Trinity Sunday
June 19, 1859
“One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, Who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” —Ephesians iv. 5, 6.
The passage: There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.
There was a time when Trinity Sunday sermons were expected to be controversial. On other days the preacher might speak to the concerns all his hearers shared: their conscience of evil, their desire for good, the toils and temptations of the week. On this day he had the privilege, or the duty, of refuting objectors and establishing his conclusions. He might show strategic skill in choosing his ground. He might defend, and defy the deniers of our Creeds to prove anything against a mystery beyond all human thought. Or he might argue that a long tradition outweighs a small minority of dissenters. Or he might gather texts from various parts of the Bible and argue that together they make the doctrine more probable than the opposing texts make it improbable. Or he might rest everything on one text, claiming that if it stays in the Canon, the question is settled for all who grant Scripture divine authority.
I do not think anyone who follows our Services can see Trinity Sunday as standing apart from the other Sundays or needing exceptional treatment. Since Advent we have been tracing a series of manifestations, of which this day records the latest and deepest. No one doctrine has been added to another. Every Collect, Epistle, and Gospel has been about a Person. He has taken on our weak mortal nature and shown power and glory through that weakness. He has been tempted by the Devil, has died, been buried, known the secrets of the dark world, and risen. He has ascended to His Father, and sent His Father’s Spirit to dwell with men, to bind all tribes and nations into one fellowship, and to awaken and govern the powers of their spirits. This Sunday proclaims that the day has come when, as Christ promised, we may know that He is in the Father, and we in Him, and He in us, and so worship the Father and the Son in the Unity of the Spirit. From now on all our Sundays are Sundays after Trinity, in which this Name and this Worship unfold themselves in the struggles, temptations, and sufferings of our common and personal life.
Services like these, which have educated the people of our land from age to age, must have been meant, in St. Paul’s words, to bring them into “the fellowship of this Mystery.” Our discourses contradict them if they present the Mystery as something common men cannot share, something hopelessly cut off from them. Any scholastic defence, however plausible, that leaves this impression undermines the faith we have thanked God today for the grace to confess. Will the argument from Tradition confirm it better? The best part of the Tradition tells of times when this faith belonged not to a majority but to a tiny, despised minority, and those were the times it was held most vigorously. As our Collect says, those who confessed the glory of the Eternal Trinity and worshipped the Unity learnt their lesson in adversity and had to pray to be kept through it. Are we to throw away these healthful recollections for the pleasure of telling opponents they must be wrong because East and West are against them, as they were once against Athanasius? And what comes of heaping up isolated texts? I believe this: first, a confused notion, pressed on others and reacting on ourselves, that we are fighting for an idea of ours which needs ingenuity and special pleading, not for a truth of God that can defend itself; second, that the Bible is a heap of sentences and decrees that can hardly be made to give a harmonious sense; third, that it is wise to suppress passages which, if there is a Revelation, matter as much for our well-being as those we insist on. And if we rest our reasoning on one text, God’s providence may well tear that one away from us, to teach us the difference between His methods and ours, and to convince us that the Name of Him who inhabits Eternity does not depend on the reading of a manuscript.
The passage I have taken from Ephesians is not one a controversialist would quote to establish the Trinity. Opponents have often seized on it, because the word “One” occurs so often and because it so clearly distinguishes the “one Lord” from the “one Father.” Our method of arguing has had no unhappier result than this: we are supposed to have an interest in passing over passages that stress the Son’s dependence on the Father, or the oneness of the Godhead, as if our creeds could not be falsified without that dependence and oneness, and as if Trinity Sunday were not the day we profess to worship the Unity. Precisely because St. Paul’s words contain no dogmatic statement, and because Unity is their subject, they strikingly illustrate the course the Church takes in preparing us for this festival and in initiating us into its meaning.
I. The Apostle speaks first of one Lord. To a Jew these words would at once recall the sentence he had heard repeated since he could speak: “The Lord thy God is One Lord.” Much of its emphasis lay in the word Thy. Many things surround you and crave your worship; but there is One near you, ruling you, caring for you, jealous of you, who claims your heart for Himself. He is the Lord.
