In recent weeks we have been talking quite a lot at St Ursula's about Anglicanism: the history of the Church of England; how the Anglican Communion emerged from the Church of England and spread around the world; the different strands within Anglicanism, notably Evangelical, Catholic and Liberal, though last week Helen also spoke of the Charismatic movement; the historic Anglican appeal to the threefold cord of scripture, tradition and reason; and, along with all this, some reflection on what it means for us at St Ursula's to belong to this way of being Christian, this way of being Church.
I was talking recently to a Reformed minister, and we touched on one of the differences between Anglican and Reformed services. As I understand it, there is no requirement in Swiss Reformed services to say one of the historic Christian creeds, whereas every Sunday, as Anglicans, we do repeat a creed. Immediately after this sermon, we'll say the Nicene Creed, which in its original form dates back to a Council (or conference of bishops) held in 325 in Nicaea (present-day Iznik in Turkey).
Saying one of the authorized creeds as part of our Sunday worship is an important expression of the Catholic strand within our Anglican identity. We do not just read the Bible, but we also respect the Christian Tradition, the traditions of the Church, among which the Nicene Creed is particularly important. Christian tradition, Church tradition, is the formative, authoritative context in which we hear the Bible and apply it in our lives today, in the midst of the questions raised by the modern world. As we listen to the Bible, we need also to listen to the Church, both the Church of the past and the Church of the present in all its diversity around the world.
Saying the Creed is perhaps the most obvious way we remind ourselves that we listen to the Church of the past and learn from its wisdom. The early generations of Christians thought very hard indeed about how to speak of the Creator God who had revealed and given himself to the world in Jesus Christ and who continued to pour out his life and light through the Holy Spirit. In the Creed the early Church has given us a concise statement of what it discerned to be the truths at the very heart of the faith.
The Creed speaks of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It does not use the word 'Trinity' but it is precisely of God the Holy Trinity that it is speaking: the God of Tri-unity, unity in threefoldness, the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Today is Trinity Sunday. Last Sunday we celebrated Pentecost, the sending of the Holy Spirit. This Sunday, every year, it's as if we step back from the story we've been telling and ask ourselves how it all holds together, this talk of Father, Son and Spirit. Today I thought we might look for a few minutes at the Creed and reflect on what we are doing as we say these words week by week.
In today's order of service, you'll see that, specially for today, the Creed has been printed in different colours. This was to bring out its four main sections: first on God, the Father, the Almighty; then on the Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God; then on the Holy Spirit; and finally on the one holy catholic and apostolic church. One reason for this colour-coding is to help us see the structure of what Christians believe about God. When we talk about God as Christians, we are not talking primarily about our thoughts or experience of God – important though these are – but about the reality of God that comes before any thoughts or experiences we might have. We are talking about how God has been revealed by what God has done in this world. We are talking about a history of God, the story or narrative of the things God has done. And in the course of this story, God is seen, progressively, to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is how it is in the Creed. In the Creed we say nothing at all about how we feel about God; rather, we speak about what God has done and what that reveals about what God is like in God's very self.
But the Creed does not speak of a God who does impressive, divine deeds just for his own glorious sake and has no relevance for us. It is 'for us and for our salvation' that Jesus came down from heaven; it is 'for our sake' that he was crucified; it is us that he will come again in glory to judge. So one important thing today's colour-coding shows is that the Creed does not have just three parts – Father, Son, and Spirit – but four; and the fourth is the Church, is us. The purpose of God in his action as Father, Son and Spirit is directed towards us, towards the creation of the community, the Church, which in the midst of God's world celebrates God's forgiving love and lives in the hope of the eternal life that God promises. But we can only truly grasp this purpose if we get things the right way round and learn to think with the Creed. Instead of starting with ourselves, our needs, our experiences, our intuitions, we need to look away from ourselves and focus on God, what God has done, what God is like; it is only then that who we are and what we are called to be falls into place. When we say the Creed we speak mainly about God, but at the end we are always reminded of the ongoing significance of what we have said about God for ourselves, for the life of the Church.
But I think the most striking thing to emerge from the colour-coding is that the second section, about Jesus, the Son of God, is by far the longest. The Father gets three lines; the Spirit gets five; the Church gets four; but Jesus gets eighteen lines of the Creed. If they are anything like you or me, the Father and the Spirit might feel a bit unhappy with this grossly unfair distribution of publicity. Why does Jesus get the lion's share of the Creed?
