Trinity Sunday 2021: The Great Commission
Mt 28 vs 16 – 20
This year I have been studying in the parish a program called “Education for Ministry” or EFM as it is usually called being run by Fr Greg Davies. It has been a fascinating experience. The year I have been doing is “The History of Christianity” and the text has been a 1000 page extraordinary work of scholarship by the Cambridge academic Diarmaid MacCulloch which traces the pre-history of Christianity and then up to modern times. I enjoy history but would in no way claim to be an expert on that of our Christianity but it has certainly broadened my understanding and challenged some of my preconceptions. MacCulloch is ruthlessly critical of the Church, perhaps overly so, but as the often sad and sorry history of violence, corruption, politicking and expediency unfolds it is amazing how the faith has survived. One can only put it down to the presence of the Holy Spirit and the faith of multitudes who have not been figures of history but have lived lives of loving decency usually unremarked upon.
Certainly the concluding verses from Matthew’s gospel are key ones in the unfolding of this history : Matthew has the Risen Jesus saying to the eleven disciples “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
This reference to Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one of the few scriptural references to the nature of God we call the Holy Trinity, that we celebrate today.
Essentially the doctrine of the Trinity was formed out of the dispute between two charismatic, powerful theologians Arius and Athanasius over the nature of Jesus. Arius believed that Jesus was fully human but not fully divine. Athanasius believed he was both fully human and fully divine. This came to a head at the Council of Nicea in 325 where Athanasius won the day and we still profess the Nicene Creed at each Mass on Sunday morning.
Arius was declared a heretic and the Nicene Creed read that Jesus, the Son of God was of “one being with the Father” And if we think about it, if Jesus was not understood to be fully divine
-what was the meaning of the crucifixion?
- If Jesus was not fully divine how can he save us? If Jesus is not fully divine how can he forgive our sins?
- If Jesus was not divine how could we ascend to holiness by following him?
- and how could Jesus say “If you have seen me you have seen the Father”?
This was a vital outcome for this question of Jesus’ identity also offers different images of God with different implications for how we see ourselves and what it means to be human.
Now on the surface the debate between Athanasius’ followers and Arius” was whether Jesus was divine but underlying it was the question “What is God like?” In many ways different answers to this question lie at the heart of the history of conflict within the Church and the conflict of the Church with the world.
It has been a complex picture that flowed from that simple, powerful understanding the early Church had that spreading the word about Jesus was the most important thing in their lives and that the loving authority they had found in him was the solution to all the questions that life could pose. That the history of Christianity that followed has been, a mixed bag shall we say, from the Crusades, anti-semitism, the ravages of colonialism including that done to Aboriginals, the shameful response much of the European Church to Hitler, can at best be put down to the impossibility of reconciling conflicting choices to just plain sinfulness, evil sometimes, and the flaws of all human institutions.
What the controversy settled with the adoption of the Athanasian Creed in 325 was the belief that when we look at Jesus we are looking at God. That Jesus is the complete self-revelation of the God of the universe. That Jesus is in fact God in human form. This God’s essential feature is self-giving, a God who is totally involved with us, and loves us enough to die for us. The essential nature of this God is the relationship of love that exists between the God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The Trinity, and that this relationship can be accepted and entered into by us in our lives.
This is indeed Good News and it is little wonder that the final words of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel are “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” Words that the Church has come to call the Great Commission.
Yet when we think of our own lives, see how small they are in the big scheme of things, how easy it is to feel a sense of failure and inadequacy if we do not have the rather rare gift of the Spirit of being an evangelist. Are we failing as disciples? What have our lives counted for?
Two points I have found helpful : Firstly the word “Go” is more accurately translated “as you go” in the sense of “as you go through life”. So it is a gentler commission, “as you go through life make disciples, by the way you live, the sort of person you are”
Secondly, offering a signpost to the increasingly vital, but vexed question of Christianity’s relationship with other faiths, an insight from the beautiful theology of Bishop John V Taylor that I came across in his biography “Poet, Priest and Prophet”. Bp Taylor reflected deeply on his calling as an evangelist following his ten years as a missionary for the Church Missionary Society in Africa in the 1950’s. This gifted man came to be the General Secretary of CMS from 1963 to 1974. In the conservative CMS of that time his work there is surely a remarkable outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
His biographer, the Australian priest Fr David Wood, writing about Christianity’s relationship with other faiths, writes that Taylor realised that Jesus is “either Lord of all possible worlds and all human cultures, or he is Lord of one world and one culture only (and that) either we must think of the Christian mission in terms of bringing the Muslim, the Hindu, the Animist into Christendom, or we must go with Christ as he stands in the midst of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or even into the world of atheism and unbelief, “and watch with him, fearfully and wonderingly, as he becomes – dare we say it ? – Muslim, Hindu or Animist, as once he became Man and a Jew.” ( p 72-3)
The point is that as ‘we go” in our lives into an increasingly, secular world, we don’t have to bring Christ with us, for He is already there. We don’t have to take Him with us, as if he is absent. We can relax in trust because He has already gone ahead of us. He is the Lord of all creation and will be with us always, to the end of the age.
We are invited to enter more deeply into the love of God, a love which is essentially incomprehensible in its depths and is only to be known through prayer and action, that we may become more loving people who exist truly in relationship to others after the divine pattern seen in the Trinity. As Jesus said in another place “By your love all people will know that you are my disciples”.