What impression did this name make on those Jews who had walked with Jesus in the streets, sat with Him in the ship on the lake, and been with Him on the Mount of Transfiguration and in Gethsemane? They called Him Lord and Master, and He said they did well, for He was that. But how could they keep this name from interfering with their homage to the One Lord whom Israel worshipped, whom no one had seen or could see? It was a deep, practical question affecting their whole lives. Was there not an infinite danger that their lives would be divided, their affections more at war than their understandings, so that they reverenced two Lords instead of One, the Visible more than the Invisible?
II. “One Faith.” The Jew had been taught to put his whole trust in the Lord God of Israel. Trust was the principle of his being, and losing it he lost everything. Objects of sense appealed to him every moment; he could care for them or dread them, but he could not trust them. Without one faith they became his masters, nothing bound him to his fellow Israelites, and his manliness forsook him.
The disciples of Jesus felt that He appealed to their trust, and to that of everyone He healed or spoke to. They felt that giving Him unlimited trust made them better men, and withholding it made them more the victims of their own senses, inclinations, and follies. But how could they give Him this entire trust and also give it to the one Lord of whom the Law and the Prophets spoke?
III. “One Baptism.” “I baptize you with water,” said John in the wilderness, “One cometh after me, Who shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” John’s Baptism had witnessed that the One God of their fathers was calling them to turn from the visible objects and secret lusts they had yielded to, that He was sending away their sins and confirming His covenant. Who was this Other, coming with mightier power to bestow a greater blessing? What was the Spirit with which He would baptize?
The Apostles must often have asked themselves these questions. Our Lord Himself forced them upon them at the last Supper. He spoke, in language that sometimes seemed unintelligible and sometimes sent a flash of strange light into their souls, of a Comforter whom He would send from the Father, a Spirit of Truth, who would teach them that He was in the Father and the Father in Him. What a sense of division from their nation, and in their own hearts, they must have felt then, and what a glimpse of a Unity they had never dreamed of!
IV. “One God and Father of all.” The Law and the Prophets had spoken of one Lord. But who had uttered this name of Father? It came forth when Jesus went up the Mount to proclaim the fulfilment, not the destruction, of what had been said of old. The essence of His discourse was gathered into that word, and it pervaded all His speech and acts afterwards. But it was spoken out in full power when He said, “I ascend to My Father and your Father, to My God and to your God.” Then belief in “One God and Father of all” began to break through Jewish exclusiveness, and to show that this was the final result of the Jewish election. There is One God and Father of all because there is One Man who can say, “I came from the Father and am come into the world; again I leave the world and go to the Father.”
I have shown how each of these clauses rises above the other and helps interpret it. But I have also shown that each contains something that seems to threaten the very unity it witnesses to. Only when the “One Lord” had given the disciples, who were struggling to keep up one faith in Him, the baptism of the one Spirit, could these divided men, with opposing tastes, inclinations, and tempers, “in the power of the Divine Majesty worship the Unity.” They could do so because they confessed the new Name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, with which they were to seal all the nations.
V. The last clause, “Who is above all, and through all, and in you all,” recalls words I spoke of a few months ago, St. Paul’s on Mars’ Hill: “Though He be not far from every one of us, for in Him we live, and move, and have our being.” I said many would call those words Pantheistical if they did not have an Apostle’s sanction. These words have been so called, though they have the sanction of the same Apostle. I would rather men uttered this thought, at least to themselves, than held it without confessing it. Then they might begin to ask what that Pantheism is which they dread, and have a right to dread; whether nothing in the heart of us all responds to it and feeds it; whether it can ever be met by mere hard, dry contradiction; and whether the mystery of the Trinity in Unity, which we consider today, is not the true faith that justifies all that is true in Pantheism and removes what is immoral and dangerous.
