Like today’s Trinity Sunday. A different perspective can deepen our understanding of who God is. The lower deck of the bus represents our everyday life. When we face a reality, day in and day out, the landscape can fade into the background. Those who are clutter-blind know the experience.
Our liturgy is basically Trinitarian. We take it for granted. The common formula at the end of the Collect sounds like this: Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen. Since all our prayers are Trinitarian, do we need Trinity Sunday at all.
Trinity Sunday is like the upper deck of the double-decker bus—a reminder to step away from the everyday grind that sometimes reduces a mystery to nothing. Firstly, the Trinity is not our invention. It is a revelation from God on which our faith is based. We believe in one God even though He revealed Himself as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. While we need to be faithful to this revelation, the question remains if the formula is dated or out of touch with progress.
For example, when in the 50s or 60s under the aegis of liberation, equality, feminism, it was felt that language was inherently oppressive since its structure was patriarchal. There was a movement to neutralise language through a process of de-masculinisation or maybe emasculation. In the past, the word “everybody” carried with it a masculine pronoun, “he”. “Every Malaysian knows at least two languages and that is because ‘he’ lives in a multi-lingual country”. Today we phrase it as “Every Malaysian knows at least two languages and that is because ‘they’ live in a multi-lingual country”.
This “neutered” English crept into our liturgy. It was felt that our prayers should also be “gender neutral”. The word “neutered” is terrible because it seems to emasculate or “defang” language. Anyway, the trend was to update our liturgy to suit this linguistic development. The challenge is that we have a given formula. It is not a construct that the Church invented. Instead it was handed down to us by the Apostles.
The received formula is “I baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”. It became inclusive when “We baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” OR better still, “I baptise you in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier.
Three points to note about these ancient and modern formulae. Firstly there is an agreement in the singular “name”. We are baptised in the NAME. There has never been any baptism done in the NAMES which directs our attention to the given. God’s revelation is a given and on that mount before His Ascension, Christ gave us the formula to baptise in ONE NAME and not three names.
Secondly, it is Christ who baptises. The use of the singular pronoun “I” signifies that the person or the minister who baptises, acts in persona Christi. It is the person and not the “assembly or congregation” that Christ is acting through.
Thirdly, the usage of the formula “creator, redeemer and sanctifier” arises from a confusion between personality and the job description. Whenever God works, God works as one. However, we ascribe creation to God the Father but the Son and Spirit are also working because it is through the Son that creation came to be and it is in the Spirit that life flourishes on earth. There is a relationship between the Father, Son and Spirit which is marked by unity. However, when we speak of Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, what is missed out are the relationships between these three descriptions. What sort of relationship exists between the Creator and the Redeemer? Between Father and Son, there exists a relationship because words like Mother and Child, Father and Daughter are relational terms. The relational nature of these words are clarified when we ask this question, “Who comes first? The mother or the son”? Our logical framework is based on age in the sense that between an adult and a child, the adult has more years and therefore he or she should take precedence but in reality, no one can be a mother without a child. The minute a woman is pregnant, she is already a mother.
Coming back to the formula, creator, redeemer and sanctifier, the updated formula even though it is progressive, it cannot do justice to the relationship inherent in the revelation of God. In fact, a priest in the recent past, that is, in 2017, had his (not theirs, ha, ha) ordination invalidated and consequently, all his sacramental acts too. The Deacon who baptised Matthew Hood used this formula “We baptise you”. The clever Deacon was trying to be more inclusive. Apart from the so-called Fr Matthew Hood’s ordination being invalid, his absolution in Confessions were also not valid and subsequently all the marriages he conducted too. In the Diocese of Toowumba, Queensland, Australia, the same happened.
Just recently, we also changed a formula in the English language to better reflect our understanding of the Trinity. It is the formula used to conclude the Collect. The change took place on 17th Feb 2021. It was Ash Wednesday. “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, ONE GOD, forever and ever” became “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, GOD, forever and ever”. Why?
The previous formulation undermines the uniqueness of the Trinity because the translation can suggest that there are three gods. Firstly, the prayer is directed to God the Father and therefore the reference to “One God” is not a reference to the Trinity. Perhaps a rephrasing might help. “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, for He (Jesus Christ) is God for ever and ever”. The conclusion is affirming the divinity of Christ and not referencing the uniqueness of the Trinity.
Jesus Christ is God. He is not One God for if He were One God, then we have three Gods. Our language about God has to be faithful because God chose to reveal Himself to us as Father Son and Spirit. How do we want to deal with this? In the past they dealt with it from the perspective of one and three. They had to grapple how three are not three but one. We are no different. We may not wrestle with three in one but still we may be worshipping three Gods without knowing it. Take the Taize hymn. “The Lord is my light, my light and salvation. In God I trust”. If my memory serves me right it used to be “In Him I trust”. Once again, the de-masculinising of our liturgy which in the end begs the question of whom we are worshipping. If we were to follow the trajectory to its logical conclusion, perhaps the hymn should be fully de-masculinised as “The Sovereign (gender neutral) is my light, my light and salvation” otherwise we might be pointing to the Lord and then affirming that the God we trust has no connection with the Lord whom we had just affirmed.
Language has become less a servant of speech, of unity in the search for truth. Instead it morphed more into a means of manipulation serving ideologies to influence thought, perception and social interaction. Somehow a criminal is less a “criminal” when he or she is labelled a justice-involved person. I am well aware that we live in a world where there are approved narratives and we are expected to toe the line. Woe to those who disobey this diktat.
This homily tries to talk about the Trinity in the context of a changing linguistic landscape. Expressions of speech can change and they do but there are realities which we have received and they are beyond us, no matter how we feel. The dogma of the Trinity is the foundation of creation. All created reality came to be through the Trinity. Every prayer of ours has a Trinitarian motif. While our prayers may describe the workings of the Trinity ad extra as the Creator or the Redeemer or the Sanctifier, what is also needed is to appreciate the inner life of the Trinity ad intra because all created reality came to be through their relationship with one another—as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We would do well to remember that.
