“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason
I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” –John 16:12-15
Most of us, if we’re honest, treat the Trinity like a gift we never really figured out how to use. We nod reverently when it’s mentioned in prayers and worship. We recognize the words and sometimes stumble over them. But we aren’t really sure why the idea of one-in-three and three-in-one matters or what it means for our faith. Our sanctuaries are filled with images of “three,”and worship is clothed in the language of Father, Son, and Spirit and metaphors of the Triune life. We are reminded of and drawn into the Holy Mystery in countless ways. Yet for all that, we often miss the meaning of this idea called the Trinity.
I was reminded recently that Trinity Sunday has earned a reputation as a preacher’s nightmare. In other words, if I was smart, I would have scheduled vacation for this Sunday, or maybe a trinitarian hymn sing. I mean, how do you make sense of something that seems to defy logic? 1 + 1 + 1 = 1. It feels more like quantum physics than good news. Yet, here’s what I want to suggest: the Trinity is not a logic puzzle; it is a meaningful way to understand God’s nature and God’s activity for and with us. It is a mystery that comes from scripture, and from the language of Jesus, that describes the God in whom we live and move and have our being.
Christian theologians, almost from the beginning, have worked to understand what Jesus says about himself, the Father, and the Spirit. The Trinity is simply an effort to work out the meaning of what Jesus says and what happens to him. Jesus himself points toward this mystery in our text today. He tells his disciples that the Spirit will continue his ministry, glorifying him and the Father. Jesus describes a mutuality of divine relationship—but he doesn’t explain it. He simply says it. The doctrine of the Trinity is our attempt to understand what he’s saying, an effort to create language that can articulate the nature of the Infinite God seen in the face of Jesus.
So, instead of shying away from the Trinity, I want to commit an “act of theology.” I want to share a few analogies that have been used to illuminate how God’s love overflows in the Three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit. As I do this, I’ll use the language of “Father” because that’s what Jesus uses. But please remember that this is only language and metaphor. God is a person, but God is not a man. God is a personal being, who is like a Mother and a Father to us all.
So, for three analogies, let me start with one that has ancient roots. Tertullian in the second century, and John of Damascus in the eighth century, both used this image. It’s not perfect. All analogies break down and collapse under the weight of the mystery; but it does lead us closer.1
Think of the Father as the Sun (in the sky)—the source of all light and energy. Everything begins there. The Son (S “o” n) is like the rays of the sun—the same essential light reaching us in a form we can receive. Without the rays, the sun would still be there, but distant and hidden from us. The rays bring the essence of the sun to us. The Spirit is like the warmth of the sun, the power that makes these rays of light not just illuminating but warming, life-giving, effective, and transforming for us.
Sun, rays, and warmth. The same divine essence and yet three distinct ways of experiencing God’s love and being. They are not three separate things, but three related expressions of the same thing. One reality that reaches us in three ways. The Father’s love has the character of source and origin and fount. The Son’s love carries the warmth of incarnation, of relatability, of God-with-us. The Spirit’s love has the quality of intimacy, of experience, and effect. Three distinct expressions of one overflowing love.
Tertullian’s analogy helps us see that God’s love doesn’t stay contained in a distant heaven. It travels. God’s love reaches us in God’s Son. God’s love warms us, embraces us, and transforms us by God’s Spirit.
That’s the first analogy. Are you still with me? Let’s take a step forward with the next one. This is from Karl Barth, perhaps the most influential theologian of the twentieth century. He, like that other great Reformed theologian John Calvin, was suspicious of Trinity analogies. Like Calvin, he worried they could mislead us or too easily break down under scrutiny, which they often do. But Barth did use this one, and he was a theologian of the Word, so it is fitting.2
Think of the Father as the Speaker. The Father is the one who has something essential to say. The Son is the Word. Jesus is God’s Word to us, embodied, made tangible, spoken into human history, with context and story. The Spirit is the Interpreter—the one who makes that Word personally intelligible, meaningful, and relevant to our lives. Father, Son, Spirit. Speaker, Word, Interpreter.
The analogy of an interpreter reminds me of a day last year when I was at a mission conference in Montreat, North Carolina, with our PC(USA) mission co-worker, John McCall. I and other local pastors spent the day in conversations with Taiwanese pastors, learning about their ministries and sharing about our own contexts. John was the interpreter for the group.
During the afternoon, John, and I, and a Taiwanese pastor went for a long walk through Montreat. As we walked and talked, John interpreted. He was converting words from English to Mandarin and back again—and doing so much more. He cap- tured tone and meaning, helped us understand not just what each of us was saying, but also the background information we needed, and added his own experiences and thoughts. He was both a full partner in the conversation and a faithful interpreter facilitating our relationship. He was the glue that made the relationship work.
That’s how it is with the Spirit. The Spirit doesn’t just connect us to God. The Spirit makes God’s love personally meaningful and relevant to our lives and circumstances. When Jesus tells his disciples here in John, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” he’s pointing to the Spirit’s work. God doesn’t overwhelm us with more than we can handle or send us resources and leave us alone to sort it out. The Spirit guides us gradually into truth we can actually receive and live.