(a) The first words, “Who is above all,” would suggest Greek or modern Pantheism to no one. They recall the old Hebrew song, “O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy Name in all the earth; Thou hast set Thy glory above the Heavens.” He was far above the Sun, Moon, and Stars that the Heathen worshipped; they spoke of Him, but He could not be in them. Then comes the other part of the hymn, just as truly Hebrew, and without which the first could not be so: “What is Man that Thou art mindful of Him, and the Son of Man that Thou visitest Him? Thou crownest Him with glory and honour, Thou hast set Him over the works of Thy hands.” The Lord is above Sun, Moon, and Stars because He is more related to man than to them. Man cannot see Him in them, because He visits and cares for man. Yet the contrast is wonderful: such glory and such insignificance! What does it mean? Who can tell?
The Epistle to the Hebrews gives the New Testament interpretation of this Old Testament marvel: “We see not yet all things put under man; but we see Jesus, Who for the suffering of death was made lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour.” The Son of God has stooped to the lowest condition of the creature. The Son of Man, the Head of the Race, who has “tasted death for every man,” is exalted far above all things. Here the glory above the Heavens appears in inseparable, eternal union with sympathy for the beggar and the outcast. That glory is the glory of an Infinite Love, which could only be revealed in a death on the Cross. We may bow to no created thing, for He who has united us to Himself is one with that Father who is above all.
(b) Now comes the phrase in which Pantheism seems to lurk: He is “through all.” The words are startling, I grant. Would to God they startled us more, and made us tremble habitually! We find ourselves in a strange medley of circumstances, some petty, some grand, some springing from the present hour, some stamped with the dust of ages. We try to arrange and manage them. The old legend of St. Peter is repeated in our experience: he asked leave to govern the world for a day, spent it chasing one goat over the hills, and lamented in the evening that it was too wild for him. Yet there is an order in this medley. It belongs to a Universe, not a Chaos. Where does its law come from? The old Heathen Philosopher said, “There must be a soul in them.” What was that soul? If it governed the world’s movements, must it not be a God? Here was Pantheism, the worship of a World-god, in direct contradiction to belief in a God above the world. But what was that belief when set against it? The belief in a mere Power commanding all things and sympathizing with nothing, a Power apart from all the powers in the Universe which men must nevertheless acknowledge and which act upon them every hour. Where was the refuge from this miserable alternative for them? Where is it for us?
I believe, my brethren, it lies only in recognizing a Filial Word, one with that Father who is above all, speaking through all things: in the World, as St. John says, which “was made by Him, though the world knew Him not”; actually God, and yet with God. Thus the dream of Greek Pantheism is made real and reconciled with the sternest Hebrew faith in God as absolute and distinct from all His creatures. Thus we are saved both from the heartlessness of an all-excluding Theology and from the equal heartlessness of an all-comprehending Philosophy.
But the deliverance is incomplete unless we look at Pantheism on its other side. No Heathen could be satisfied with a belief in a soul of the World. He had taken the idea from himself. He was conscious of something directing his body, his acts, his opinions. If the world’s soul was divine, must not his be more so? Must he not be an emanation from the God; must he not be a God?
This conclusion is more fearful than the other, yet harder to avoid, because even if conscience shrinks from it, there is something in us that bribes us to it, as it has bribed all men since the serpent said, “Ye shall be as Gods.” Yet part of the serpent’s promise was fulfilled: “Ye shall know evil.” And the other part has been fulfilled too, because it was not the serpent’s promise but God’s: “Ye shall know good.” St. John says: “In Him [the Word] was Life, and the Life was the Light of Men. And the Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.” The good is His light shining into men’s hearts; the evil is the selfish darkness that has tried to put it out. We sink into darkness, isolated from our kind, wrapped in solitude and atheism, when we try to become Gods by taking credit for the good ourselves. We rise to the highest state men can reach, that of Sons of God and not Gods, when we confess all the evil as our own, and trust in the Good that is in Christ the Word of God, revealed to us as “the glory of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
When St. Paul preached Christ to the Ephesians, he took from them no treasure they had before. If they no longer
“Had sight of Proteus coming from the sea,
Or heard old Triton wind his writhed horn,”
