We persist in believing that our theological language is precise, that we have somehow managed conceptually to contain God. Each religion manages to hang its symbols of God, no matter under what art form, quite high, denying all others as inadequate. If only in reference to the idea of God, we ask ourselves whether all religions are not equally good, we must give the clear answer: "No, of course not; they are all equally bad." God is the one truly inclusive other and yet we continue to make God exist in the image of our own pettiness and alienation.
The teaching of the Trinity is meant to avoid the exclusive and make God accessible to everyone. It is so beautiful a lesson for us that I fail to see why we have conspired to make of its presentation a conundrum of no insignificant "puzzlement". Like every other symbol, Trinity is a teaching mask that tells us about this significant other who is on stage in our lives.
The Trinity is really a very simple piece of theology. Yes, God is One but we cannot hold or define God. We can only see and share in the effect of God.
When he speaks of God as Father or Parent, Jesus uses the Aramaic word "ABBA", something like grandpa's personal carpentry, grandma's basement kitchen smell, mom's hug and dad's sustaining hands all rolled up into one. There is no smell of death clinging to the word, only life that keeps pouring out of it to find its way to us, inviting us to decision, respect and care for whatever we see and whomever we come to love. The Trinity says that God is Father or Parent or ABBA, from whom all good gifts pour, yet God will never be contained by creation and is not merely identified with life; God is the magnificent source. Parent, Source of life, Creator is the first great mask of God.
But there is more to God than creation. Creation is basically action and movement. Some of it has soul and some of it does not. And the part with soul can sing and weep, thank, respond and smile. There are some who say that, beyond creation, God makes no appearance. Jesus of Nazareth changed all that. He makes God's organization of life and the struggle for every people's freedom available to human history, to our cultures and our dreams. God has become magnificently accessible in Jesus of Nazareth. He is the second mask of God, the sign of our humanity truly celebrated for whatever may be its hope and its way of making the future.
There is a third mask within history and beyond it, clear and marvelous but even more difficult to accept. God can be seen, not only in Creation and in Jesus of Nazareth, but in the dynamic process of dialogue that is the human community. No matter how long it takes us to gather, God insists on accompanying us.
God has approached us as a faithful lover, incapable of living even one more day separate from the be-loved. God's Spirit is drawn in the Scriptures as the organizer of life, the soothing presence of Jesus to all crushed by law and ritual. Yet the Spirit is also harsh challenge to all those who build a fence around the beauty of God and try to turn God's face from the poor. The Spirit can be the caressing breeze that cools a prophet's fevered cheek or the wild wind that messes up our private agendas and demands reorganization. God's Spirit is the wisdom and sensitivity that opens the future to new friendships.
The Spirit, third mask of the one God, clearly belongs, not to an exclusive group, but to everyone. The Spirit is God's solidarity with us in our own place and time. While there is no room for apathy in the community of the Risen Lord, the Spirit of God does not depend on that. We are to use the tools and talents made available to us as God's children to do what God does, organize life and free all peoples.
God has become magnificently
accessible... |
The three masks of God are controversial and conflictive. Creation did not have to be the gambled risk of evolution. Jesus of Nazareth could have stayed at the carpenter's bench and lived by all the cultural rules of his community. And the Spirit of God could have cuddled up to the wise and wary who are always secure in their possession of static and staid truth.
Instead, three variables happened, revealing masks of time and destiny: the dot of maximum density exploded into an expanding and thinking universe. One fine day, Jesus announced the Reign of God and the Apostles opened their ears and their community to strangers from every nation who claimed that everything was and would be possible in him.