When you’re struggling to pray, when the words won’t come, when you feel you’re spiritually empty, the Spirit is interpreting your wordless feelings to the Father. When you read scripture or sit in worship and suddenly a familiar passage or line of a song or thought in a sermon speaks to your situation in a new way, the Spirit is doing interpretive work. When you find yourself moved to compassion for someone you previously dismissed, when you feel that your heart is getting softer, the Spirit is working Christ’s love into your heart.
You see, the Trinity is not abstract theology. The Trinity describes the mechanics of grace, how God’s love operates in the world, in your life, in a community of faith. The Father is the Speaker. The Son is the Word. The Spirit interprets and makes relevant and real.
Now, if you’re still with me, let’s take one more step, with a third way to think about the Trinitarian mystery. This one may feel more contemporary, even though it’s ancient: Lover, Beloved, and Love.3
We like to say that “God is love.” That’s biblical, from the first letter of John. And … it actually requires the Trinity. Here’s why: love isn’t a stand-alone thing. Love needs a relationship. You can’t have love in isolation; you only have love in a relationship. You need someone who loves and something to love. This means that God cannot be love, in God’s own very self, if God exists in isolation as a unitary being, because love needs an object, a recipient, a beloved. If God is truly love, if love is the essence of the divine being, not just something God does but who God is, then God must be relational from the very beginning. God must be a relationship in God’s very self.
So, think about it this way: the Father is the Lover, the one who desires to love someone, something. The Son is the Beloved, the perfect object of the Father’s love, the one who receives and responds to the Father’s love completely. The Spirit is the Love itself, the relationship, the bond, the connection that flows between them.
This metaphor depicts so well the lively and personal God we find in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The God of the Bible isn’t a philosopher’s God, living in a static state, in some kind of divine loneliness at the top of the universe, ruling from splendid isolation. The God revealed in scripture, seen in the face of Jesus, is a personal God, a being in relationship, who chooses to be in relationship.
Before there was anything else, before there was even creation, from eternity, a relationship of love was circulating in the life of God: The Father loving the Son. The Son responding to the Father. The Spirit as the love that binds them together and the life they share. Creation doesn’t happen because God is lonely. Creation happens because God’s love is so overflowing, so abundant, it spills out into making worlds and creatures and people. We are the recipients of the overflowing life of love within the Triune God. The classic line that captures this in the creation story of Genesis 1 is when God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, in our likeness … So in the image of God, he created them. God created them male and female.” Creation is the result of the overflowing love of the divine life.
Now, I must confess that this can feel esoteric. The headlines of any given week can make a sermon on the Trinity feel like very poor timing. Why speculate about the nature of divine being in a world like this? We should rather lament war in the Middle East or anywhere, as bombs fall on hospitals and children, and we should pray for peace. We should lament political violence, the murder of legislators and mass shootings, and pray for justice and for mutual understanding to take root in our own nation. We should speak up for vulnerable neighbors and strangers, for every person who deserves to be treated with the dignity of God’s image, no matter how they made it across a border or when.
And while any of this can make Trinity Sunday feel like poor timing, the Trinity is not just idle speculation. Because this is what the Trinity shows us: God’s own life reveals that power does not translate to mean domination, that authority can be shared rather than hoarded, that mutual life and flourishing is the goal of creation. The Father doesn’t lord it over the Son. The Son doesn’t compete with the Spirit for influence. The Spirit doesn’t manipulate the other two with power games. Instead, there is mutuality, a genuinely shared life, and love overflowing toward creation.
When we witness hatred and violence dominating our news cycles, we’re seeing the opposite of trinitarian life. The Trinity gives us both a critique of the world as it is—where “might makes right” or fear drives relationships—and a vision of the world as God intends it, where love flows freely and power serves the flourishing of all. The Trinity isn’t idle theory. It’s a vision of life and a description of what is most really real.
Lover, Beloved, and Love is the essence of the God in whom we live and move and have our being, and therefore a description of the deepest and most important truth we know.
Our language will always be groping after the truth. God—the Living God—will always be bigger than we can describe, and out beyond what our minds can comprehend. Yet, we are strengthened and nourished and enlightened when we seriously consider what God has revealed about God’s nature. These three analogies for understanding the Trinity help us take one or two or three steps forward in faith. Sun, Rays, and Warmth. Speaker, Word, Interpreter. Lover, Beloved, and Love. They help us understand the God we worship, and make some sense of how and why Jesus talks about the Father and the Spirit in the way he does.
Three analogies, and there are many more, but none of them is enough. Legend has it that St. Augustine told a story about walking along the beach and seeing a young child who had dug a hole in the sand. The child kept running to the ocean, filling a small bucket with water, and pouring it into the hole. Augustine asked the child what he was doing. “I’m trying to put the ocean in this hole,” came the reply.4 That, of course, is silly. But Augustine realized he was doing the same thing with his theology: trying to pour the infinite mystery of God, word by word, into the small hole of human language and understanding.
Ultimately, we just can’t. We will never grasp the mystery completely; we can only point to it. We can wade into it, like an ocean of mercy and love. We can let it shape how we worship, how we live, the vision we have for our lives, for the world, and the future. Because the Trinity is not a logic puzzle. The Trinity is a gift to receive as we seek to worship the God whose life we are invited to share, now and forever. Amen.