Is it because Jesus is the most important member of the Trinity? No: in Christian teaching on the Trinity it is clear that all three persons, Father, Son and Spirit, are eternally and equally God. The explanation lies elsewhere, and brings us back to the point that we know God through what God has done. At the beginning of John's Gospel, we read: 'No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son ... who has made [God] known.' (John 1:18). No one has ever seen God. Human beings may have all kinds of profound insights but ultimately we cannot know God, we cannot work God out, we cannot 'see' God, through our own unaided efforts. God must make himself known to us. God has done that in many ways, but above all, and definitively, in Jesus Christ. It is God the only Son who has made God known.
At the heart of the Christian faith is the conviction that what we know about God is given to us through that episode in history that we call the Incarnation, when the Word became flesh, when God stepped into history in the form of a flesh-and-blood human life and said: 'Here I am. This is what I am like.' Our knowledge of God depends on the Incarnation, God becoming flesh in Jesus Christ.
Coming back to the Trinity, the point is this. From before all things, when there was only God, God already was the eternal Trinity: Father, Son and Spirit in an eternal communion of love. But in the fullness of time, when it was necessary for God to intervene sacrificially in our human history for the sake of our salvation, it was not God the Father who became incarnate; it was not the Holy Spirit who became incarnate; it was God the eternal Son who became incarnate in the true, flesh-and-blood human person, Jesus Christ. In the gospels, we see Jesus living and acting with divine self-consciousness and divine authority; in him God is truly present. But God is not present exhaustively in Jesus. Jesus is not all there is of God, with nothing left over. No, Jesus prays and lives in loving submission to the God he calls Father; and Jesus experiences and acts in the power of the Holy Spirit of God.
Jesus is not in himself the Trinity. Jesus is the eternal Son of God, become flesh in this world, and in his life we see the eternal relationship of Father, Son and Spirit played out in human history. Jesus is not the Trinity, but in Jesus the Trinity is revealed. This is especially clear in John's Gospel but it's also apparent in the other gospels. The word 'Trinity' isn't used anywhere in the gospels, but the Church agreed on divine tri-unity as the best way of expressing the reality described in the gospels of the threefoldness of the divine life that was revealed in Jesus.
This is why, in the Creed, we say so much more about the Son of God than about the Father or the Spirit. We can rest assured that there is no resentment, no jealousy or recriminations among the persons of the Trinity in relation to this quite disproportionate share of the Creed that Jesus seems to have grabbed for himself. The Father and the Spirit were totally present and active in his life and ministry, his death and resurrection, but it is to Jesus himself, to his flesh-and-blood reality, to his human face, that we must look to understand that God is Trinity. We would not otherwise know this to be true. Conversely, to the extent that we look away from Jesus as the final word about God, the idea that God is Trinity will cease to make any sense to us, will lose its beauty and its power. The Son is not more important than the Father or the Spirit; but it is on the story of the Son that the Father and the Spirit call us to concentrate. 'Listen to him...' says the Father; and it is at the heart of the work of the Spirit to turn our attention to Jesus. And that same logic is at work in the Creed.
So I am glad that members of the Church of England are expected to say the Creed every Sunday, not just occasionally, not just when we feel like it. When we say the Creed we speak about the Father, the Son and the Spirit; and we also speak of the Church. But we speak above all of the Son, who before all things was already 'Light from Light, true God from true God ... of one Being with the Father', and who for our salvation took on human flesh, suffered death, rose again, ascended into heaven and sent the Spirit. It is above all through Jesus and his story not just that God is revealed as Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit, but also that we learn that we are invited to share in the life of God the Trinity. We do not become God, but we do become one with Jesus, the Son of God, and through the gift of the Spirit within us we cry out 'Abba, Father', just as Jesus did (Romans 8: 15-17).
I end these Trinity Sunday reflections with the words of the Gloria, the short burst of praise to God the Trinity that recurs constantly in many forms of Christian worship. If you take nothing else from what I've said, I encourage you to hide these words in your heart and draw on them often when you pray:
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning is now, and shall be forever. Amen.
David Marshall