancient peoples, serving as the core of their identity.
The Mystery of the Plurality
Despite this emphasis on oneness, there are hints throughout the Hebrew Scriptures that something more complex is going on. In the Genesis creation story, God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” This is not just a quirk of translation; God speaks using plural language: “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” While Jewish scholars have understood this passage in different ways, Christians have long seen in it a hint that God’s nature may be more complex than a simple singularity. The Gospel of John explains this through the “Word” who was present with God before all time: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh and lived among us.” We see this climax in today’s Gospel reading, where Jesus commissions His disciples to baptize all nations in the single name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Logic and Contradiction
To the casual observer, a God who is “One” yet described as “Three” might look like just another biblical contradiction. But centuries of Christians—including St. Paul, a Jew committed to monotheism—held these truths together in tension. In his blessing to the Corinthians, Paul invokes the grace of Jesus, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. The Church eventually defined this as God being One in Three and Three in One – a tri-unity or Trinity.
If that defies your logic, let’s go back to your high school science class: modern physics describes light as both a wave and a particle. It is not a particle behaving like a wave or a wave behaving like a particle, but both. Physicists insist that if you think you truly grasp this, you probably don’t understand it at all. If we cannot fully grasp something as fundamental as light within creation, how can we possibly understand the Creator of light?
Lessons from the Shamrock
St. Patrick, the 4th century missionary to the Celts, offered a more “down-to-earth” explanation. Legend holds that Patrick famously used the three-leaved shamrock—a plant already sacred to the Druids—to illustrate the Trinity. Just as the shamrock is one leaf with three distinct parts, Patrick taught that God is one being in three persons.
In the 1880s, Edwin Abbott, an English mathematician, wrote a book which might help understand such apparent nonsense. In Flatland, Abbott describes a two-dimensional world where the inhabitants are confined to move on a horizontal plane and have no knowledge of anything outside that surface. This land is occupied by two-dimensional creatures—squares, circles, rectangles, and lines—who cannot comprehend (but perhaps imagine) a three-dimensional world. For the Flatlanders, a square is a solid object since they can only move around it. A house, for example, might be a pentagon with one side removed—the only entrance for a Flatlander.
Towards the end of the book, Abbott introduces a sphere from the three-dimensional world of Spaceland. The sphere fruitlessly tries to explain his identity to the skeptical Flatlanders. Finally, to demonstrate his true nature, the sphere passes vertically through the Flatland plane several times. Magically to the Flatlanders, they see first a point, followed by a small circle, a larger circle, then a smaller circle again before it disappears. The sphere then demonstrates that by moving above the Flatland plane, he can see into the Flatland houses, rooms, cupboards and even into the interiors of the Flatland beings themselves—all mysteriously without passing through doors or windows!
Let’s go a step further. Imagine an even more mysterious being appearing to the Flatlanders in the form of Patrick’s shamrock. Remember, the Flatlanders can only see whatever happens to intersect their two-dimensional world. If we slowly lowered a shamrock through the plane of Flatland tip-first, the Flatlanders would not see a shamrock at all. They would first see a single point appear from nowhere. The point would stretch into a line, then shrink and disappear. A moment later, two new points would appear, grow into two separate lines, merge into one larger line, then separate again before vanishing. To the Flatlanders, these would seem like entirely different objects appearing and disappearing for no apparent reason.
To make matters even stranger, imagine lowering the shamrock flat through the plane. The Flatlanders would first see three separate points appear. As more of the shamrock passed through their world, the points would grow into three distinct leaflets that gradually joined together at the center, revealing a single three-leaved shape. What appears to them as separate objects is, from our perspective, one unified shamrock.
If that is difficult for us to visualize, imagine how difficult it would be for the Flatlanders to believe our claim that all these strange appearances were actually manifestations of a single object existing in a dimension beyond their experience.
We tell the Flatlanders the petals of the shamrock are “distinct but not separable” – that you cannot rotate one petal of the shamrock without moving the entire object. This reflects the “perichoresis” of the Trinity—the idea that the Father, Son, and Spirit are so perfectly united that where one is, the others are also. You cannot “have” the Son without the Father.
We also try to explain to the Flatlanders that the shamrock retains equality of substance. Each petal of the shamrock is made of the same material (that is, plant material). One petal isn’t “more shamrock” than the other. This addresses Arianism (the idea that the Son is “lesser” than the Father). In the shamrock analogy, all three points are equally “The shamrock,” just as all three Persons are equally “God.”
Finally, we might try to explain to them the shamrock is not a fourth thing; it is the totality of the three petals joined at the center. Likewise, God is not a “fourth person” that sits behind the Father, Son, and Spirit. Rather, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each fully God, sharing one divine being. Thus, Christianity affirms one God: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. A tri-unity or Trinity.
The Imagery of the Father
Now I appreciate the imagery of God as “Father” can be a stumbling block for many people. Too many of us carry the pain of fathers who were absent, inattentive, or abusive. For some, the word is like nails on a chalkboard, leading some churches to substitute terms like “Creator” or “Mother.” While God is not literally physically male, I believe moving away from the biblical metaphor of “Father” is a mistake.
First, Jesus referred to the first person of the Trinity as Father. Jesus, who’s portrayed as God become human, would talk to God as a distinct person. And when he did, he called Him “Father.” When Jesus talked about God, he wasn’t referring to an abstract force or energy; he was talking about a personal being that you can relate to. There’s a lot of personal images of God in the Bible—Ruler, Creator, Judge—but Jesus consistently referred to God as “my Father.” Jesus experienced God as a source of infinite love. He said, “The Father has loved me since before the creation of the world.” Apparently, Jesus knew the Father as an eternally other-centered, life-giving being.
Second, Jesus used the metaphor of God as Father to represent the ideal of fatherhood. Like a good father, God the Father teaches the difference between right and wrong, sets boundaries for the well-being of his children, and, most importantly, loves them more than himself.
But perhaps your wounds go deep from a father who was the antithesis of all a father should be. God can be that loving Father you never knew. For those who have never experienced such a father, God the Father invites us into a relationship as his beloved children. Rather than clinging to past trauma, such unconditional grace can be profoundly healing and empower us to reach out to a world so desperately in need of God’s love. So is the Trinity the final word on the mystery of the nature of God? When we get to heaven, I can’t imagine Jesus saying to us, “Yup, you nailed it.” But it brings us just a bit closer to understanding a transcendent God from our Flatlander perspective—and perhaps more fully embrace God as he has been revealed to us: One God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Amen.