As we celebrate today the feast of the Holy Trinity, the lectionary invites us to listen to the story of creation, how God the Father created the whole earth. This is the beginning, the beginning of the world as the passage says, and it’s also the beginning for us “liturgically speaking” since we’re going to be reading from the book of Genesis every Sunday until mid August…and I am excited about that because there is so much to learn from it!
Now there will be a lot to talk about obviously, but I think that the first thing we need to know to get started, the thing that is important for us to keep in mind, is that the Book of Genesis was born during a difficult time for the Jews: Defeated by the King of Babylon, they had been taken into exile after having lost their land, their city and their temple. In the midst of that, they somehow had lost their faith, which can happen to the best of us when we experience too much suffering. Well, actually we don’t know if the people had lost their faith but we know they were deeply grieving. As Psalm 137 goes: By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion…And in fact, remembering, the Jews did just that in Babylon: Holding on to their memories, to their identity, to their traditions, they started writing down the story of their people. But the thing is, it wasn’t just about History. More deeply, they wanted to understand. They wanted to understand what had happened to them, why was it that, from being God’s elected, they now felt forsaken by God, and how was it that they could find their way home, that they could find their Redemption. In a sense, this is what we also do in our churches. We listen to the Scriptures and celebrate the Sacraments not just to make remembrance of Christ, as if he were only a distant memory. We do this to ponder how Christ is now present with us and how it is that we are to respond to his call. Certainly this is the invitation for us gathered today, since the feast of the Holy Trinity is also the feast of our church.
Now in the past weeks, I’ve asked many of you what you use to do for the feast of the Holy Trinity and you have told me: “Nothing special”. Well, you’re not alone in that. In fact, the feast of the Holy Trinity is one of the most overlooked feasts of the church and my sense is that it’s not a very well loved feast. I get that, because when we start talking about the Holy Trinity and how is it that God can be Father, Son and Holy Spirit, “Three in one and one in three”, it quickly gets overwhelming and we don’t know what to think. One of the ways a lot of people deal with the problem, I have often heard that, is to conclude that it is all a big mystery, that we cannot comprehend God. After all, Saint Augustine said: “If you understood God it would not be God.” Fair enough.
Yet there is a problem with that. First, because if we somehow admit that we cannot comprehend God at all, then we have to agree with basically anything people can say about God, and not only this is dishonest intellectually and spiritually, but practically it can become very risky to base our hope, our well being and our daily ethics in an unknown God (Think about cults, spiritual abuse, fundamentalism etc.). So that’s already a big problem. Then, more deeply, assuming that God is just a big mystery, this is essentially the opposite of everything the Church teaches, especially when it comes to the Holy Trinity. Indeed, if there is one thing that this doctrine teaches us is that, far from remaining unknown and distant, God has created this world, inhabited this world and continues to sustain this world: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It does not mean of course that we can comprehend God in the sense that our minds can wrap themselves around God’s being, I think that’s what Saint Augustine meant, but what is unique to our vision of God as Trinity, is that God is in fact in the movement of revealing God, of unfolding God’s being towards us, of giving God to us. It’s like if we want our friends to know us, sure we can forward them our resume and they can learn facts about us – and some people believe the Bible is like that, facts about God or instructions from God or maybe God’s resume– but if we want our friends to really know us, we need to spend time with them, and to open our hearts to them, and give a little bit of ourselves to them, and I think this is how it is with God: God makes God knownby being with us, in the word and in the world, in Jesus and in the Spirit, and God gives God’s own being to us. Believing in the Holy Trinity means that we believe that the nature of our God is to reveal God.
So who is this God?
That’s when we go back to the story of Genesis. And the story we read does not keep us in suspense, does it? We’re right here, at the very beginning of the whole Bible and this is what we learn from the start: God is good. God is good and God has created a good world. The God we encounter in the Bible dissipates the chaos, separates one thing from another, not to divide them but to let them be fully. God brings order, adorns everything with beauty, gives life, provides food to each creature (on a strict vegetarian diet), and God also gives to man and woman a future, with a job to do, responsibilities, a family, and also rest, a time dedicated to pure enjoyment. God gives a good world to good creatures.
