Abstract
Robert Redford’s 1992 film A River Runs Through it, based on the autobiographical novella by Norman Maclean, tells the story of the two sons of a Presbyterian minister growing up in Montana in the 1920s. The boys are very different: the one studious, the other irrepressibly rebellious. But, with their father, they share a love of fishing, and of each other. Towards the end of the film, the older boy, the narrator, describes the slow process of his father’s coming to terms with the death of his younger son, Paul. When every question has been asked about the events surrounding his brother’s death, the older son says, ‘maybe all I really knew about Paul is that he was a good fisherman’. His father replies: ‘You know more than that. He was beautiful.’ Later, when the older boy has a family of his own, he hears his father preaching and knows that Paul is in his mind: ‘It is those we live with and should know who elude us, but we can still love them. We can love completely without complete understanding.’
My son is 18 today. Returning in memory to the day he was born I find I can quite easily retrieve the unexpected emotions that swept over me on first seeing him. In advance of his birth we shortlisted names; but he suited none. Perhaps we had imagined our child would be an extension of our ourselves, but minutes old, resting in his mother’s arms wearing a cheerful grin he has always had, he was quite other. From that first moment he has always been strangely and confidently himself. And so, we gave him another name that seemed to suit him better, as if he had chosen it. For 18 years I have watched him grow, eating, playing, walking with him, listening to him (he talks a lot), being surprised when I thought to have him figured out, laughing when I intended to be angry. He looks like me at his age. His mannerisms and gestures, many by nurture or nature my own, seem familiar, but the familiarity is all illusion. He is what he always was, wondrously, mysteriously elusive, completely my son, yet all himself. Yes: it is the ones closest to us who are most mysterious, those with whom we share our lives that we love most completely, yet without complete understanding.
It is tempting for preachers to approach Trinity Sunday as an apologetic challenge. ‘How can I explain this complex doctrine in ways that everyone can understand?’ There is nothing wrong with rigorous theological reasoning, but the theologian and the preacher who aim ultimately to offer an explanation of God are bound to fail because, as the writer of Isaiah 40 grasped perfectly, the Lord’s ‘understanding is unsearchable’. Even Karl Barth, the modern theologian most responsible for putting the doctrine of the Trinity back on the theological agenda, knew that ‘Theology means rational wrestling with the mystery [of the Trinity. . .]. But all rational wrestling with this mystery, the more serious it is, can lead only to its fresh and authentic interpretation and manifestation as a mystery’ [emphasis mine: CD I/1, 368]. But mystery is not failure, because we can love completely without complete understanding. This is true of those nearest to us. It is truer still of our love of God.
This insight is not my own. In May 1934 Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in his Trinity Sunday sermon that mystery does not mean simply not knowing something. The greatest mystery is not the most distant star; to the contrary, the closer something is to us, the better we know it, the more mysterious it becomes to us. The person farthest away from us is not the most mysterious to us, but rather the neighbour [. . .] the very deepest mystery is when two persons grow so close to one another that they love each other’ (sermon preached May 27th, 1934).
The Lord is mysterious. Only he held the seas in the palms of his hands and weighed mountains in the scales. Who taught him? No one. Mighty nations are as dust to the Lord. Yet he makes himself known. Even the strength of the young will fail, but ‘the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles’. The God of Isaiah is the same God as the God of the Psalmist, who set his glory above the heavens, and yet, in his graciousness, has made human beings ‘a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour’.
Jesus too makes himself to be known, meeting his disciples in the place to which he has directed their steps, directing them to make disciples of all nations, just as he has made them disciples. And in what does that ‘discipling’ consist? In ‘baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’, the One name of the One God in its threefold iteration. Making disciples means no more or less than naming God with the name he has named himself. To teach obedience to that same teaching Jesus has given them is to teach this name, this God, who is not one God among many, but the only God. To receive this name is not merely an act of the mind, though it is that too; it is an act of the will and the heart. To receive this name in baptism is to be received into this God’s loving embrace. To receive this name—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—is not merely to know God, but to love God completely without complete understanding. To receive this name is to receive blessing. For this reason, Paul, himself without full understanding, closes his second letter to the saints in Corinth with a blessing in this name: ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you’. Amen!