the voice of Him who spoke to His disciples on the Lake of Tiberias might be heard in the billows and rise out of the ocean’s depths. Every familiar hill might have the awe of that Thessalian hill where the Thunderer sat, for from each might be heard the echoes of the voice that said on the mountain in Galilee, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” “Blessed are the pure in heart.” The fountains kept their honour, for everyone who brought a pitcher to them had a right to the words spoken in Samaria: “The water which I will give thee shall be in thee a well of water springing up to everlasting life.” No old hero who had done good for his city or land lost any of his glory; he gained new glory, for He who is called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, had been the author of every right deed and worthy impulse. The Greeks were right that whatever bore the true sign of humanity was divine; only the inhuman, false elements mixed with it were from beneath and doomed to destruction. So, brethren, with purged ears we should hear the Co-eternal Word speaking to us through sea, earth, and air, and receive all the harmonies of Nature as His, not hers. When those harmonies are broken by the jarring cries of our fellow-men, let us not rest until we hear through them also the voice of a Lord, who alone enables us to understand each other, and without whom no utterance would come from us, for there would be no thought in us. It is awful to think that if we take the wings of the morning, or ascend into Heaven, or dive into Hell, we cannot escape the Divine Presence. It may be more awful that we can talk with no friend or enemy without some message from God coming through them. But could we bear it to be otherwise? If the world, or men, succeeded in preventing God from speaking and manifesting Himself through them, would they not annihilate themselves, and would not Death be the universal lord?
(c) There is one clause more. According to one reading it corresponds exactly to those before: “Above all, through all, in all.” The reading our translators adopted sacrifices the symmetry of the sentence, but the change directly suggests a meaning that is certainly latent in the other. I cannot doubt that St. Paul wanted the Ephesians to remember that God, who was above all and through all, was in them all, and that His presence was the only cause of their fellowship and unity. This was the lesson he had pressed throughout his letter. No men were more possessed by belief in spiritual agencies and communications. Their city was a favourite haunt of enchanters; the books of curious arts they burned were worth fifty thousand pieces of silver. They did not need to be told of a Spirit ruling and working among men. They needed to know what manner of Spirit it was. A Spirit of divination and imposture, or of truth? A Spirit of self-exaltation, or one that cultivates humbleness and the surrender of high conceits? A Spirit of division, or of love? This was the question for Ephesus in St. Paul’s time. Is it not the question for the cities of England in the nineteenth century? We have not fallen on a time when spiritual influences are thought impossible or derided. The unbelief that prevailed a century ago has been vanquished. Our day has openings for as many kinds of spiritual delusion and imposture as the Roman Empire had in the first century. If a few have entered and been cherished by wise as well as foolish, there is no reason why a multitude we cannot dream of should not darken the air and defy all scientific exorcists. So it is needful above all to declare what Spirit we believe is meant to rule the wills and reasons not of a few but of all. It is needful to testify that the Spirit with which we are baptized proceeds from the Father and the Son. He strives with the pride, malice, lusts, and uncharitableness working in us for our ruin; He is working in all that they may submit to the one Lord; He will bring into harmony the scattered fragments of the one Faith throughout the world; He will baptize all at last with the fire that consumes all that is corrupt and false in His Church and Universe; He will not let our spirits rest till they have ascended through the Filial Word to the Father of all; He will make all that is above us, around us, and within us His Temple; and He will enable us to offer our souls and bodies as holy and acceptable sacrifices to Him.
Brethren, these, I think, are the deep, practical lessons of Trinity Sunday. I have said that our modern society has the capacity for all the dark superstitions that invaded former ages, and that I see no escape from that danger unless we fully recognize such a Spirit as Whit-Sunday proclaims. May I not say today that Unity is, consciously or unconsciously, the end we are all striving for? Sometimes it looks hopelessly distant, sometimes very near. Must it not be hopelessly distant, its attainment impossible, if it depends on decrees, dogmas, maxims of uniformity, compromises, or eclectic schemes of creatures so ignorant, narrow, and self-exalting as we are? Must it not be very near, if it is involved in the very Nature of the Father of all, of the Son by whom we were created and redeemed, and of the Spirit who works in us to will and do of their good pleasure, if we have been adopted into God’s Family and baptized with His Name, that we may show forth His Unity?