Now we may have gotten used to this version of our origins, but imagine how strange it was to tell that story at a time where all the myths taught plus or less that the gods were fighting with each other to assert their supremacy, and using human beings to their own ends and abusing them. But the exiles wanted to remind themselves that they didn’t believe what the pagan nations said about God, they believed that God was unique, faithful, that God cared for their well being and had a purpose for them, even in the midst of a very challenging time.
For us too, we need to be remindedthatGod is good in an agewhere we hear so many crazy thingsabout God. We need to be reminded that God has created a good world when we seem to be so at war with nature, thinking it’s our own privilege to use up all the resources of the earth. God has put us in charge of the creation, yes, and it’s not a license to exploit it to satisfy our greed, it means we are to care for it. At least as important, we need to be reminded of the goodness of human beings, when we are tempted to see corruption everywhere or toreplace our human interactions with machines. We need to be reminded that we are made for one another, as Adam and Eve were made for each other. It can be a strange experience to read this old text from Genesis, a passage that so many people today would consider irrelevant because it’s not scientific enough, and to realize how much we all need to hear those words spoken to us again: Our God is not a God of power, of judgment, of domination, our God is a good God who createsall there is out of God’s goodness and put God’s goodness in all of us.
And maybe that’s another important thing we need to be reminded of today: That we can look at ourselves and know that we are created good too, “very good” even, according to God’s own words. Maybe one of the main problems of our times is that we don’t believe anymore that we are meant for goodness. Not only do we keep looking suspiciously at each other, thinking good can be dangerous, and good can be weak, but even more disturbingly we may also have become unable to be in touch with our own goodness because the world keeps reminding us that we are not good enough: not young enough, not healthy enough, not accomplished enough and the list goes on. And I think it makes a lot of people very unhappy to be unable to experience their own goodness.
So how do we do that, how do we get in touch with our own goodness? Most people want to know they are good people, right, and it’s not just for Christians. The very wrong way to get there is of course to start comparing ourselves to others, trying to find people’s flaws, and then thinking: At least I am not like that, I am better than that. Unsurprisingly though, seeing all that is wrong with other people does not end up making us a good person. Now we can also try to experience our own goodness by doing good things, and that’s certainly a better way to get there, but it can easily become entangled with our pride and self-centeredness, a performance. No, to me, the closest I came to the understand goodness I learned it from an old lady. Her family came to see me after she had passed to celebrate her funeral, and as I asked them about the readings they would like to pick for her, they said: Let’s pick a reading about trust because she was a very trusting person. And it really struck me because I have never heard that before. Most of the time, when someone dies, their family and friends will say: They were a good person. But a trusting person? That was new. So I had to think about it, and I wondered what it meant to be trusting.
I came to the conclusion that it is about seeing the good in people, in the world, in life in general. When you trust someone it’s because you think they’re not going to hurt you, your trust is trust in their goodness. And this is exactly what God does in this passage, isn’t it? The text does not exactly say that God is good, rather it says that God sees the good and names the good: Light, nature, plants, animals, people. And so, if we want to become good, we too have to start seeing and naming the good around us. Start seeing and naming the good around us. We cannot be good on our own you see. We can only be part of goodness. It does not mean we have to be naive or defenseless towards evil, and God certainly isn’t any of that. God sees our sins and the brokenness of the world, because it is real, but God has compassion and want nothing more than to raise us up and to redeem us because love is more powerful than any of our wrongdoing.
Maybe the mystery of the Trinity is not so much that God’s being is incomprehensible to our minds, what passes our understanding is that God is so good that God wants to reveal ourselves to us, be in relationship with us and ultimately unites us to God’s very being.
And so may we be able to trust what God believes about us. Each one of us.